Last Thursday, Feb. 15, the city of Halifax did something it hasn’t done in a while: adapted quickly to changing circumstances. The city has done this once before in recent memory, in response to COVID, and as it happens those COVID-centric amendments were one of the many things that changed with Halifax’s five-year strategic plan update on Thursday’s Community Planning and Economic Development Committee meeting.
The city’s strategic plan, corporately titled People. Planet, Prosperity: Halifax’s Inclusive Economic Strategy, guides city staff in decision-making and recommendations to council. Part of this plan explicitly changed in 2020 to reflect the fact that Halifax was responding to COVID. Those “let’s help people recover from COVID” strategies have now changed to a more general “let’s help people recover from all emergencies, and hey let’s maybe try to mitigate some stuff too.”
The city also recently updated the Playing Field Strategy, plus we now have a Rural Recreation Strategy. In previous years implementing these strategies would take a lot of time, and occasionally new strategic plans, like the Rural Recreation Strategy, would have been kicked down the road for inclusion in the next five-year cycle.
This committee also learned that due to Halifax’s recent growth, when companies are considering a move to Halifax, we are now competing with major cities like Toronto, instead of with other mostly adequate mid-size cities, like Winnipeg. The CAO told council that there were things that were making Halifax less competitive as a city that was outside of the municipality’s control, like being able to provide financial incentives or tax breaks to companies. She was not suggesting that this was something the HRM would or should do, but because it can not do it, it has to focus on the things it can control, like our urban infrastructure.
Apparently, things like workers not being able to afford a car, and also not having safe non-car transportation options, and also not being able to find a place to live, and also income tax not being indexed to inflation so the tax burden is increasing every year is really killing Halifax’s competitiveness to attract workers here. As an aside, this is probably why Tim Houston’s current “recruit our way out of the healthcare crisis” strategy is not working.
Unlike the provincial government, city staff have recommended we change this, the committee agreed, and now this change will be sent to council for approval. Under new chief administrative officer Cathie O’Toole, we are starting to see more streamlined and adaptive bureaucratic processes. As any sports fan knows, changing a coach takes a while to start to have a consistent impact on how the team plays. In Halifax we are starting to see what a bureaucracy under O’Toole looks like, and right now the potential for our future looks bright.
