Halifax’s municipal council doesn’t normally meet on Fridays, except during budget season. That’s when Fridays are held open as a contingency meeting day, to be used as necessary when the debates about how to spend Halifax’s $1 billion-plus budget go long. This year, councillors are asking good questions to ensure that things are settled with the budget before the new fiscal year begins on April 1. Budget season officially opened last week, with the Budget Introduction and Capital Budget debates on Wednesday, which The Coast reported on here:
Related
The high cost of low taxes
But sure enough, the capital budget debate, which was also scheduled for and started on Wednesday, spilled over into Friday, Feb 7. And as far as my memory of budget contingency debate days goes, it was one of the wildest in HRM’s history.
Halifax’s capital budget, clocking in at $318 million in spending, was approved in principle by council. Although that might seem like a lot, they probably won’t build all of it. Last year, the city had a record year and built just over $200 million worth of capital projects. Over $200 million of capital projects are still unspent and sitting in the hopper from previous years. The city expects to spend about $1 billion on capital projects over the next five years. The budget as a whole still needs to be ratified, which is currently scheduled for April, so the capital budget can still change—and it needs to, because there’s no way to be sure if the money in the capital budget is going to build a future Halifax in line with council’s priorities. Or if this billion dollars is instead going to be spent to build a city that is in line with the priorities chosen by Mike Connors, HRM’s manager of transportation planning.
But the question about priorities came late in the debate, and there was a lot of ground to cover in this six-hour meeting. The first things council debated as they continued Wednesday’s meeting were the new police tank and two old-news armoured F-350 trucks ordered last year. Councillor Shawn Cleary wanted to send all three of the vehicle purchases to the budget playoffs (the Budget Adjustment List debates in March) to get more information and maybe not buy them. There was a lot of confusion about Cleary’s motion because the city has already bought the two F-350s—they’re about to enter service, council can’t just pull the funding. Except council can just pull the funding if they want because it’s in the budget, and they can pull the funding for anything in the budget. They shouldn’t because it would create an unfunded liability and also because, unlike the tank, police chief Don MacLean has a very good case for the F-350s.
Related
Council sends police tank to budget playoffs
So surely nothing can top that, right? What a crazy budgeting process that exposes the city to needless, avoidable fiscal risk, allowing council to cancel funding for things already purchased! There’s no way anything tops that!
But late in the six-hour meeting, councillor Laura White asked the HRM’s manager of transportation planning, Mike Connors, if they ever considered removing cars when they’re trying to figure out how to give Halifax Transit buses preferential treatment on city streets.
Before we get to Connors’ answer, it’s important to have some context. Not necessarily context about buses and what are known as transit priority corridors, but context about mass transportation in Halifax.
The city is trying to solve two big problems, because we want to continue being Canada’s oldest colony. The first problem is that the post-war development pattern of single-family suburban housing is unsustainable.
Related
The suburbs are a Ponzi scheme
It sucks, but it is what it is. We’re holding the bag at the end of a decades-long grift that said sprawl is good. We’ve been duped! But it’s hard to admit that to ourselves at the best of times, and harder still when living in this scam is all most of us have ever known the world to be. We’ve built our lives here, in this bag.
That’s why Halifax’s first forays into fixing it were subtle, like the Centre Plan, which mostly successfully encouraged new developments to add density in the urban core instead of unsustainable suburban sprawl. The Suburban Plan, which is expected to drop this spring, is expected to be a huge stride in fixing Halifax’s unsustainability. As was the Asset Management Administrative Order passed last summer.
The second problem, related to the first problem, is that the way we move around the city is also unsustainable.
Related
The saga of Otago Drive part 2: Halifax’s plan for a strategic bankruptcy
But unlike the suburban Ponzi scheme, our transportation poses a huge number of other issues. It kills us. It maims us. It makes us lonely. It destroys our spaceship’s life-support systems. It might make you a murderer. It’s ugly. It’s noisy. To name a few. Plus, like the suburbs, it’s expensive.
However, the city is trying to solve the transportation problem, and that’s why we have multiple strategic plans. Like the Bus Rapid Transit strategy, which explains that transportation planning is self-reinforcing. Whatever option you give people, they will use and demand more of. Right now, we’re in the self-reinforcing cycle of automotive transportation, and need to shift to the transit cycle. HalifACT, Halifax’s climate plan, explains that we can’t meet our climate targets without breaking free of our automotive dependence.
Then there’s the Road Safety Framework. It was decent, but it got downgraded last year. That’s the plan that says we don’t want anyone to die a preventable death caused by bad engineering and predictably inattentive drivers. We started this plan because 14 people a year dying on our streets was considered too much back in 2018. After a few decent years, the city killed 12 people last year. We’re at two already this year (editor note: three, a woman died in Lower Sackville the day before this story was published.)
And then there’s the biggest issue: the physics. Cars don’t scale as mass transit. It’s physically impossible. If sprawling suburbs are unsustainable, then we need to densify, but if we densify, there will not be enough space for everyone to drive a car. This lack of space is also what causes congestion. To solve this problem, the city passed the Integrated Mobility Plan. Which lays out how many people need to change how they travel through the city to solve congestion. To give you an idea of how inefficient cars are with space, only about 30% of the people who currently commute by car would need to do so by bike to see a noticeable decrease in congestion. The IMP was supposed to be the plan that connected land use, policies and the municipal departments to enact change in Halifax.
In every single one of Halifax’s transportation planning documents, they stress the importance of removing cars from the road—for safety, faster commutes, more reliable transit and a better city. They are specific planning instructions on how to achieve those desired outcomes.
On top of these plans giving staff planning instructions, there is also the Strategic Priorities Plan, which gives staff direction for their annual budget spending. This plan, as we learned in January, has some issues.
Related
Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update
In the meeting where the Strategic Priorities Plan was debated, councillors learned that their plan for municipal spending was based on some Key Performance Indicators, but that those KPIs weren’t necessarily tied to tangible outcomes for this city. Key Performance Indicators were chosen for other factors, like how well the KPIs could show staff’s progress on work that wasn’t necessarily tied to tangible outcomes.
But that Strategic Priorities Plan, page 27, ties together all of Halifax’s strategic plans into a tangible, actionable plan. A little something called Transportation Demand Management, which is defined in the plan as so:
“Transportation Demand Management is one of the foundational policies in the Integrated Mobility Plan and refers to a wide range of policies, programs and services designed to improve the efficiency of transportation systems. Approaches will include education, marketing and outreach, as well as travel incentives and disincentives to influence travel behaviours.”
That’s crazy jargony, and doesn’t really say anything. But rest assured TDM is a real thing that Transportation Canada says is all about better using existing infrastructure to influence people’s behaviour “by shifting private automobile use to other modes, dispersing travel from times of peak demand, or eliminating travel all together.”
This is great because here’s what council’s specific priority is in the Priorities Plan: “A responsible investment approach that maximizes the use of existing mobility infrastructure and aligns with climate and social equity goals.”
Isn’t it just great when a plan comes together? In very simple terms, all of this strategic planning talk means that council has instructed city staff to use the city’s streets in ways that will encourage people to do things other than drive.
That’s why Connors and everyone in the Department of Public Works are supposed to be taking road space away from cars and giving it to other modes of transportation. They’re supposed to have been doing this since at least 2018, when the Integrated Mobility Plan passed. Or at the very least since 2021, when the Strategic Priorities Plan passed. But on Jan 28, 2025 council killed the Windsor Street Exchange redesign, in part, because even seven years after the IMP was passed, staff still haven’t made a network-wide transit plan like they were instructed. Councillor White, who did very well on The Coast’s candidate exam during last fall’s election campaign, knows council’s priorities inside and out. This, combined with the general lack of deprioritizing cars in municipal transportation planning, is likely why White asked if city staff ever deprioritized cars in transit priority corridors. In response, transportation planning manager Connors said this:
In terms of removal of traffic lanes, that could be something we could look at. We typically look at that, but that’s something we can look at. It’s a tough thing to do on a lot of these corridors because they’re very important multimodal corridors.
Or in other words, nah, fuck all of those plans, fuck council priorities, here is our actual priority: To make sure cars don’t lose their space in bus corridors. If people couldn’t drive on Robie Street, they might have to *gasp* take the bus! And we wouldn’t want to start that transit cycle the BRT talks about now, would we?
The worst part about this answer is that earlier in his answer to White’s questions, Connors explained the design process. He explained that they develop a rough draft, a 30% design, for corridors “for our corridors that look at a whole range of scenarios, looking at how we can improve transit, priority, improve active transportation, things like that. Engage with the community. We engage with councillors. We come up with a range of options. We outline how those options align with priorities outlined in the IMP, and we come up with a recommendation, we bring it back to council.”
Except that’s not how it works in practice in the HRM. City staff don’t develop a rough draft per the council’s priorities, which genuinely prioritize buses in our key transportation corridors. If they did, the Windsor Street Exchange would be moving ahead instead of moving back to the drawing board to be redesigned to align with council’s priorities.
Instead, apparently, city staff are doing whatever they can to work on council’s priorities as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their priority of generating car traffic. This results in city staff never presenting council options that align with their priorities. Council, unless they bring their own expertise like White did, never knows to ask for better. Staff are not giving our council the chance to achieve our priorities.
The way the council operates provides no satisfying conclusion to such high drama. We’ll probably get a report on changing procurement because of the truck thing in a few months. And after Connors finished answering, the debate moved on. When White came back into the debate almost an hour later, it was only to ask why the city pays any money for provincial roads (because we agreed to; there’s no benefit to us, just to the province).
Even though the city’s chief financial officer, Jerry Blackwood, ended the meeting by saying that anything could still be changed in this budget. And even though you now know there is no way to tell how much of the approved-in-principle capital budget will actually be spent on council priorities and how much will be spent on DPW staff priorities instead. And even though your councillors now also know this because you emailed them about it, it’s not clear what, if anything, can realistically be done to stop the millions in road spending that’s not going to be spent achieving council’s priorities. Nor is it clear what, if anything, can or will be done to stop the corruption of council’s priorities that’s rampant in the Department of Public Works.
However, the debate suggests that council seems totally cool with not having any power to dictate transportation outcomes this budget. Except for White’s one question, council seemed happy to let the usurping of their priorities continue and let staff’s car-centric priorities dictate this year’s capital spending.
Budget season continues on Wednesday, February 12, with the Department of Community Safety, the Fire Department, and the two police departments’ budget debates. Tune into The Coast’s budget coverage to find out if this story is one of the rare ones at City Hall that ends in a public win.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.
Thanks for writing this. Someone has to keep DPW’s feet to the flames.
Every time I read an article from Matt Strickland I’m sickened by the smug, authoritative socialist tones. This alt-left entitlement of shoving his ideology that owning a house and a car is somehow unsustainable and that we are irresponsible to not live in a shoebox and either catch a bus or ride a bike and we should want to pay more tax is nothing more than disgusting woke WEF rhetoric.
Property taxes don’t generate enough revenue because the left demands excessive ineffective spending. Government contracts are disgracefully expensive for no reason other than corruption. Example, the spending per homeless person in this city is a joke. Just give them each half that money directly and you’ll see actual results. Instead you listen to fake empathy driven social science and see the problem worsen in literally every city where that is implemented.
The irony of the lefts diversity and inclusion is that it is limited to physical attributes. Diversity of thought, opinion, lifestyle are prohibited under this “own nothing and be happy” solution.
This line of thinking is being played out elsewhere in the world. Vancouver lost its charm to over development and homeless. London tries chocking motorists with tolls and limitations only to hurt it’s residents when utility and commerical vehicles pass on the extra cost to consumer.
In Matt Strickland’s world everyone’s work week is Monday to Friday commuting from home to office to home or working from home. A slither of white collar reality where sedentary habits lend to the potential of self propelled transit.
In reality people need space. Kids need a house they can scream in and a yard they can play in by themselves where they can develop their character without an audience. Tradesmen need a driveway for trailers, 4×4 for towing capacity and shocking winter roads, by which Matt would like to see deteriorate further so there’s more budget for his priority bus lanes.
All the while his plumber is 20 minutes late to fix his burst pipes, he’s upset his Tofu Pho hasn’t arrived and he’s calling his building manager to complain about a barking dog because the dog walkers can’t service the city due to grid lock.
I suggest removing his standing desk and ergonomic chair and getting him a proper chair so he can sit tf down and rethink his pompous position.
Try to understand the beauty of seeing stars, northern lights, tress overhead and the beautiful care, flair and personality people put into their homes that gives Halifax its charm. Understand that this is why I and everyone else from BC, Ontario and abroad fell in love with this place.
Sprawl IS good. UK village design is fantastic. There’s culture to every postcode! Having a central place where everyone has to converge on is the issue. Hence the 15 minute city design which was also ruined by the left as they insisted on financial penalties for leaving their zones.
Note to editor: preface these articles with “OPINION” to avoid being responsible for our future Orwellian reality and reel in the course langue and hire actual journalists who can form proper paragraphs to avoid having your articles read like a rushed and incoherent rant (such as this one).
Thank you Matt for identifying the following as Jargon Feb 11 in your article on the budget.
“Transportation Demand Management is one of the foundational policies in the Integrated Mobility Plan and refers to a wide range of policies, programs and services designed to improve the efficiency of transportation systems. Approaches will include education, marketing and outreach, as well as travel incentives and disincentives to influence travel behaviours.”
I have added this gem to my collection of bafflegab.