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Twenty years after amalgamation, some residents of the Halifax Regional Municipality are still in favour of bringing back the county.
That’s according to a new survey from Corporate Research Associates, which found nearly half of the 401 HRM residents surveyed supported splitting the municipality into an urban city and rural county.
Overall results of the small sample (just 0.1 percent of HRM) are accurate to within plus or minus 4.9 percentage points, says CRA. Support for the purely hypothetical idea is also slightly down—54 to 47 percent—from the last time CRA asked the question nine months ago.
“While the gap has narrowed, many residents continue to believe that splitting Halifax Regional Municipality into two units would be in their best interest,” writes Corporate Research CEO Don Mills in a release.
But one of the councillors who actually represents those rural residents is baffled as to why Mills keeps beating a dead horse.
“Why does Corporate Research and Don Mills continue to ask this question?” says Waverley–Fall River–Musquodoboit Valley representative Steve Streatch. “In my view, that discussion is passé.”
It was mayor Mike Savage’s father, premier John Savage, who wed the former Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford and Halifax County back in 1996 to streamline political services and end administrative redundancies. Since that time, former councillors like Dartmouth Centre’s Gloria McCluskey have criticized spending projects on the western side of the Harbour (like the Central Library and Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes) as of no interest to Dartmouth residents, and groups like Save Rural HRM have protested a lack of services under the flag of the old County. Some members of that group have explicitly called for a return to rural governance.
Streatch says some residents voiced similar thoughts while he was on the campaign trail last month during the municipal, but they were “very few and far between.”
Surprisingly, given that the outcry on social media is largely related to those rural issues and Dartmouth identity politics, CRA’s survey found urban residents of Halifax are the ones who most support a conscious decoupling. Only 40 percent of Dartmouth and Bedford/Sackville residents polled were in favour of a split, compared to 46 percent of former county residents and 55 percent of those living in the former Halifax city.
Fourteen percent of the 401 adult HRM residents over 18 that CRA surveyed didn’t have a preference or opinion on the breakup. Streatch isn’t one of them. He wasn’t surveyed, and he certainly has an opinion on the subject.
“I believe that we’re stronger together,” says the councillor, while acknowledging that can sometimes lead to conflicts between HRM’s communities. “That doesn’t mean you take your toys and go home. It means you work hard to make the situation better for those residents.”
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This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2016.
I suspect this is an evil plot masterminded by Gloria to let Dartmouth separate from HRM and be the capital of the new rural municipality.
I thought this amalgamation thing was a great idea. Stream-line the bureaucracy and move forward together. The reality is people have a hard time finding NS on a map, and we are spending time debating differences in a town of 300,000. It’s a big world out there; so if we could just got rid of some of the lame issues separating us we could do good things.
I was wrong, this hasn’t been the reality. If I tell local people I live in Halifax they complain that they cant find parking, or they hate downtown (no clue where that comes from) and instead of talking about how to make it better together, it’s just a very childish ‘who do you think you are’. It’s weird.
So, please, lets just get on with it. Stop pretending this HRM thing was a good idea and we can all move forward. Separately.
Okay! Bye! Enjoy not getting services!
Who are you kidding amalgamation was forced on us because Halifax was broke while Dartmouth was not! The constant syphoning of Dartmouth tax dollars to build everything in pennisular Halifax with our tax dollars has done nothing to benefit us. Instead of continuing the building up of downtown dartmouth with our tax dollars we were left to languish while pennisular halifax continues to be the only ones benefitiing from amalgamation.!
Yeah, the official record doesn’t reflect that assertion there gargramel. Developers don’t need to expand to Darkness as there are plenty of opportunities to expand over here. When they run out of space, they’ll ferry over. If you get bored, drop by!
@gargrmel
I say this as a Dartmouth resident: having Dartmouth and Halifax (and Bedford) as separate cities was and is a bad idea. They act as one functional unit; people living in Dartmouth use services in Halifax. If Dartmouth was tax rich compared to Halifax, it’s because we residents used Halifax amenities without paying for them. The region also had tons of inefficiencies because the former cities were fighting each other. Instead of building one business park, we collectively built five, and then offered the land to people at bargain-basement prices to undercut each other.
To suggest that all our tax dollars go into the Peninsula is just hogwash. Dartmouth is getting a new four-pad; has new all-weather fields; is getting an upgrade to the Sportsplex; has a new transit hub; will probably get a new Dartmouth museum; and has countless other investments in trails, bike lanes, parks, and other amenities.
I could see some justification for splitting the Eastern Shore from HRM… but at this point I think the effort versus the benefit would not be worth it. Maybe we should all just learn to get along and realize that what’s good for one portion of HRM is good for all of us.
It would be more sensible to split the county in half, east and west. This would create two cities with reasonable geography and population balance: Dartmouth and Halifax.
The above very corporate looking, or PR dream, rag as a flag, or banner, only really makes sense when seen from one direction, as from the other it is mostly gibberish; as many flags with print on them tend to be. Also, it really only ‘pushes’ one component area of the whole of this municipality. Which is not a city in whole or in part (thanks to the current HRM Mayor’s father and minions) – no matter how many try to say it is. At least not until the province decides to change some legislation. We really did not get amalgamation, as such but more a dog’s breakfast of municipal ‘cut and paste’.
Wow. Such distortion of reality there gagelmel. Actually if you were alive to witness the farce of amalgamation in 1996 you would have seen Halifax delivering fire apparatus, police vehicles and basic stuff like streetlight maintenance. And halifax which operated as a pay as you go see it’s inhereted debt go to $10 mil. It was like a upstanding person marrying a crackhead. You get all the problems it entails. If the “county and dartmouth could pay me back the monies i was robbed from my taxes i’d be happy to let them go.
Oh yeah the water problem this summer? It was because we turned off the pipe coming across the bridge that was put there to offfset the lousy infrastructure in darkness.
And Ask Savage about his oldman’s gift to the reveloutionaries of latin america while he was mayor of tinytown. To the tune of 1 mil. Who bailed him out of that? The shitty liberals
Realistic 69…we had all those services thanks, including having started the bus service etc. We were in the black halifax was deeply in the red. We had fire and police services we were not some backwoods town. The only ones who recieved the biggest benefit from amalgamation WAS AND IS HALIFAX!!