Halifax’s municipal budget pre-season crunches on, bending bureaucracies to its will. The Board of Police Commissioners didn’t get to the RCMP’s preliminary budget requests at the end of 2024, so held a special meeting Monday, Jan 6 to go over the RCMP’s budget asks. The Monday meeting had to happen before the public meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Jan 8, ensuring members of the public have the information they need to comment on both the RCMP and Halifax Region Police budgets. Not that the board cares at all what we citizens think—the board’s new chair gave a blanket dismissal of public input last year when he was a commissioner. More on that in a moment, but for now it’s safe to say the RCMP requests will be taken seriously by the board no matter what happens Wednesday. And what requests they are!
Between two batches of hiring spaced out over 2025/26, the RCMP want to add more than $4 million worth of new cops to the city’s annual payroll. For starters, in the 2025 they are asking for one traffic cop for Musquodoboit Harbour, one community cop for Sheet Harbour, six cops for a satellite office in Beechville, and six cops for a satellite office in Fall River, which will cost approximately $2.6 million to HRM taxpayers. Then, in 2026, they will ask for one cop for the Community Action Response Team, two cops for the RCMP’s intimate partner violence program, and six cops for a community office in Eastern Passage, which is approximately $1.7 million based on the RCMP’s budget submissions.
RCMP superintendent Don Moser told the board these three new satellite offices are needed because Halifax has been putting up some Micheal Jordan-esqe numbers in population growth, which is putting a particular strain on the RCMP, which covers places where most of that growth is happening. Remember, Halifax Regional Municipality is about as big as PEI. Halifax Regional Police are responsible for the urban core, a relatively compact territory. The RCMP covers places on the outer edge of the core like Lower Sackville, Cole Harbour and Eastern Passage; plus the rural exurbs like Beechville and North Preston; and the may-as-well-be-Cape Breton’s of the HRM, like Sheet Harbour. The RCMP is planning for growth.
As is the city, which not long ago received a swift kick in the ass from both the federal and provincial governments, both asking for massive changes to the way the city does suburban planning. Although we won’t know the specifics until the first draft of the new suburban plan is complete early this year, the city is probably aiming for a massive increase in functionality and efficiency in existing suburbs, which means increasing density and subsequent population growth. This is the type of unified planning exercise that really should have been part and parcel of amalgamation, but the late 1990s were a simpler time.
At any rate, one of the long-term results of this planning process should be a more unified and coherent, moderately urbanized municipal core within HRM’s urban transit boundary.
One of the RCMP’s main roles in Canada is what’s called Contract and Indigenous Policing, which means that roughly 75% of Canada is policed by the RCMP. In spite of their many, many, many faults, the RCMP are the experts in policing rural Canada. It makes sense for them to police the Sheet and Musquodoboit Harbours of the HRM. But does it still make sense for the RCMP to be policing within the urban transit boundary? Should the board be taking the RCMP’s proposed spending and giving it to the HRP instead?
It’s not really a question of whether population growth will lead to a greater need for policing. Alongside our population stats the province has been putting up strong numbers in poverty, where Nova Scotia is currently the national champion. This has led to things like 65% of the province’s population being put into situations where crimes of desperation might suddenly seem like good ideas. So as the population grows and as we change our city to accommodate that growth, who should be policing the newly densified communities of Lower Sackville and Eastern Passage in 2035? The Halifax Regional Police, who seem to be giving police reform an honest try? Or the RCMP, the guys who showed up to answer questions about the Mass Casualty Commission without reading the report?
The next meeting of the police budget pre-season will be the Wednesday, Jan 8 public meeting, where members of the public can give their opinions on policing and police spending to the board. Commissioner Gavin Giles was appointed chair of the Board of Police Commissioners and will lead that meeting. It is not a great look for the board that the guy who last year called the public presentations “canned and banal” is leading the meeting this year. In the full quote Giles also dismisses a large swath of last year’s public participation, calling it “nonsense and rubbish commentary designed only to titillate and annoy.”
A week later, on January 15, the board will have its debate about the proposed HRP and RCMP budgets. They could demand changes and spending cuts, putting serious questions to the police based on insight from the public. Or they could just pass both proposals on to council to deal with. The crystal ball says the board will heed the police’s advice, dismiss any comment from the public designed only to titillate and annoy, and do very little if any serious thinking about the future of policing. They are likely to make canned and banal presentations in support of the police designed only to titillate and annoy the engaged citizens in the HRM who took time to talk to make presentations to the board in good faith. Then, the board will rubber stamp the police budgets like they do most years. And budget pre-season will crunch on.
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
