Matt Stickland

Wednesday’s Board of Police Commissioners meeting was one for the record books, as the embattled board struggled to maintain its legitimacy in the face of withering public scrutiny. But the board’s struggles with legitimacy didn’t start on January 8 during the public participation phase of the 2025/26 municipal budget process. Instead, they can be traced […]

Halifax’s municipal budget pre-season crunches on, bending bureaucracies to its will. The Board of Police Commissioners didn’t get to the RCMP’s preliminary budget requests at the end of 2024, so held a special meeting Monday, Jan 6 to go over the RCMP’s budget asks. The Monday meeting had to happen before the public meeting scheduled […]

On Wednesday, Dec 18, Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners held their final meeting of 2024. On the agenda was Halifax Regional Police’s proposal for the coming 2025-26’s budget. The $101.2 million in proposed spending is a 3.3% increase from last year’s police budget, and would be roughly 10% of Halifax’s entire municipal budget. This fiscal […]

In Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 World War II film starring Tom Hanks, there is a scene with a sniper. It starts off simply enough: Hanks and his squad enter a French village, where they find a family with children in a bombed-out house. The family begs the soldiers to take the kids out of […]

On Wednesday, December 18, the Board of Police Commissioners met to discuss the police budgets for the next fiscal year. Unlike the municipality’s other business units, Halifax’s police departments get extra budget scrutiny. Also, unlike other municipal business units, the police have been the subject of not one, not two, but three massive reports about […]

Blink and you’d have missed it, but a routine community council vote—passed with little fanfare—might be heralding a new era of bureaucratic nimbleness. It happened at the Halifax and West Community Council meeting on Dec 16. The owner of 918 South Bland Street wants to put a secondary suite in his back yard, which—on the […]

The Community Planning and Economic Development standing committee met Dec 12 and talked about lights in parks. This conversation dates back to 2021, when councillor Sam Austin put forward a motion asking for the city to come up with a plan to light municipal parks, because not having lights made people feel unsafe and not […]

  After an exciting off-season in which we decided to change up our roster at City Hall, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is here. That’s right, we’re talking budget season! For those who need an introduction or refresher, budget season is the planning period of months from now to April 2025 when the […]

In June 2022, Sunny Marriner from the Improving Institutional Accountability Project posed a question to Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners: If women who’ve been sexually assaulted aren’t coming forward to the police, and even when they do, there’s very rarely a conviction. Shouldn’t we try to figure out why? She made her case when she […]

Tuesday’s council meeting was dominated by old business being rehashed by new mayor Andy Fillmore. Last council meeting, Fillmore caused a procedural kerfuffle when he put forward a motion to rescind Halifax’s list of potential encampment sites without a staff report. Since Fillmore’s motion did not have a staff report, it was deferred to the […]

During Tuesday’s meeting of council, outside of City Hall the winds were so strong that Barrington’s streetlamps were being vigorously buffeted outside the windows of Halifax Hall. They moshed with the wind for the entirety of council’s hours-long in-camera debate about a motion. The motion—number 17.2, about “INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS”—was moved up to 1 o’clock, so […]