Erica Butler

Back in 1997, seven years after the Kyoto Accord was born, HRM joined the 20 percent club. We committed to reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 percent by the year 2012. Instead, our emissions increased. By 2002, SuperCitizens were producing 28 percent more GHGs than in 1997. One reason is simply there were […]

Angela Weal has been trying for five months to get her front and back doors fixed. Despite repeated promises, her landlord simply wouldn’t do the repairs. So Weal went to the city and the province for help. After months of phone calls, a hearing, and three separate orders to repair (all of which expired, with […]

The most recent issue of Naturally Green, the glossy and colourful newsletter produced by HRM’s communications department to promote the city’s collective environmental efforts, includes a story entitled, “Scavenging, A Blight on the Community.” The hyperbolic headline has provoked reactions from some SuperCitizens. “It blew my mind how insensitive and inflammatory it was,” says Dennis […]

This past spring HRM council budgeted the largest amount yet toward implementing its bike plan: $200,000. While an improvement on the $120,000 spent last year, it’s still well below the $300,000 minimum recommended in the 2002 council-approved bike plan, and still sadly not enough to even come close to completing a major bike project. The full bike plan fund this year, besides $25,000 set aside for a multi-use trail in Sackville, was devoted to the Bedford Highway bikeway. Or at least 1.2 kilometres of it. Over the summer HRM paved the shoulders of the Bedford Highway from Millview Avenue to

Even though HRM has been one big, amalgamated SuperCity for going on 10 years now, transportation is still a bit of a fractured affair. You’ve got HRM Council responsible for transit services, bikeways and most of the urban and suburban roads in the region. Then you’ve got the provincial department of transportation responsible for roads […]

Earlier this summer, the mayor and 20 city councillors voted in favour of a motion asking the provincial government to enact something called the Safe Streets Act, similar to legislation currently in effect in BC and Ontario. Upon seeing the moniker Safe Streets, you might reasonably assume this is legislation cracking down on street crimes […]