Councillor Purdy asks city about integrating the Integrated Mobility Plan

Halifax’s aspirational and hopefully one-day transformative plan to solve congestion in Halifax got an assist from one of its biggest opponents this week, at Halifax Regional Council’s regular Tuesday meeting. Halifax’s Integrated Mobility Plan has not been implemented very well since first being passed in 2017, because city staff just can’t help themselves from prioritizing cars. As a result, congestion and road violence are both trending up. To solve both of these things, councillor Trish Purdy put a motion on the floor asking for more information about the outcomes of IMP implementation, and maybe look at changes to improve the so-far-lacklustre implementation.

So far, the year 2025 is shaping up to be the deadliest year on HRM’s roads in recent history. In 2018 the city passed the Road Safety Framework because 14 people a year on average were dying on HRM’s roads. From then through 2024, the average dropped to an average of 13 people a year, progress that was helped by the resounding success of COVID-19 in removing cars from the road.

But now, it’s already becoming clear that roads have become more dangerous than in previous years. For example, even though the number of drivers hitting pedestrians was up in 2016, no pedestrians died that year. So far, in 2025, two pedestrians have been killed, and earlier this week, a woman died on the roads in Lower Sackville. Not quite halfway through February, we’re on track for 24 road deaths this year.

At the Feb 11 meeting, councillor Shawn Cleary pointed out that based on the designs coming to council, like the Windsor Street Exchange, the IMP being implemented still remains an aspirational goal for Halifax. The IMP is now in its ninth year of being the municipal strategy that is supposed to connect land use, policies and municipal departments to enact transformative change in Halifax. Instead, we had to cancel the Windsor Exchange redesign—and decline nearly $40 million other governments were ready to give us for it—because city staff haven’t even started to picture the sort of extremely useful bus network the IMP demands the city create.

Purdy’s argument for the motion was not really coherent. She said that this plan was voted in, in 2017 “prior to everything that has happened in our world since and all of the changes that have kind of been forced on us.” She said that we’ve now seen changes to our infrastructure in the seven years since it’s been in force, which does not seem to have resulted in safer streets or less congestion. She then asked for data on where collisions were happening in the HRM (this data can be found here). Councillor Cleary punched into the debate and said, “if anyone believes that we’re actually prioritizing people who walk, bicycle or take transit, just cast your mind back a couple weeks ago to the Windsor Street Exchange.” He continued, “I don’t think anyone should be under any illusion that we are actually prioritizing people who walk, bicycle or take transit. That’s aspirational for us apparently. But we’re gonna get there. We’ll get there.”

The good news is that the way Purdy wrote her motion, asking for things we need to change to make the IMP better, means she’s about to get a report about how to make the implementation of the IMP better.

This likely explains why her motion passed unanimously and with very little debate. Here’s to hoping councillor Purdy gets exactly what her motion asks for.

Things that passed

We found out more about councillor Sam Austin’s One Membership program motion. As it stands, it’s looking like as early as this summer we may see the individual memberships to city recreational centres like Zatzman Sportsplex, the Canada Games Centre and Cole Harbour Place all merged into a single Halifax-wide recreation membership. There was some debate about this motion, as councillor Purdy said she doesn’t know of anyone who goes to Zatzman Sportsplex if they have a CHP membership. But anecdotally speaking, it’s absolutely happening that families with kids who get catastrophically disappointed that the members-only swim at CHP filled up early frequently go to Zatzman to pay for a swim on top of their CHP memberships.

The Lake District Recreation Association will get $100,000 a year for five years to keep the arena in working order. You may remember this from last summer when the arena made a Facebook post threatening to not put the ice in, which compelled the city to give them more money. This passed on the consent agenda.

Council is going to consider giving $100,000 to the United Way for a community mediation pilot, which is a low-level non-police intervention to resolve conflict, as they sent this to the budget playoffs to potentially get funding this year. This is mediation program is needed due to the fact that if your neighbour is being a massive prick in a variety of ways, but not breaking any specific rules, the city currently wastes thousands of hours of bylaw-enforcer and police-officer labour to tell distraught neighbours there’s nothing the city can do about your neighbour. Rookie councillors were worried that this money could be better spent. Veteran councillors and Board of Police Commission members begged their peers for this money to be spent, because a dispute resolution process would save a lot of municipal resources. Some councillors were worried that this $100,000 would be a gateway to a massive amount of spending the city couldn’t afford. Because looking like they are being fiscally responsible is important to councillors, they spent a lot of time debating the consequences of this $100,000. Hypocritically, they spent way more time debating $100,000 than the consequences of the $1 billion in planned spending on road infrastructure.

If you’ve been walking around some this past week, you probably discovered that even though the streets are pristine, the sidewalks are sheets of ice. This is because while the city says it cares about accessibility, it doesn’t put money into things that would make Halifax more accessible. For example, at last Friday’s budget meeting, Halifax’s manager of transportation planning, Mike Connors, told councillors that his department’s priority is not the 30% of Haligonians who can’t drive. This is why the city has passed yet another strategy that should change how the Department of Public Works plans transportation infrastructure in this city. Will the new Accessibility Strategy be the one to do it? We’ll find out. If this meeting was any preview, councillors will also be asking some hard questions of the Department of Public Works during their upcoming budget meeting on Feb 19.

Council approved a bunch of changes to individual properties to bring them more in line with the Housing Accelerator Fund priorities. Which is a fancy way of saying upzoning properties near transit. They’ll also added some heritage properties and some other minor changes. It’s properties throughout the HRM; the full list can be found in the report here. Councillor Becky Kent added three properties to the list so ongoing developments to add density in Eastern Passage could continue. These changes will get a public hearing before becoming the law of the land.

The city is considering giving more property tax relief to more low-income households, but the scope of the income tax relief discussed at the meeting was too targeted and missed people who needed it. For example, young people who inherit a highly valued property from their parents and get hit with a high property tax bill even though they live below the poverty line wouldn’t qualify for property tax relief. This got deferred to make the municipal tax relief more inclusive and should come back to council with suggestions Soon^™.

8 Sullivans Hill in Bedford will get a public hearing to become a heritage property.

Councillor Laura White wanted to know if the city can stop using Twitter/X because “X is no longer a medium that many reputable organizations are comfortable associating with.” This is due to Elon Musk’s pivot to Nazism and overthrowing the American government. Councillor Purdy, whose job is to make political statements and decisions, made the political statement that she was against making a political statement with this ban. White’s first motion passed with David Hendsbee, Trish Purdy and Billy Gillis voting no. So, the city will start moving away from Twitter.

During this debate, councillor Jean St-Amand asked if the city was thinking about what the municipality needed or could gain from social media. He wanted to know if there was a way to leverage the power of social media to the city’s benefit. He’ll come back with a motion at a later meeting. It may also be worth opening up the debate about whether or not social media is a or could be a public good run by the government. The cons of public and private ownership of social media are evident in places like China and the USA, respectively. Still, could the city reap benefits if it ran its own social media platform? We’ll have to wait and see how deep St-Amand goes with his motion.

Seniors get to ride the bus for free, but only between 10am and 3:30pm on Tuesdays. Councillor Virginia Hinch wants to know if this service can be expanded. She argued that it should be for way more than five and a half hours, so why not more or all of Tuesday? This passed unanimously with very little debate. This motion also begs the question: seeing as how seniors on fixed incomes came up a lot in the property tax relief debate couldn’t council make the bus free for seniors all the time so they don’t need to spend $1,300 a month on transportation?

Finally, as discussed above, the last motion of the day— made at almost 10pm—was councillor Purdy’s motion to make sure that the IMP hierarchy is “used to guide the updated plan such that it more appropriately addresses true integration of all travel modes and how different areas (urban, suburban and rural) will require different approaches in applying the plan based on the differing geographic and demographic contexts.” Here’s to hoping staff read this as a genuine motion and not some “kill the IMP in disguise motion.” This may end up being, perhaps inadvertently, a huge step up in Purdy’s game as a councillor.

This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.