Halifax city staff’s status quo sedition

One of the most important things revealed at Tuesday’s council meeting, although it slipped by pretty quietly under all the headlines about the death of the Windsor Street Exchange, was the extent to which staff in the city’s bureaucracy are undermining the will of council and the integrity of our municipal democracy. But that’s pretty grim, and it’s not all doom and gloom in the city, so before we get to that, some positives! Like survey responses about bike lanes and achieving council’s priorities, it’s possible to frame the slow collapse of our municipal government as roughly 66% good.

The city of Halifax, if it were in a sports team, is about a decade into a rebuild. For those who are unfamiliar with sports, rebuilds are a cyclical part of sports fandom. No matter how good your current team may be, athletes age and need to be replaced to stay competitive. Every now and again, certain players or coaches will come along and change the foundation of how the game is played, and this too requires adaptation. Like a city, for a team to stay competitive and survive in such an environment, they must constantly adapt.

Not only does Halifax’s municipal government share the struggle of sports teams, they also share the leadership structure required to win. Professional sports teams and your local bureaucracy requires three distinct entities within the team to be in sync for that team to win a championship.

The team’s board or owner

Depending on the team this top administrative level varies, the most commonly known being rich people outright owning teams, but there are examples like the Green Bay Packers or AFC Wimbledon, which are almost exactly like the city of Halifax: A publicly chosen board of directors who set strategic priorities to guide the team to success. Every four years we choose the board members for the HRM corporation.

Halifax’s previous two boards of directors were relatively strong and passed many forward-looking strategies to ensure Halifax could adapt to the changes in our world. We are still early into this newly installed board’s four-year terms, but it seems like in last October’s election, we chose a board with a slight future-focused majority. In spite of some memorable headlines from the minority, the early indication is that we can expect good things from the current board of directors.

The manager or coach

The lynchpin in any team’s success is the person on the sidelines responsible for implementing the board’s strategic priorities while the game is being played. While it is obvious that every team wants to win, some teams have objectives they want to achieve while winning. The Halifax Wanderers pro soccer team wants to win while developing young Canadian players. The Pittsburgh Penguins of hockey want to win by building a team around a core of franchise players like our own Sidney Crosby. It is crucial that the board finds a coach or manager who understands the plan and can make it a reality in realtime, from the sidelines, as the game is being played.

In the world of Halifax’s municipal politics our last board chose former HRM accounting director and Halifax Water general manager Cathie O’Toole to be our manager, or as the city calls it, Chief Administrative Officer. In her previous time with the city she performed her job with integrity in an era plagued by scandal. At Halifax Water she was GM when they implemented a sustainable infrastructure asset management program. Her CV and early changes to our bureaucracy are going well. For example, prior to O’Toole’s arrival a lot of municipal departments worked in silos, spinning their wheels, accomplishing very little. The city’s bureaucracy is changing, and now all municipal work is overseen and coordinated by a chief operations officer. Even though it’s been a year of our lives, institutional changes are slow; at about a year in, we’re now approaching the end of the first period or quarter. It will take time to see positive outcomes from our team’s changes. These changes will take longer still for the city of Halifax because even though our board and our manager are good, the team we are fielding is absolutely terrible.

The team

Halifax’s bureaucracy is our team; they run our municipal government on a day-to-day basis. They are supposed to be playing the game, following and implementing the directions from the coach and the board. In this, our city is a lot like the Halifax Wanderers last year: Head coach Patrice Gheisar clearly had a plan and clearly trusted his players, but Halifax’s players just did not play well. Silly mistakes and stupid penalties combined with poor player performances to produce a very disappointing year. Even team all-stars like defender Dan Nimick had an unusually bad year: In 2024, Nimick scored the most goals for and against the Wanderers.

Halifax’s bureaucracy is also having a bad game, a bad few seasons truth be told. From Risk Assessment to HalifACT, strategic priorities to diversity and inclusion, the city’s staff kind of suck at being a competent bureaucracy. Like Dan Nimick, they wake up every game day, put on their shirt, step out onto the pitch and kick a ball straight past a confused goalie right into their own net.

At Tuesday’s council meeting city staff scored a few more own goals. The first two came in response to questions from councillor Patty Cuttell. She pointed out that the “key performance indicators” the city is tracking for Halifax Transit say the city is doing well on Transit, but one of the things she hears the most from her constituents is how much the buses suck. How valuable are our KPIs saying we’re doing a good job if the bus still sucks for a lot of Haligonians?

In response to the question, city staff explained that the “biggest challenges” are that staff only have “outcome statements” that are “high level” and “describe for you what we want out in communities, but don’t speak to our role as an organization. Like how does that [outcome] relate to organizational performance?”

Excuse me? Staff don’t think their performance should be judged on how well they can actually achieve council’s priorities out in the real world? But wait, because this gets worse when you remember this debate was due to councillor Tony Mancini requesting a presentation on council’s now four-year-old Strategic Priorities Plan 2021-25. This report was attached as an information item, but since city staff are failing on about half of council’s priorities, Mancini wanted a presentation so councillors could find out why.

Staff then explained to Cuttell that in the new strategic plan, they’re going to identify key performance indicators that actually measure outcomes, and they’ll determine what those outcomes are by reading council’s strategic planning documents. Which sounds…totally normal and pretty much the only way to bring KPIs, outcomes and strategy together. But staff saying they’re going to do this in the new plan begs the question: Have they been doing the same type of good governance for this four-year-old strategic plan? No. No they have not.

Right after councillor Cuttell, councillor Sam Austin started asking questions. Allowing that KPIs are trending in the right direction, he asked how can KPIs be meaningfully used to achieve council’s objectives? City staff responded that even in strategic plans like HalifACT that have established targets, those plans don’t have an annual year-over-year target. And sure, city staff could have demonstrated competence and just averaged out the end goal over the years between now and the goal’s date, but that might have given city staff actual targets to hit. And what if some of those targets had high ramp-up times? It would look like the city was failing in the early years. Staff explained that is why, even for strategic plans with measurable outcomes, instead of choosing KPIs that measured those outcomes, city staff chose KPIs divorced from council’s desired outcomes. As a result, HalifACT is at risk of failing due to lack of implementation.

Councillor Austin’s questions were also responsible for one of the other own goal bombshells in city staff’s ongoing status-quo sedition. At issue was the Windsor Street Exchange redesign. The Coast story about it has more details, but basically the plan became an untenable kludge because council wanted to achieve some of its transportation (read reduction in car traffic) goals, while also getting $36 million in government funding that is contingent on increasing truck traffic through the container terminal. To get a sense of staff’s thinking, Austin went into the realm of the hypothetical—even though the $36 million in funding was the whole reason the city started thinking about remaking the intersection, Austin removed it from the equation.

He asked if we were redesigning the exchange to the city’s standards exclusively, and council was willing to spend $60 million on the project, could staff come up with a design to reach the desired transit priority outcomes? Staff said that their plan to achieve transit priority would be exactly the same without the $36 million government funding. Because if they added dedicated bus lanes to the Windsor Street Exchange to boost transit reliability, buses would get caught in congestion on approaches like the Bedford Highway, so city staff would have to look at “network-wide evaluation of reallocating lanes.” Apparently, once council passed the Integrated Mobility Plan eight years ago, work on the network-wide transit priority plan and section 2.2 of that plan seems to have just stopped.

This lack of network-wide transit planning is also hurting and killing Haligonians. On the Bedford Highway there are many transit stops that let people out on the shoulder, with no sidewalk and no safe way to cross. Staff’s work on the council priority of a transit-accessible city that doesn’t kill people in preventable ways has apparently stopped, if it ever started. This staff decision to not work on implementing “what we want out in communities” bears a substantial portion of the blame for a 15-year-old getting seriously injured on Wednesday. Although staff are incorrect, because it does, in fact, speak very clearly to what the bureaucracy sees as its role as an organization.

What has not stopped, however, is staff building the city around an automotive priority plan. This plan is killing people and the planet, and is probably why the plan city staff *are* following was *not* approved by council.

Councillors do not and should not have the power to hire and fire staff—that’s a recipe for corruption. But it’s high time they started expressing their displeasure about our current team and demanding changes. If this were sports we’d be braying for blood, hanging bedsheets out our windows, asking for everyone from the kit manager to the team’s owner to be sacked. There would be angry op-eds, protests and righteous fury. Our team sucks, and it’s unacceptable!

That’s what the city would be doing if the municipal government was a sports team, and saving people’s lives was as important to us as earning made-up points to beat other teams and winning a decorative plate or oversized cup.

Things that passed

Part of 12 York Redoubt Crescent became deregistered as a heritage property because it no longer has any historical value, but the property owner is going to do an archeology assessment.

Thanks to councillor Tony Mancini, council debated the lack of progress staff have made in achieving council’s strategic priorities. Before this debate started, staff corrected the record: Last meeting, director of corporate planning and performance Mike Pappas said a plurality of people wanted bike lanes in the city decreased. He told council he made a mistake and that this is incorrect; the reality is a plurality of Haligonians want bike lanes maintained at the current level, and the majority want that or improvements. This did lead to a funny exchange where Mancini asked Pappas how councillors were supposed to determine what Haligonians wanted with these numbers. Pappas explained what majorities and pluralities were. This is funny because Mancini won an election decided by a plurality, and works for a board that makes decisions based on a majority, so he really should know how we, as a democratic society, use pluralities and majorities to help make decisions.

As outlined above, the issues with the strategic plan are deep-rooted and have led to overall underwhelming results throughout the HRM. Staff’s underwhelming, outcome-free plan implementation is likely a contributing factor to why Haligonians in the most recent survey were unhappy that their taxes paid for such abysmal performances. One of the most concerning elements of the strategic priorities update is that those priorities dictate how the HRM spends tax revenue. This council highlighted a lot of flaws and shortcomings with the current set of priorities, but won’t get an opportunity to fix those issues this year. But it also does not make sense to do another year of spending based on a strategy we know is not meeting council’s expectations. In answering council’s questions, a beleaguered Brad Anguish, the city’s new chief operations officer, said that this year’s budget book will be more holistic so council will be better informed in their decision making. We will find out next Wednesday, Feb 5, when budget season kicks off with the Budget Introduction and Capital Plan Recommendation meeting of Halifax’s budget committee.

This year we also hope to get an update on whether or not the city of Halifax is fiscally sustainable.

Council killed the Windsor Street Exchange because city staff’s design plan did not reflect council’s instructions to prioritize Halifax’s Bus Rapid Strategy plans. This would have required city staff to be planning a transit priority network on public roads, which they have not done and do not seem to be doing, in spite of the IMP instructing them to do so—eight years ago.

It’s worth highlighting that in the debate about the exchange last summer, councillor Shawn Cleary asked city staff what the point of the deferral was because they’d already been instructed to consider council’s priorities and came up with the now-rejected design, which was the same in Jan 2025 as it was last summer. Last summer, Cleary was trying to determine if the deferral was a waste of time (it was) and asked staff what would be different with the deferral. Which led to this exchange last summer:

Staff: What we were asked to do by Transportation Standing Committee was to come back to council and consider how those design elements [council priorities of bus and active transit] should be incorporated, and if they couldn’t be, tell you why they couldn’t be incorporated and that’s what we’d be committing to right now as well.

Cleary: So what’s the point?

Staff: Well… we will have a close look at how we incorporate all those things.

Cleary: Did you not have a close look over the last 10 months?

Staff: *chuckling* We did, we did.

Cleary: So what’s going to look different over the next number of months?

Staff: We’ll have a better understanding of I guess the more intensive… uh… the widening type things.

Except, it turns out there was no point in deferring it last summer afterall. On top of not being able to meet council’s priorities due to lack of network-wide transit planning, they also couldn’t change the design to meet council priorities with the “widening type things” unless the council also instructed staff to abandon the federal money. Neither of these pieces of information was presented to council last summer, even though it would have been relevant to tell councillors trying to craft a motion to design an interchange in line with their priorities. Not sharing this information with council last summer is uncomfortably easy to interpret as staff making the political decision to act in their own interest to pursue federal funding for their own, not council’s, priorities.

Does anyone know if any Dutch cities want to unload a transportation engineer for a handful of middling traffic engineers and future draft considerations?

Council approved spending $2 million to fix Craig Blake’s VOITH drive and perform some needed maintenance since the ferry will be in drydock anyway.

They also approved the new anti-Black racism grants program from last week’s Grants Committee meeting.

Councillor Cathy Deagle Gammon wants to run for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ board of directors, and she needs, and got, council’s permission to do so.

A staff report on councillor remuneration was added to the agenda. Every year, council has to look at its policies as instructed by the province, and doing so this year council approved a minor change to travel expenses. Next meeting they’ll vote on pay raises. This year, city staff recommends a 4% increase across the board. The last time council looked at pay raises, then-mayor Mike Savage argued his increase should be less because his salary was higher. This time ‘round, council will likely vote for a flat 4% pay raise because people always vote for pay raises, and that’s why big companies spend so much money union busting.

And finally, councillor David Hendsbee is going to try and convince his peers to waste money on the rejected Windsor Street Exchange because three councillors weren’t here for the vote: Becky Kent, Billy Gillis and Cathy Deagle Gammon. This’ll come back next meeting and council will need a 2/3rds majority to resurrect the bad Windsor Street design presented to council this meeting. It is quite likely that with full attendance of council the vote would probably have been a 10-7 split instead of the 8-6 vote of Tuesday, but ultimately the same result. Hendsbee’s efforts to revive this bad plan are likely in vain.