Halifax’s new city council had their first regular meeting of Halifax Regional Council on Tuesday, Nov 12, and it was a pretty routine affair. A lot of the discussion this meeting happened in-camera. In the public portions of the meeting, the bulk of the interesting debate was around the climate, specifically the yearly update on Halifax’s climate action plan, HalifACT AKA Halif-Acting on Climate Together. New councillors understandably had a lot of questions about this strategic plan, because their HalifACT orientation session is an hour-long briefing scheduled for Thursday, Nov 14, two days after the annual update.
The annual report says that Halifax is doing okay but really needs to start implementing the plans it comes up with. City staff gave a presentation summarizing the report. Councillors heard that the city has done some really good planning and some really good work, yet this program remains “at risk” due to a lack of implementation. On the positive side of things, the city has dropped its emissions by making buildings more efficient and dropping fleet vehicle emissions. Some ways the city is doing the latter are simple and cheap; for example, there is an internal municipal e-bike loaning program so employees can bike to cross-city meetings instead of driving. The city could be moving faster, but provincial inaction on greening the power grid means there is a hard cap on how much the city can reduce its emissions. This lead the city to enter into a power purchasing agreement with Renewall Energy.
This power purchasing agreement is actually a pretty big deal, in a very boring way. As we know from Canada’s oil and gas sector, when an energy product is not competitive, massive government subsidies are required to make it viable. In Canada, public subsidies for oil and gas companies are somewhere between $4.5 and $81 billion, depending on how a subsidy is defined and how many externalities are included in the calculations (here’s an explainer). The argument for these subsidies is that oil and gas provide reliable power, and reliable power is required for society and, therefore, businesses. Businesses are required for the economy to succeed so, therefore, we need to subsidize oil and gas. Regardless of how cheap renewable energy is now, renewable energy is still seen as unreliable due to a little bit of outdated information and a lot of oil and gas propaganda disinformation campaigns to sow the seeds of doubt.
On top of the direct financial “subsidy” of the city buying power from a renewable energy company, it also sends the message that renewable energy is reliable enough for the municipal government—an organization that needs to keep working when everything else goes to shit. On top of that, a government contract makes it more likely for companies to succeed in the long term (shout out Bombardier!). This, in turn, will allow local businesses to buy renewable energy and decrease their operating costs, which they will, in turn, slap right into the economy and look out oil and gas—there’s a new subsidy that generates more economic productivity. And it should be noted that oil and gas subsidies are tax dollars being spent to fund the end of human life on earth, an event which may also have some negative effects on the economy.
Anyway, it’s not all good news because these plans all serve to make Halifax do its part in limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by 2030. Meanwhile, outside council chambers, we are cruising through that extinction milestone six years early. With global policies as currently implemented, we’re on track to see 2.8 degrees by 2100. So even as HalifACT is at risk due to a lack of implementation, the world it’s planning for does not and can not exist. We no longer live in a world in which we can prevent climate change. This is something we discovered in 2021 and then again this year.
We’ve already done a lot of damage.
The climate is changing.
The question now is not can we prevent climate change, it’s can we prevent climate breakdown and save human life on the planet? Because, yeah, we probably still can. But as HalifACT joins the many species of animals on the “at risk” list it’s becoming increasingly obvious that parts of this plan desperately need to be updated.
For example, in the HalifACT plan staff write that
Halifax covers a large geographic area and as a result, communities and citizens are heavily reliant on public and private transportation for daily life. Switching to electric vehicles for private, public, and commercial transportation will reduce fuel costs, improve air quality, and reduce
maintenance requirements. Wide-spread adoption of electric vehicles will require planning for and building charging infrastructure throughout Halifax, and coordination with local partners and industry specialists to prepare for a shift from gasoline to electricity.
While it is true that it would require a lot of investment to make the electric car as prolific as the gas-powered car and to make car charging as ubiquitous as gas stations, no one seems to bother to ask if that’s a future that we should be striving for. As we become a society that has to deal with stronger storms, larger fires, more damage and destruction, we will have to evacuate our people from dangerous areas better. It is only due to the luck inherent in competent professionalism that no one died in Upper Tantallon. This is not news, though. Thanks to Halifax’s catastrophic transportation planning, we knew back in 2017 that it would take 15 hours for the city to evacuate in an emergency. Now, in 2024, it would take about 24 hours to evacuate. This degradation in emergency transportation capacity is because of our dependence on cars to get everywhere we need to go. We don’t need to build our future city to accommodate electric cars, especially because some EVs solve none of the problems cars cause in moving people around en mass as required in a city. A good forward-looking climate plan probably does not include policy encouraging people to double down on the mistakes we know we’re making today.
Things that passed
In our council’s first meeting, they heard an information item brought forward by councillor Cathy Deagle Gammon about extending water services to Fall River. This is probably a bad idea unless taxes or density increase significantly in the area around the Scwartzwald subdivision. Deagle Gammon brought this to council to find out what the consultant will do now that the contract to do the study has been written. Staff said the work will take about six months once they find someone to sign the contract, and then that consultant will come back with recommendations after their work is done.
Council named some parks and added names to the city’s big list of names used whenever something needs a name. This got pulled off the consent agenda because Seaview Community Park is being renamed Jessica Brown Park. Councillor Nancy Hartling pulled this off the consent agenda to laud Brown’s contributions to the community, which continued well into her long fight with cancer.
Kristin Poole Chislett, Jaime Swinton and Isabelle Ouellette were added to the ranks of the HRM’s development officers on the consent agenda.
Council decided who amongst them would be appointed to the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, the Board of Police Commissioners and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Board of Directors. After a bit of a debate, councillor John A. Young was the only person left in consideration for one open spot, so he’s now an HRM representative on the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, joining councillor Sam Austin. After about half of council was nominated as potential candidates for the Board of Police Commissioners, there was a first-three-past-the-post ballot, and as a result of that vote, until 2026, council’s reps on the Board of Police Commissioners will be: Virginia Hinch, Tony Mancini and Becky Kent. And finally, councillor Patty Cuttell will join the Federation of Canadian Municipalities board.
Remember a while back when the city’s Auditor General wrote two reports about how terrible the HRM’s risk assessment framework was?
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Well, the city has come up with an action plan that addresses the AG’s concerns and will hopefully shore up the HRM’s massive vulnerabilities due to about a decade of absolute garbage risk assessment, first identified by a Halifax Transit fuel spill and subsequent AG report from 2015. To be clear, in 2015, the AG first identified municipal risk management as an issue, and the city’s efforts to fix this led to, somehow, even worse municipal risk management 10 years later. Now, I know that sounds bad, and that’s because it is bad—just catastrophically bad governance. This plan is still in its infancy, so it’s way too early to say if this will be an improvement, but staff’s plan looks promising. This passed on the consent agenda, so we’ll get more information when this comes back to council as a fleshed-out plan.
As mentioned above, council got the annual progress report about HalifACT, the municipal plan to adapt to our climate-changed future. The TL;DR is that we’ve done a lot of planning but not a lot of implementing so “Overall, the current status of implementing HalifACT is considered to be ‘at risk.’ Many actions are progressing, but not at the pace and scale necessary to meet the science-based targets. The 2023/24 fiscal year represents a crucial point as HalifACT shifts from planning to implementation.” This past year needed to be a big one, and the update coming to council indicated that this year and the progress so far has been relatively lacklustre. If the city doesn’t start to kick climate adaptation into high gear and doesn’t raise taxes or other revenue, this climate plan is dead. However, should this climate plan get funded, the city will be restructuring its governance model to “accelerate the implementation of HalifACT by addressing key barriers and driving action at the necessary speed and scale.” During this debate, rookie councillors Nancy Hartling and Jean St-Amand asked good, incisive questions and showed initial signs as promising legislators. This motion was just to receive the report and presentation, the real work will happen in the upcoming budget season. (Get excited; budget pre-season should start in less than a month!) So far, council is making noises like they’re willing to make up for lost time this budget season. If that comes to pass, we will really start seeing climate projects take off next fiscal year. And we can expect most of our rookie councillors to improve as they become more familiar with strategic plans and municipal processes.
Speaking of climate change, council got a report from the LakeWatchers Water Quality Monitoring Program that says most of Halifax’s lakes are dying. Or as staff write: “Overall, the initial findings of the LakeWatchers Program indicate that most Halifax-area lakes currently suffer from some level of chloride enrichment and show signs of increasing eutrophication.” Salting the road so we can drive around in the winter is causing “chloride enrichment” in lakes within the HRM’s Centre Plan area. Pretty neat!
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City staff have suggested reviewing best practices for road salting, which were last updated in 2011. They recommend that the city identify “salt vulnerable” lakes and develop strategies to mitigate the environmental damage caused by winter driving. Better transit so people don’t have to drive at all in the winter should be high on this list. We need to fix the damage in our lakes, and we also need to stop doing the things that are damaging them in the first place. Staff also recommended that new developments be set back further from lakes, and have better, naturalized infrastructure to clean up that stormwater before it gets shunted into our freshwater lake systems. Staff also recommended writing a letter to the province asking for permission to build infrastructure to improve stormwater quality, which is not something Halifax Water is currently empowered to do. This passed, so a road salt plan, better setbacks and the letter to the province will all go ahead.
Council will include the North Woodside Community Park in the 2025/26 budget this upcoming budget season.
The Board of Police Commissioners (and pretty much everyone) thinks it’s dumb that cops need to be hired at a premium to close down streets for special events. It’s expensive, and because it’s expensive, Halifax has fewer community events that shut down streets, and as a result, Halifax is a little more boring because of this silly rule. During the debate, councillor St-Amand asked if cops would lose overtime if this change happened. Councillor Kent explained that there’s plenty of overtime to go around, so this wouldn’t impact the officers. Kent also explained that cops, like everyone else, need time off work to be healthy. But it is also worth pointing out that overtime can lead to cops getting paycheques that put them on the sunshine list of the highest-paid city employees. Decreasing overtime means that cops are healthier *and* the city saves money. Regardless, the province would have to change this rule, so council voted to write the province a letter. Feel free to add this to your list of questions for provincial candidates.
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In heritage business, council set a date for a public hearing for 1300 Oxford Street to become a heritage building. They approved the development at 1262 Bedford Highway, which’ll see a circa 1856 “Honeycote” house be moved and joined by some higher-density buildings. They also approved the changes to the old Dartmouth post office, and set a public hearing to demolish 1259 South Park Street.
Councillor Mancini asked for a staff report on creating an official HRM tartan, and councillor Kathryn Morse asked for a staff report on transit-related collisions in the past five years. Both passed and will come back with staff reports Soon™.
Finally, new mayor Andy Fillmore added a motion to the agenda to de-designate the encampment sites council designated in July of this year. This motion made a recommendation without a staff report, which is against the rules: Administrative Order One section 17 says motions of council need to be accompanied by the CAO’s advice, which is given via staff report. As a result, Fillmore’s motion was added to the agenda, and when it was discussed at the tail end of the meeting, it was immediately deferred to go get a staff report.
When that staff report comes back, it will likely say what the last one did: encampments will happen as long as political failures continue. So the city had to choose if we wanted to designate where encampments are allowed, or if we want to let them form organically wherever people want to set up tents. If we were to do the latter, it’s with the understanding that recent Supreme Court decisions prevent the city from moving the organic, locally sourced artisanal encampments like we used to have. In March of 2024, city staff explained that the city could shut down the hand-crafted Victoria Park encampment only because there were designated encampments to move people to.
Any new staff report on encampments should explain, again, to our council that de-designating encampments will make things worse, not better, as not having a list of allowed encampments on record forces the city to give up all control over where encampments sprout up. Fillmore added this to the agenda because a lot of people talked to him about it on the doorsteps. It is good for democracy when politicians listen to the people and address their concerns, and it’s good that Fillmore is trying to do that. Unfortunately, he didn’t take the next step of doing some homework on the issue, to find out why the city made a list in the first place so he could come to council and propose a solution that might work or, at the very least, propose a solution that hasn’t already been considered and dismissed as a bad idea. Instead, our new guy didn’t even read up on how to actually propose a solution in the legislative body he chairs. Rough first game for our new mayor.
Notable Debates
Since the rest of this report was a relatively heavy one, he’s some catty gossip from the latest installment of The Real Councillors of Halifax County. During the meeting, councillor Billy Gillis mentioned that he had a family member who was a cop. Councillor Kent chimed in to ask if someone who had a relative who was a cop was in a conflict of interest as a commissioner on the Board of Police Commissioners. City lawyer John Traves said no, and he’s right, although the perception of conflict of interest in such a case would be… not awesome.
Anyways, this was a funny moment, not because Kent’s son did the new logo for the Board of Police Commissioners, but because of why Traves is right. The underlying argument is that if family relations benefiting from systemic improvements was a conflict of interest, then councillors deciding to improve the city at all could be considered a conflict of interest on the off chance their families also benefit from the city being made a better place.
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This article appears in Nov 7-30, 2024.
Re: Road salt. During my 82 years I have lived in seven Canadian towns and cities. Halifax applies road salt MUCH more thickly than any of the other places. Why?
Bill McKay, Halifax