Big news to start off this regular Tuesday meeting: John Lohr is the new mayor of Halifax! Okay, this is an abbreviation of the civics lesson required to bring everyone up to speed about the change to today’s agenda: The addition of agenda item 18, Information Item 6 – Memorandum from the Chief Administrative Officer dated October 16, 2023, re: Legislative Update – 2023 Fall Sitting and Bill No. 329 [PDF]. But like the provincial government is likely to do, we will ignore this report for the time being.
In intro-level political science classes, professors often like to ask students who has more power, the US president or a Canadian First Minister with a majority. Novice political scientists believe it’s the American president, because America is arguably the most powerful country in the world, and therefore America’s leader is the most powerful person on earth, let alone when compared to a Canadian prime minister or premier.
But Joe Biden, for all his power, can’t prevent a handful of fringe congress members from effectively shutting down the federal government. Whereas a Canadian first minister with a majority, such as Nova Scotia’s own Tim Houston, can ram through legislative changes like Bill 329.
Majority governments have a majority on committees, and party discipline in Canada means that a leader’s power over their caucus is absolute. Which is why the bad development policy of Bill 329 sailed through Monday’s law amendments committee without issue. Even though other outlets spilled a lot of electrons over the proceedings, what we all witnessed was a piece of accountability theatre, where the Houston government got to pretend it was doing its due diligence.
Because on top of the curtailing of public accountability, the major issue with Bill 329 is that it fundamentally doesn’t address any of the issues behind the housing crisis. And the frustrating past is that there are things the provincial government could be doing if it genuinely wanted to build more housing, faster. Housing minister Lohr has said the reason this legislation will get more housing built is that it will speed up the approval process for private developers, by taking decision-making responsibility away from the inefficient city and giving Lohr himself the ability to grant development agreements, streamlining the development approval process and freezing development fees. But Lohr’s arguments fundamentally ignore what’s actually happening in Halifax, and most of the lessons we’ve learned about development for the past 20 or so years.
In 2003, the province wrote a report to the city explaining how private-led development, if left unchecked, would cost the city a lot of money. For developers back then, it was cheaper to build one home on a parcel of land and make the city pay for all of the infrastructure, so that’s what they did. Repeatedly. Unchecked. That’s why we have suburban sprawl, and that’s why the city of Halifax is always broke. Here’s a good explainer of the phenomenon, if you’d like to know more:
Now to be fair, the city has been catastrophically bad at planning for, and then actually building, dense, complete walkable communities in line with their own strategic and priority plans. This is due, in part, to public participation processes giving too much power to people who hate change. If Lohr uses his new power to bypass those people and approve mixed-use, walkable developments with pedestrian and transit transportation needs prioritized, this could be a very good piece of legislation. However, you should know that Lohr has said his government is not following the housing plan. So this seems to be an unlikely outcome.
It should also be noted that at the province’s request, the city has been improving and speeding up its approval processes and timelines, and there are approximately 11,000 developments in the HRM that have been approved where construction has not started. Read that again: 11,000 developments stuck in the pipeline at the *construction* stage, which have already been given the go-ahead by the city.
One of the big reasons construction has not started is because there aren’t enough people willing to be overworked for unfair compensation in the construction industry. In March, when Houston’s finance minister Allan MacMaster was asked if his government was willing to change the labour laws to make working suck less and/or pay more, he said what his government was already doing was good enough. Which is why construction workers still have to work 110 hours to get overtime, and can get terminated without notice. All that to say, this government has so far been unwilling to enact good policies to boost the labour force in the construction industry.
On top of that, private construction is slowing down because the Bank of Canada needs us to be unemployed and homeless in greater numbers to fix the economy, so it’s raising interest rates. Which means it increasingly doesn’t make sense for private companies to build housing. As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives writes in an October housing report:
Compared to February 2022 when rate hikes started, the numbers are even more dire. Investment in single-family homes is down 36 per cent, semi-detached houses declined by 27 per cent, new row home construction saw a mild decline of two per cent over, and apartment buildings cratered by 19 per cent.
And
The Bank of Canada estimates that the worst impacts of rate increases take two years to hit the housing sector and the housing sector is the main vehicle for rate hikes to hit the economy. Right now, it has been 18 months since the first rate increases, but most of the bigger rate increases have occurred in the past 12 months—so the worst is yet to come.
Which is to say, with Bill 329 Lohr gave himself a lot of power to fix a problem, and so far is signalling that he plans to use that power to make the problem much worse, in a few years time. And this is all without mentioning the fact that this legislation gives one man the power to approve anything in the HRM. If Lohr is a good steward of the public trust, this won’t be an issue until someone who is corrupt takes his cabinet position and assumes these new powers. But make no mistake, legislation that allows a single approval by a single person with no public scrutiny is exactly how to ensure government corruption. And we all know what that looks like thanks to the Tories in Ontario.
There were 29 tents on Grand Parade on Tuesday, an increase of eight tents from the last council meeting.
That’s mainly what city council talked about today, here’s the rest of the…
Things that passed
First up was that CAO update on Bill 329, and during that debate, a few things came up worth pointing out. Apparently freezing the fees—according to the HRM charter—would require a year notice, but the city was only given a few days notice. I think the city has the ability to force this debate into the judicial branch of government, i.e. the city could sue the province for that money, and might win!
There was a public hearing because the city wants to sell a bit on Windmill that’s currently being held as right of way. This is getting a public hearing because it’s worth more than $50,000. Staff recommended the sale. Sold.
There will be a lessons-learned-from-the-Tantallon Wildfire debate, but that’s been deferred to committee of the whole. (Which has looser debate rules, allowing for better discussion and hopefully, better motions to fix things, please?)
The military will do a flypast of Grand Parade on Remembrance Day.
Councillor Paul Russell had the annual workforce report on the agenda as an information item; he did this to ensure our workforce is getting new workers, instead of recycling old blood. The old way the city used to track employment numbers didn’t really do a good job of tracking who was leaving or just transferring, and so they’ve updated their HR dashboard. The city is also updating its exit interview processes.
Halifax passed the updated vehicle boot bylaw, which should increase oversight into booting companies, and it’ll up the fine these private companies are able to extort out of you for parking on parking lots that are accessible exclusively by public infrastructure but are privately owned. But anything that takes parking away is a bit of a win, so mixed bag here.
The city added some names to its approved list of street and park names. And it will also be changing the names of some parks. For example, the Dartmouth Harbour East Recreation Campus Volleyball Courts will become the Pemamkiaq Beach Volleyball Courts. Pemamkiaq is a Mi’kmaq word meaning waves, or drifts in the sand. On a personal level, I much prefer the Indigenous naming convention of naming things for what they are. I would much rather live in the City of the Great Harbour than the City of the dead British guy, even if I don’t understand the language.
Halifax wants to host the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 2027, so it’ll start trying to.
Councillor Pam Lovelace wanted to give businesses destroyed by fire a tax break, and city staff are saying she’s not allowed to do that because the charter explicitly forbids it and businesses are supposed to have insurance for that type of thing. But this has implications of the in-camera variety and so this was debated in-camera. The result of this debate was a request to the province to amend the HRM charter to make clear what the city is or is not allowed to do. This amended motion passed.
Councillor Kathryn Morse wants to know if the city can better collect fines owed to it by developers, this will come back as a staff report.
Council also got an update on the provincial homelessness strategy. During this debate it was revealed that the feds are willing, and may have started working with the city, to use Shannon Park for something. Still early stages. Depending on the level of federal involvement, the floor is a large designated tenting area and the ceiling is a massive public housing build. Unfortunately, expect this to end up closer to the floor. After a brief attempt by Russell to not designate Grand Parade and Victoria Park for tenting was defeated (he was only supported by Trish Purdy and David Hendsbee), council approved eight new tenting sites. More on that in the Notable Debates section below. If the province can’t find a place to put the winter shelter, then it’s likely an HRM rec centre will be used. And if that happens, expect rec programming to be affected. That’s right, decades of political failure on the housing file is now impacting kids sports because we don’t want people to die outside on the streets of Halifax in the winter because they were too poor to pay rent while working full-time.
And finally, councillor Tony Mancini asked for a report to see if the city can move some of the housing accelerator money into an account for non-profits to use to pay Halifax Water development fees, which are apparently large enough to prevent some non-profit development.
Notable Debates
Apologies for this section, but even after sleeping on it, I’m still furious. Councillor Russell had an abhorrent debate performance on Tuesday. A performance so bad it suggests that he may be unfit for public office. It has to do with his attempt to not have Grand Parade listed as a designated tenting site. He tried to do this so unhoused people wouldn’t get in the way of public events, like the Remembrance Day ceremony. It’s quite offensive for a political leader to make this request, especially using Remembrance Day as an example. Allow me to explain.
On November 11, Canada gathers at cenotaphs around the country to remember the sacrifice of the men and women who volunteered to wear our country’s uniform. And to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, in order that we could be free in our democracy. Over the years, in large part due to its ceremonial and ritualistic nature, we have shifted the meaning of Remembrance Day. We no longer remember *why* our soldiers went to go fight, just that they did.
In 2011, Libya got caught up in the Arab Spring; riding a wave of protest that originated in Egypt, many North African countries rose up against their autocratic governments. In Libya a bunch of rebel groups rose up against long-time dictator Muammar Ghaddafi. In response to the uprising in Libya, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution, and just like that I was going to Libya to help evacuate Canadians caught up in the civil war.
Since air travel is much faster than travel by sea, by the time the HMCS Charlottetown got to Libya, the evacuations were complete and things had settled into the opening stages of a prolonged civil war. Our mission changed, too. We were to support rebels, unofficially of course, by supporting the UN-endorsed no-fly zone. I’ve written about the ambiguity of our mission before. But it was a genuinely exciting time to be a naval officer on the Charlottetown. In May of 2011, we thwarted a small boat attack in the middle of the night with our machine guns. We were also almost sunk by enemy missiles. Capt. Jennifer Stadnyk, a public affairs for Canadian Expeditionary Force Command at the time, said the rockets did not hit us because the crew—me and my colleagues—considered the enemy’s weapons capabilities, and sailed outside the weaponry’s maximum range. But that’s not true.
At night we sailed in close to the shore with lights off to monitor enemy activity. Fine, at night. But the officer of the watch that morning forgot to move the ship away from the shore when the sun came up. Rockets landed so close to the ship, the boarding party that was doing their morning exercises got splashed by the rockets entering the water just aft of the ship. In a panic they tore through the ship, expecting the ship to come alive ready to fight. We did eventually turn away from shore at high speed, but we were incredibly lucky there was no second volley. We were likely saved by a light breeze or the enemy’s aim being slightly off.
On one of those nights in close to the shore, I called in an airstrike. We were quite proud of the violence we did on our deployment. We were the first ship since Korea to actively fight a shooting war. We were the big swinging dicks of the Navy. Our commanding officer was so proud. There was a long discussion on the bridge about how we should commemorate our violence. We got official credit for three “kills.”
In the old days people used to paint silhouettes on the sides of their ships of the enemies they killed. What should we do then for airstrikes? After much discussion it was decided to put bombs on the side of the ship. Not the old-timey bombs, but silhouettes of the sleek, modern GBUs we were dropping in Libya. We were going to paint them on, but our CO decided to have them made and hung on the side of the ship, just in case we got in trouble for doing it. So as we pulled in, there they were. Three black silhouettes hanging on each bridge wing as we pulled into port.
They didn’t last long once we came alongside.
This is likely because one of the confirmed kills was an airstrike I was involved in calling in. The intelligence on the ground says it was a tank platoon. Amnesty International says it was eight women and eight children. I could file an access to information request to find out for sure either way; it would be my signature in the ship’s legal record of events on that date and time. Or it wouldn’t.
But that violence dished out to a foreign country is worth it, because democracy, and the freedoms it provides, are the best. They are worth committing violence to bring to other countries. That’s why I was sent overseas. To topple a dictator and allow democracy to flourish.
And this brings us to the point of Remembrance Day: To remember why men and women signed up to fight. In the past they went overseas to fight Nazis and did so because they were fighting for democracy. I too was sent overseas to fight for democracy.
The point of Remembrance Day, councillor Russell, is to remember what your power cost people like me. To remember why we agreed to pay that price. The deal is, I sign on the dotted line, you are responsible with your power. It is deeply insulting that on Tuesday you tried to hide your failures in the name of honouring my sacrifice. With as much respect as possible, Mr. Russell: Please seriously consider tendering your resignation from public life.
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This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 5, 2023.
Well written piece about what we are trying to remember and forget at the same time.