The Audit and Finance Standing Committee met on Wednesday April, 17, and Halifax’s new Auditor General Andrew Atherton told councillors what his team’s priorities are for the coming year. For the capital budget audit, Atherton said that the capital budget is getting bigger year over year, and it also seems like the amount of work […]
Matt Stickland
Matt spent 10 years in the Navy where he deployed to Libya with HMCS Charlottetown and then became a submariner until ‘retiring’ in 2018. In 2019 he completed his Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College. Matt is an almost award winning opinion writer.
Posted inNews + Opinion
The Grand Parade podcast: Halifax’s budget season is (almost) over. How did councillors perform?
Halifax council is one week away from approving its 2024/25 budget—a capital plan tasked with both guiding the HRM out of a $105-million shortfall and setting the course for a region on pace to reach 525,000 residents by the end of the year. On Tuesday, Apr. 23, 2024, councillors will review a revised budget that […]
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Everything you need to know about HRM council’s April 9, 2024 meeting
This was supposed to be a short council meeting with only five things on the public agenda. But today, like most days, council got derailed by a debate. Ultimately, councillors discovered (again) that councillors’ past decisions, or the decisions of their predecessors, are the reason for most if not all of the issues councillors in […]
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Demystifying Halifax’s budget process
After months of meetings—what I’ve been calling the regular season of Halifax’s 2024-25 budget talks—we are finally down to the Budget Season playoffs. One city council. Two days—Tuesday April 2 and Wednesday April 3. An awful lot of talk about something called the Budget Adjustment List. It’s going to be great. The Coast recently polled […]
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Transportation in crisis on the eve of budget playoffs in Halifax
The city has done a lot of good work this Budget Season, and councillors have set themselves up well for the Budget Adjustment List debates—the playoffs of Budget Season—that start Tuesday, April 2. Part of the reason for the city’s success is due to Bedford councillor Tim Outhit, who’s not running for re-election this fall. […]
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Everything you need to know about HRM council’s March 26, 2024 meeting
At this week’s regular Tuesday meeting of city council, multiple councillors wore purple shirts to bring attention to epilepsy. Purple Shirt Day was started in 2009 by a Nova Scotian named Cassidy Megan, who wanted to raise awareness about people living with epilepsy and the challenges they face. It’s a good thing the purple shirt […]
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Halifax Transit planning for a ridership decrease
We’re still in the Budget Season doldrums, the weeks between the end of city council’s regular season of budget debates and the start of playoffs, when the Budget Adjustment List is finalized. So it’s a great time to catch up on a vital piece of budget business that The Coast didn’t fully get into at […]
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Everything you need to know about HRM’s March 19 council meeting
Halifax’s budget season is in the break between the normal budget debates and the budget playoffs (the Budget Adjustment List debates), so council got back to normal business this week in a relatively quick city council meeting. So without further ado, here’s what happened at the Tuesday, March 19 council meeting. Things that passed The […]
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A new speed limit exposes design failures
The roads of Downtown Dartmouth just got official recognition that they’re a bit safer for everyone than the HRM’s standard street. This is a result of the city successfully petitioning the provincial government to lower the speed limit in Dartmouth’s downtown core. The provincial government was happy to reduce the posted speed from 50kmh to […]
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Nova Scotia’s forests actually generate carbon now
Halifax’s Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee had a sobering meeting on Thursday, Mar. 7 about the work required to prevent the dire future currently in store for humanity. First on the agenda was a presentation from Donna Crossland, who’s been working to prevent the spread of the hemlock woolly adelgid in Nova Scotia. This invasive […]
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How a Dartmouth speed change exposes HRM council’s political failures…
Will be live tomorrow. If you are seeing this, you’ve followed a newsletter link that wasn’t working. This will be fixed in time for tomorrow’s newsletter, but we’ve had some St. Patrick’s weekend scheduling issues.
Posted inNews + Opinion
Police reform takes big little step forward in Halifax
The city of Halifax made a major advance in the agonizingly slow process of police reform on Wednesday, Feb. 28, when councillors had the city’s first ever Department of Community Safety budget debate. The issue of police reform has been a hot topic in Halifax in recent years, with the Wortley Report, the Defunding the […]