Last week, most of Halifax’s city council tried to debate the future of public safety services in the HRM. Only they were missing one key voice from those discussions: The mayor’s. While council waded through a bevy of issues over the course of two days, ranging from emergency response times to Halifax’s approach to homelessness, Andy Fillmore was, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the mayor’s schedule, likely wading into the Caribbean Sea. Or staring out at it, anyway.
Fillmore has been absent from council for just shy of two weeks now, including a Feb 7 budget meeting and council’s regular meeting on Feb 11. At first, the mayor’s travel was for work-related reasons: Fillmore attended the Big City Mayors’ caucus in Ottawa on Feb 5. But The Coast has heard from several sources in the know that on Valentine’s Day—the same day that council met to resume debating its approach to helping unhoused residents—he was soaking up the Caribbean sunshine. Which is weird for our mayor, because as recently as December, getting rid of homeless people seemed to be Fillmore’s top priority.
Fillmore’s absence—though not a breach of council rules—caught his colleagues’ attention. During the debate on Feb 14, political veteran Becky Kent told her co-councillors she would “very much like to hear” the mayor’s thoughts on public safety, given “the point of a democracy” is that “we all sit around the table and have a good debate and understanding” of the issues.
“This is a huge piece of work that we’re doing,” Kent added. “But he’s not here. And he chose not to be here for these budget debates. And that’s disappointing. So we don’t know what our mayor can offer here, but let’s make a deliberate choice to ask him when he returns.” During the debate itself, there was not a lot of response to Kent’s comment, but we shall see what questions our councillors levy at our mayor’s freshly tanned face in the upcoming debates. The Coast’s attempts to reach out to Fillmore through his office have not been returned.
Fillmore’s unannounced Caribbean vacation—confirmed with The Coast by multiple sources close to the mayor—might have raised eyebrows at HRM council, but it’s within the rules. Councillors can’t miss three meetings without permission; otherwise, they are to be removed from the committee whose meetings they missed. The good news for our new mayor is that going to the Caribbean in the middle of budget season is totally okay. (Even if it’s in poor taste.) Because despite the fact that Fillmore has been absent for the past three budget meetings—Feb 7, Feb 12 and Feb 14—according to the council agenda, he has only missed one. Each budget meeting so far has been two days long—which means that even though Fillmore missed Feb 7’s meeting, he was present for the start of it on Feb 5. And likewise, even though council met for two long days on Feb 12 and 14, there was only one meeting according to the agenda.
This two-day debate was challenging for councillors, as it puts them in an impossible position. Since the city predominantly collects money through property taxes—and since unhoused people are by definition without property—most, if not all, of the help given to unhoused people from the city comes from housed people’s taxes. In a cost of living crisis, many homeowners don’t want to pay higher taxes for fear of being homeless themselves. This, in turn, puts councillors in a position where their constituents want homelessness to be solved but may not be willing or able to pay for it themselves.
Kent put the issue succinctly: “Budgets are hard.”
While Andy “the worst of the homelessness crisis is behind us” Fillmore and his flip-flops were in the Caribbean, the councillors left in snow-blasted Halifax got to work making hard decisions about the future of public safety in the HRM as they debated the Department of Public Safety—AKA the Community Safety Business Unit’s budget.
This is an incredibly challenging time for our councillors because even though a few municipal reports explain that de-tasking or defunding the police is the best long-term fiscal move for the city, it’s a slow-moving savings. In the HRM, the preferred method of defunding is replacing uniformed officers with civilians in the annual budget process. As a result, it will likely be more than a decade before we start to see any significant savings in police budgets due to council’s efforts to de-task the police. Meanwhile, the city is also spending $15.8 million to continue standing up for the Department of Community Safety now in its second budget season. Until the new Department of Community Safety really gets going and starts taking work away from police through prevention or diversion, we’re spending $15 million on top of the $101-million HRP budget, which is a lot of money on public safety.
The councillors who attended the meeting made significant progress in de-tasking and sent a bunch of stuff to the Budget Adjustment List—AKA the budget playoffs—for consideration in this year’s budget.
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Among the budget items sent to the playoffs was a portion of JustFOOD funding. The JustFOOD program is Halifax’s effort to prevent people from being hungry. Nova Scotia has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in Canada and Halifax’s director of housing and homelessness, Max Chauvin, told councillors during this debate that people are stealing food at grocery stores because they can’t afford it. For $329,000 in annual spending—an insignificant share of the city’s $1.3-billion budget—the city could prevent some people from being hungry, preventing food theft. As food security increased and food theft decreased, cops wouldn’t have to pull extra duty shifts in grocery stores, which would decrease the workload on police officers and decrease burnout. These are the kinds of positive knock-on effects we can expect if council decides to spend $329,000 on food security—but despite the benefits and the low cost, councillors wouldn’t commit to it yet. Last year, council cut JustFOOD funding to save money after councillors had sent it to the playoffs for consideration. If the same thing happens again this year it won’t be the end of the story, either: Since this funding is needed for the council-approved JustFOOD program to be successful, this spending ask will keep coming back until council finally decides to outright fund or kill the JustFOOD program.
Council also debated the merits of a new community emergency response team. There are many emergency incidents in the city that need some form of conflict resolution, but the 911 options—police, fire and ambulance—are not always well suited to help. Since we have no alternatives to 911, police, fire and EMS have become our default responders to every emergency, regardless of whether those emergencies merit cops arriving with guns. (And sometimes, as we’ve unfortunately seen, calling 911 makes things worse.) On top of that, due to the provincial legislation in Nova Scotia mandating police officers to wait in hospitals with people, sending police on wellness checks is a massive drain on Halifax’s resources. And yet councillors refused to prioritize funding the new community emergency response team ($463,800/yr), instead sending it to the budget playoffs.
One of the most impassioned debates came from councillor Sam Austin about the rest of the HRM’s commitment to funding a drop-in centre ($150,000) and an after-hours individualized mobile engagement team—AKA the AIM team ($1.5 million). The drop-in centre is already operational and vital for Halifax’s unhoused population, as it allows unhoused people to do housed things, like shower, eat, be protected from the elements and have access to safe storage for their belongings. Chauvin explained that some of the tents we see in Halifax are just people’s stuff because unhoused people have no other reliable means of storage.
Austin made the impassioned plea because if the AIM team had been in place in December, a man would still be alive today. This team, explained Austin, could be called by unhoused people with problems that aren’t emergencies outside of the working day. For example, if someone is living outside and their tent gets destroyed, there’s someone at the city who they can call between 9am and 5pm from Monday to Friday to get a new tent. But if it happens on Christmas Day, there’s no one to call except for the police.
Austin explained that if the AIM team had already existed, the city could have avoided “the day after Christmas, a senior, dead on the ground.” He said that this man’s death was preventable because people at the Geary Street encampment knew the now-deceased was unwell; they knew he was sleeping in wrapped-up tarps instead of a tent. If the residents of Geary Street had had an AIM team to call on Christmas, the AIM team would have seen the man was unwell and taken him to the hospital, or they would have gotten him a tent or other sleeping arrangements. But with no one to call for help on Christmas, the residents of Geary Street just went to bed.
“We lost a human life that did not need to be lost,” Austin told his peers. He argued that spending money to save lives like this is the textbook definition of public safety, and “if that doesn’t count as public safety, I don’t know what we’re doing; I don’t know what does.”
Councillors mostly agreed with Austin, with some pointing out that it was ridiculous that things approved by council, like the two civilian response teams, were included as budget additions (and thus subject to being killed at BAL debates) instead of core spending built into the budget. Chief administrative officer Cathie O’Toole told councillors that should this new spending be approved this year, these new items will become regular parts of the Community Safety Department’s budget. But last year, council only approved stuff for one fiscal year, and there’s been an election in between, so the bureaucracy thought it prudent to ensure our new council wanted to spend money the same way our old council did.
The Budget Adjustment List debates—AKA the budget playoffs—will kick off on March 19 and councillors will make a final decision about whether or not to take another big stride in defunding the police. By March, everyone should be back from vacation, so maybe then we’ll get to hear what our mayor thinks about council trying to end homelessness with responsible spending and empathy instead of evictions from camps.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.
Yer scraping the bottom of the news barrel Matty, when you begrudge the man his vacation