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 first meeting of council in December 2024 where it came back with a staff report and was re-debated on Tuesday December 3.
The debate itself will be covered in the Notable Debates section below, but the motion to rescind encampment sites was defeated 8-7 with councillors Sam Austin, Shawn Cleary, Billy Gillis, David Hendsbee, Becky Kent, Kathryn Morse, Janet Steele and Jean St-Amand voting to reject Fillmore’s bad idea. Mayor Fillmore, deputy mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon and councillors Nancy Hartling, Trish Purdy, Virginia Hinch, Laura White and John Young lost the vote to make a mistake. Councillors Tony Mancini and Patty Cuttell were absent from the meeting.
Right after Fillmore’s first foray into policy was quashed by councillors who understood the reality facing the city, it was lunch break, where Fillmore was scrummed by the press. He explained that his motion to rescind encampment sites was based on vibes and believies, not evidence and facts. Fillmore told the gathered reporters that when the HRM designates encampment sites, they undermine provincial policies to help unhoused people.
The argument that encampments undermine the success of provincial housing plans only makes sense if you make the assumption that because anyone can sleep in encampments, and only sober people can sleep in shelter facilities like the Forum, people are choosing to do drugs or drink rather than live indoors. This argument is incredibly naive and largely ignores the reality of how addiction works. Or put another way, if people are living outdoors because they are regularly succumbing to addiction, they’re not going to move to a provincial shelter just because living outdoors is frowned upon by city council. They’re going to keep living outdoors and succumbing to their addiction, designated sites or not.
Even though the city can’t often live up to its “housing first” ideals—a requirement for sobriety often comes first, with housing second—providing housing is more likely to provide the stability needed for people to kick an addiction than rules demanding sobriety for shelter. If our leaders’ actions matched their words, then the policies to help unhoused people would take into account how addiction works, instead of assuming punishment is an effective way to ensure and enforce sobriety. Especially when considering city staff repeatedly tell council that people with “high acuity” within the HRM, and countries like Finland globally, are consistently proving that assumption false. This assumption being wrong is something Fillmore knows as well, or at least he should. In the scrum after his motion was defeated, he told reporters “we have vacancies across the shelter system.” And yet, even with those vacancies, there are still people sleeping outside. I wonder why that is?
Nevertheless Fillmore plowed on, saying he believed that the worst of the homelessness crisis was behind us because he’s had conversations with the provincial government. Meanwhile the crisis has gotten worse. Look to the 13-month stretch from Februrary 2023—when city staff warned council that bad policy choices would force the city to learn how refugee camps work—to March of 2024, when we opened our first refugee camp. To June and October, when Max Chauvin, the HRM’s director of housing and homelessness, made presentations where he said homelessness is increasing at about 4% a month. To last month’s Point Pleasant Park Advisory Committee meeting where Chauvin said that homelessness is a “symptom of other problems we’re facing in the community.” And those symptoms, like the increased cost of transportation, housing and groceries, have led to a recession and a noticeable decline in Canadian’s standard of living. This drop in the standard of living is extremely well reported, but usually pretty cleverly hidden in articles with titles like this: RIP: Here are 70 things millennials have killed.
With all of this publicly available information contrasting the mayor’s statements, The Coast asked the city if they had any evidence to suggest that encampments undermine provincial policy, or if the worst of the homelessness crisis was over. City staff replied: “I would suggest reaching out directly to the mayor’s office for additional information or comment.” And yeah, fair enough, city staff aren’t supposed to divulge government secrets or be political, so they couldn’t spill the beans on a secret plan to end homelessness. And in the absence of a secret plan, it would be considered political for staff to tell the media the city can’t prove the mayor is telling the truth.
Fillmore also told the gathered reporters that his motion to de-designate encampments was part of “a better solution, a made-in-Halifax solution, and that’s one that I attempted to begin.” Details about this made-in-Halifax solution were not included in Fillmore’s prepared remarks supporting his motion during the meeting or in the scrum with reporters, nor did we receive a response from his office in a request for more details in time for publication.
Things that passed
New mayor Andy Fillmore’s first motion ever failed by a vote of 8-7. This debate was heated, but it is one of the rare cases in policy where objectively there is a right choice and a wrong choice. And although it may seem counterintuitive that voting to allow encampments is the “right” choice, here’s a very simple, highly abridged version of how that works: Due to that whole “symptoms of other problems” thing, which is mainly a “the rich are richer than ever and the poor are poorer than ever because robbery isn’t robbery if it’s good for the economy” thing, homelessness is growing in Halifax by about 4% a month. Because real life isn’t a video game, when a person loses at the economic game, they are still alive and existing in the physical world, and they have to exist somewhere. Like most people with homes, people without homes will choose to live where it is convenient for them. Parks tend to have a lot of space for putting up a tent for free, and they’re usually located close to amenities, which means they are an ideal place to live when things like housing, a car or a friend’s couch aren’t an option. Since the city owns most if not all of the parks in the HRM, when people live there, they become an HRM problem.
Back in the heady days of 2021 the city seemed to think it could just shut down encampments and solve homelessness that way. That went terribly.
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That eviction—combined with a couple of court decisions reminding everyone that unhoused people are human beings like everyone else, and governments can’t just move them around like unwanted garbage, Indigenous peoples or residents of Africville—resulted in a policy shift in the city. City staff started giving presentations to council (a lot of which are linked above) explaining that no one in the city wants people to be living in tents, but that the city is relatively powerless to solve the issues making people homeless, such as fixed-term leases, and that the city is relatively powerless to enact solutions to homelessness like building affordable housing. But at the same time the city can’t just let people die in parks due to neglect, and if people are living in a park the city can’t move them unless there’s somewhere for them to go, like housing, a shelter bed or an encampment where they won’t be left to die of neglect. And court decisions or not, the people who work for the city are just kind of generally good people who don’t want to let fellow Haligonians die preventable deaths of neglect.
What this means is that as long as people are homeless, the city is going to try and ensure they don’t die. If the rules the province set for their shelter exclude segments of the unhoused population—people who have addiction issues—then the city will still have to try and ensure those excluded people don’t die. It is both easier and more cost-efficient to do that if unhoused people are grouped together. And as an added bonus, if the city has encampments where it can take care of people, the city can move people to those places instead of leaving them set up where the city doesn’t want them, like Grand Parade.
And finally, on top of all of that, de-designating encampments wouldn’t even prevent future encampments. The city still has an obligation to not let people die preventable deaths. And providing services in bulk is always cheaper and better for government spending than bespoke, one-off personalized solutions. Which means that if Fillmore’s motion had succeeded and it turns out there is no secret made-in-Halifax plan to end homelessness, then every single time the city had enough unhoused people to warrant an encampment, this can of worms would be open once again and once more we all go back into the breach.
To be clear, the HRM does not have a lot of good options in front of it. But among the bad options, of those that have been publicly presented, there is only one that both helps people, is legal, and is relatively cost- and time-efficient. In June of 2024, last council voted to approve that option—a list of designated encampment sites. In Dec 2024, new council once again voted for their only real option. So maybe now, finally, we can all agree that we don’t want people to die preventable deaths, and we want to do this prevention in the most efficient way possible and we can finally put this debate to bed.
Moving on to other issues, at 1pm council had two public hearings for two heritage properties. Congratulations to 6105 Willow Street and 5450 Russell Street, which become heritage properties.
There used to be a municipal fire station on 4032 Mooseland Road out in Mooseland, but it was decommissioned as a fire station and turned into a community centre between 1998 and 2013. The community centre is being run by the Mooseland and Area Community Association, and they need a little more time to do some paperwork to apply for a less-than-market-value lease to keep running the building as a community centre. This motion to grant them a 90-day extension was passed on the consent agenda.
Also on the consent agenda, council approved giving $350,000 in stabilization funding to “signature events” in the HRM that are suffering since the rich of this world are vacuuming up so much money the rest of us have less to spend on arts and entertainment. Here are the events:
Since there’s a new council in town, city staff brought a big list of all the staff reports they’re working on, separated into two piles: a list of reports they think staff should keep working on, and a list of reports they think staff should stop working on. There was some concern expressed by councillor Austin that some of the staff reports the city is trying to ditch are pretty important, like the city’s on-going efforts to modernize committees and update the Wildland-Urban Interface (that’s WUI, pronounced “woo-eeee”) policies.
City staff explained that the municipal staff report process is essentially councillors asking staff: Is this a good idea? Is this work worth doing in the HRM? Go look into it. If the go-look-into-it staff report process finds that something is a good idea and worth doing, that idea can be implemented. Once ideas become actions the staff report isn’t needed anymore, as the work plans take over. The clerks explained to council that this is what’s happening with the committee modernization: the work has started, so the staff report isn’t needed anymore as the information report got superseded by a plan to do the work.
Alternatively, if the staff report finds that something is a good idea, but outside of municipal responsibilities, then the staff report can be abandoned because someone else is responsible for doing the work. Chief Ken Steubing of Halifax Fire explained that since WUI is building codes and stuff, there’s not much the city can do about WUI, so a staff report is no longer needed now that they’ve learned they can’t do much about WUI.
Procedurally, this debate was pretty interesting as the chair of the meeting—mayor Fillmore—played fast and loose with the rules of order. Councillor Cleary moved to amend the motion and save a staff report about pointing lights at other people’s houses. The rules of debate say that once an amendment is on the floor, everyone has to talk about the amendment and not the motion as a whole. But after Cleary put his amendment on the floor Fillmore allowed other councillors to chime in to talk about the whole motion, which was as chaotic as it was confusing. Kent punched into the debate to (politely) put Fillmore on blast for being a chaos agent and not following the rules of order.
After that needlessly confusing debate about Cleary’s light-pointing staff report, the councillors who did not do their homework about the staff reports staff report were worried that there were staff reports in the staff reports staff report that were on the keep list that should be on the kill list or vice versa. Councillor Morse asked if councillors could get an extension to read the staff reports staff report before the next meeting, so that everyone could be prepared to debate staff reports mentioned in the staff reports staff report at the next meeting like Cleary and Austin, who did their homework and were clearly ready for this meeting. I’d highly recommend you read these two staff reports (1, 2) and email your councillor about staff reports you are concerned about, because based on this past meeting, it’s not a sure thing your councillor will do their homework.
Notable Debates
As it always is when homelessness comes up, the debate had the vibes of a walk home after sleeping with your ex—just an embarrassing, shameful experience for everyone involved. On the positive side of things, veteran councillors carried the weight of responsibility and prevented our new council from making a mistake and de-designating encampment sites. Councillors Kent and Hendsbee had unexpectedly strong performances; they were joined by Cleary, Austin and Morse, who had expectedly strong debate performances.
Kent did make one faux pas when she suggested that targeted aid campaigns—like when Canadians rallied to take in Syrians or Ukranians—were wildly successful, so maybe we could try something like that to help unhoused people. The only issue with this idea is that is more or less what the provincial Happipad app was supposed to do, but that app has failed spectacularly.
Cleary specifically pulled no punches when he said Fillmore’s motion wasn’t exactly virtue signalling, but was pretty close because it was a waste of time. He told his peers, “I can’t support this because it doesn’t mean anything.” Cleary and Austin explained that this list of sites is place in the HRM that meet the city’s stringent where-encampments-can-go rules, so without this list being official, when new encampments are needed councillors will have to debate the sites on this list one at a time.
Councillor Hartling did her best “I’m not mad I’m just disappointed” dad lecture when she told her peers whenever council has a debate about encampments, they are politicizing the issue and harming unhoused people by galvanizing housed people against the HRM’s most vulnerable. But debate Hartling was then rudely ignored by voting Hartling, as she voted to de-designate the encampment sites, which would have resulted in more debates about, and therefore more harm to, the HRM’s most vulnerable—which she said she was against.
Councillor Purdy, who’s notoriously weak on this file, demonstrated that again on Tuesday, saying she would support Fillmore’s motion because she believes the provincial government will fix homelessness. But if the Progressive Conservatives really did have a plan to fix homelessness, they would have put it in their platform, campaigned on it or implimented it while they were in power at some point in the past few years.
The debate was not all doom and gloom. Some rookie councillors like St-Amand had an incredible meeting, and St-Amand in particular is making an early case for rookie councillor of the term. During the debate he said that encampments are not a solution, they are first aid. They are something that’s needed in an emergency to stabilize someone so they don’t die before they can get help. He said that Fillmore’s motion was asking council to do first aid by hiding the first aid kit and then having special meetings to see if the first aid kit is needed whenever someone gets hurt.
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.