The warning signs have been there for a while, but it’s becoming harder to deny that Halifax is dying. Not some glamourous death, a noble sacrifice for the greater good. Nor is it something expected after a prolonged and public illness. No, it’s a far more embarrassing death; We’ve been bitten by a zombie, and staff are trying really hard to hide it. Not that being bitten by a zombie is inherently embarrassing, but for Halifax specifically our demise is still pretty avoidable.
Like most old cities, Halifax was founded before the car and before any sort of urban mass transit. This necessitated a small, dense city with everything anyone needed within walking distance. The invention of the steam engine was a turning point for Halifax, and the first mass transit opened in 1866: a rail line from the north end, down Barrington Street and up Spring Garden Road—seven cents for an adult, three for a child.
As Halifax grew, mass transit grew with it. With the start of World War II, Halifax’s population grew to 120,000 and the streetcars, lovingly called Birney cars, struggled to keep up with the 31 million annual trips. For context, during the war, Halifax had a population of 120,000 making those 31 million transit trips—about 260 trips per person in a year. In 2024, Halifax’s population was about 500,000 people and used transit for 1.4 million trips, or not quite three trips per person.
We got bit by unsustainability after World War II, but that’s not the embarrassing part. Everyone was doing it. During the war, Halifax’s population doubled from the pre-war population of 60,000. The Macdonald Bridge opened in 1955, connecting Halifax and Dartmouth. In the 1960s Halifax embarked on a project of “urban renewal,” which aimed to bulldoze Black “Blighted” communities and replace them with highways. We are lucky that plan died out when the highways had to go through the wealthy non-blighted areas. Because if it had gone to completion, that would have been the public health equivalent of forcing everyone in Halifax to smoke as many cigarettes as Ricky in the early seasons of the Trailer Park Boys, based on the best available research on “Near-Road Traffic-Related Air Pollution: Resuspended PM2.5 from Highways and Arterials.” Thank goodness for classism, eh?
But the damage was done; the disease of accepting unsustainability had taken hold and the infection was spreading through car traffic. In the early days, it seemed like it was harmless. We should spread out, get away from the dirty downtown. Who cares if we sacrifice the farmland in Cole Harbour for suburban development? That’s not a concern for us, that’s not a concern for anyone! Even the now-famous-for-biking Netherlands was on the same trajectory, leading to a hellscape of flat beige boxes and parking lots. You know, the one that makes almost any mid-sized city in Canada feel the same and robs us of any real cultural identity?
Ba-da-ba-da-ba, I’m lovin’ it.
Anyways, the thing that makes this embarrassing, above and beyond the societal erosion that made us all pretend that a fancy thermos fad is the same as having a culture, is that we now know what comes at the end of this infection. In 2013, Halifax commissioned a study and found its suburbs are unsustainable. And we know—or at least we should, as it’s in the budget every year—that our transportation system is also unsustainable. Which means it’s only a matter of time before our beloved city collapses.
In cities that are allowed to take on debt, like Detroit, that collapse sometimes manifests as a bankruptcy. Because Halifax can’t easily take on debt, the worry is less about bankruptcy and more that our public buildings may non-metaphorically collapse. This prompted Halifax to enact the Corporate Asset Management Policy in April 2024. (That plan is a lot more than it seems because it includes managing natural assets, like wilderness.) At any rate, it’s only half the picture: Having a plan to fix things and having money to fix things are two related, but separate, problems.
The struggle between these two problems is best explained through a composite Cole Harbour councillor, an imaginary amalgamation of two real councillors that we’ll call—with apologies to everyone for this portmanteau—Trecky Kendy.
District 3’s contribution to the caricature Kendy is councillor Becky Kent. Kent has been in politics for a while, which means she has her pulse on the issues and is a pretty good political communicator. She is aware that the infection of unsustainability is now spreading to the point where it’s affecting personal budgets, not just municipal ones. This is playing out in many ways, like the rising cost of food and transportation. But the most fascinating is in the world of insurance. As our planet warms and our life support systems collapse, the weather is becoming more intense to match the vibes of the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is making insurance costs go through the roof—for insurance companies. Like you, insurance companies take out insurance just in case they have really expensive claims and can’t pay them out. As the cost to insure the insurers is driven up by global warming, the externalities fossil fuel companies have been profiting on start to re-enter the market. Fossil fuel externalities cost Canadians $8.5 billion in insurance last year. As it turns out, in free market capitalism all that trickles down is being legally compelled to cover the cost of large companies’ profits.
And that’s just home insurance. Car insurance is going up too, exacerbated by car theft, the rising cost of car repairs, and the frequency and severity of collisions. These costs, on top of all the other rising costs in Canadian life, mean people are struggling.
This is why, at a recent meeting of the Community Planning and Economic Development standing committee, after a presentation from the Downtown Halifax Business Commission’s CEO Paul MacKinnon about their Downtown Vision 2030 plan, Kent gave MacKinnon the gears.
we can all argue to our constituents the net benefit to [a] healthy downtown. But in the meantime, we’re growing in areas that have been fighting tooth and nail for decades for investment. I have areas in my district, and I know [the] chair does and there’s actually several of us around this table that are. It’s a struggle to justify a lot of the downtown investments to our constituents, to our taxpayers.
However, the reason Kent and other suburban councillors struggle to have money to invest in their districts is because of people like Kent during budget debates. Kent’s district, like most districts in the HRM, costs the city more money than it generates in revenues. Lots of space between houses means more infrastructure for the city to maintain. Lots of space between houses means fewer taxpayers to pay for the excess infrastructure. This means the city doesn’t have enough money to build what it needs for growing communities, like fire stations.
Even though suburban residents often feel like they pay very high taxes, those taxes aren’t enough to pay for the municipal services they receive. This is likely a large contributing factor in the recent HRM citizen survey, which found that people don’t think they’re getting good value for their taxes. Because they’re not. They’re paying a relatively high rate for a relatively low standard of service (especially Halifax Transit) because suburbs are unsustainable.
But this is tough for downtown residents to hear, because they pay the same rate of taxes but in higher amounts due to higher property values downtown. Unlike suburbs, it costs the city less to deliver municipal services due to downtown density. Why should downtown’s excess go out to Cole Harbour instead of being invested in their downtown community? And let’s not forget the rural residents who pays a similar rate of taxes to the other two but get far, far, far, far less in municipal services. All of the taxes get sucked out of rural areas, and municipal programs, from firefighters to rec programming, are supported by volunteers.
So there are different implications for tax revenue and civic expenses in different areas of the city, with downtown Halifax bearing a lot of responsibility for revenue. And getting back to that meeting about community planning and economic development, that means it’s not just acceptable but preferable for DHBC’s MacKinnon to talk about investments that can enhance downtown. Through that lens, MacKinnon’s requests were reasonable, like making downtown Halifax the space where the city has its “one of” attractions—things like an arena, stadium, major art galleries, plus loads of spaces for arts and entertainment. The DHBC Vision plan sees downtown Halifax as a community hub thanks to its unique attractions. Much like it is today, but better. For downtown Halifax to be a hub, people need to be able to get there, make some mildly irresponsible but oh-so-fun life choices, and then get home safely. So maybe we should also do more practical things like investing in better transit, cycling and pedestrian areas. This would also make the downtown core a more attractive place to live and allow it to better accommodate density. In other words, more municipal revenue for fewer and less municipal expenses.
If Kent wants lower taxes for her voters, she must support investments downtown to bolster suburban tax subsidies. But if Kent wants investments in her community, that means higher fees and taxes. It’s an impossible position—and that is where our composite councillor Kerdy is. But what if we lived in a world where Kerdy could have a low tax rate and community investments, too? Although this feels like an unrealistic pipedream, the stuff of imaginary councillors, it almost happened in the HRM.
The year was 2020, it was December in the early days of These Unprecedented Times, in the pre-season debates for Halifax’s 2021 budget. As the city was reeling from the COVID lockdowns, the recent existential crisis got our municipal government to ask an existential question: How can the city handle a crisis like this in the future if we are unsustainable? We can’t. Well, we probably can’t. What we know for sure is that when COVID came, the city’s future problems were laid bare due to the sudden chaos caused by the unwelcome arrival of a horseman named Pestilence.
For our city Pestilence’s warning was $85 million in budget cuts, which saw sweeping cuts to libraries and the fire department, and capital project delays. When things are unsustainable, fiscal setbacks make the climb out of the hole just that extra little bit harder. Making things harder still is that after COVID came to town, we were also visited by Fire and Flood. Famine’s hoofbeats are also getting closer.
Municipal leaders in 2020, to their credit, responded with remarkable urgency, coming up with a two-pronged approach to fix Halifax’s underlying unsustainability. The first was presented to councillors on December 1, 2020, when Halifax’s budget committee defined a set of strategic priorities. These priorities, with Key Performance Indicators, were passed on Jan 12, 2021. These are the same priorities that came back to council this year, in a report attached to a council agenda without administrative fanfare: no presentation to council, nothing to vote on, and little reason for councillors to bother reading the thing.
Related
Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update
Luckily, councillor Tony Mancini noticed the report and plucked it from obscurity, requesting staff give council a presentation about it. That’s scheduled for Tuesday, Jan 28. And it’s a good thing too, because the bottom line about Halifax’s strategic priorities is that staff is failing at about half of them. Even though things like this make it easy to conclude that the professionals in our municipal democracy aren’t competent, in actuality city staff keep failing because Halifax’s strategic plan is missing its other half. It’s a broken policy framework producing predictably broken outcomes.
The other half of council’s plan to fix the problems exposed by COVID was a “Fiscal Sustainability Strategy” (sometimes called the Tax and Fee Revenue Strategy), which was first debated on Dec 15, 2020, and then passed on Jan 20, 2021. At the time, the city’s top accountant (and general fiduciary badass), Jane Fraser, was laying out a new strategy. She explained to council that if we consider the city’s current (circa Dec 2020) fiscal situation and project out the city’s infrastructure needs 10 years into the future, we would need over $1 billion in capital expenditures and $288.2 million in routine maintenance for automotive infrastructure.
The city’s annual budget usually comes in at around $1 billion, so the idea was to incrementally raise this money, starting in 2020, in order to avoid having to double taxes and fees overnight 10 years later, in 2030. (More realistically, if historical decision trends continued, we would defer maintenance and let things fall into disrepair, complain and/or blame the province instead of using municipal powers to raise fees or taxes.) To try and prevent driving full speed off a fiscal cliff, the city would slowly raise fees and taxes, as well as do some other things like diversifying revenue streams and making sure the spending the city was doing was a good use of money. In that way, the city could use the increased funding for the good and beneficial aspects of municipal socialism, like public transit. In theory, with better investment comes better services, and for some reason, people don’t seem to mind paying high taxes when they demonstrably benefit from them.
But even though this plan for fiscal sustainability was good, and was approved by council with great fanfare in 2020, the plan was quietly disappeared by city staff.
Subsequent to that vote, a city spokesperson wrote to The Coast in an email, “the strategy was not progressed any further.” Instead of following council’s approved plan, each municipal business unit now takes an educated guess at what the “intent” of the plan was, and is “expected to review their fees before each budget” to make sure their spending is in line with what they’ve determined the “intent” of the abandoned plan to be. Some business units, like Transit, do better than others, like the Department of Public Works.
A general understanding of math and a quick perusal of the high cost of automotive infrastructure compared to the very low cost recovery for that infrastructure gives a pretty good understanding of why the DPW not really considering fiscal sustainability is pretty bad for our future. And this is where the other half of Cole Harbour’s fake councillor Kerdy, the real councillor Trish Purdy, comes in.
Purdy is the type of person political eggheads believe prove that our democracy is the greatest that ever was. She is not from a political background, she’s just a person who cares about her community, saw problems and wanted to fix them. To the eggheads, the fact that she, an everywoman, was able to win an election and have access to power proves that the power of our democracy truly lies with the people.
While that is very good on a theoretical level, some realities of politics quickly turn that positive into a massive disadvantage, especially in municipal politics. Municipal politics is a different beast than provincial or federal version of the game. Those versions are highly professionalized team sports; when a caring everywoman joins those teams they’re supported by policy staff, partisan and not, to get help understanding how the machinations of the jurisdiction and their powers work. Municipal politics, with its absolute power over the physical world and the critical services it provides, is the loadbearing foundation of our democracy. Yet it’s a version of politics played mostly by well meaning, unsupported amateurs out there on their own. Giving an everywoman amateur access to power is useless and sometimes inadvertently harmful if you don’t also give her the tools to wield it responsibly.
The real councillor Purdy is now in her second term on council, and doubtless learned on the job. We can’t make the same assumption about our amalgamated councillor Trecky Kendy, who is now taking shape as a plucky political outsider forced to trust information coming from city staff to guide their decisions, with a moral compass steering them to be more interested in their constituents’ day-to-day lives than lofty civic ambitions. Kendy sounds like a good hang, but Kendy can be manipulated by professional bureaucrats.
If the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy were still being run by accountants, they’d be able to give an overarching picture of the city’s sustainability and what needs to change. If that were still happening, then when councillor Kendy was making decisions about fiscal sustainability, they’d have the proper tools to make good decisions about how to use their power. Instead, the cohesive, overarching fiscal sustainability plan has been delegated to each individual business unit in the City Hall bureaucracy, and their individual interpretations of what the “intent” of the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy was.
This means that when it comes to the realm of automotive infrastructure, Kendy needs to rely on fiscal advice from a department whose budget looks like a low-effort parody of that @dril tweet from 2013:
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Roads $137,000,000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my city is dying
The lack of overarching guidance to keep things on track, while relying on business units who may or may not have applicable expertise, is an obviously flawed approach to governance. The city last tried this approach with a risk management strategy implementation. And when that strategy implementation was investigated by the Auditor General’s Office, they found that it was (predictably) a disaster. Most business units had no risk management plans, and the ones that did had plans that were surface level and the AG had “concerns about accuracy.”
Related
Halifax’s bureaucracy fails two emergency readiness audits
Surface level with concerns about accuracy is how to best describe the fiscal sustainability analyses coming out of the Department of Public Works. It’s not that they’re deliberately wrong; it’s just that they don’t give enough information if that’s where all the heavy lifting of the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy is supposed to happen.
Our road infrastructure requires a massive amount of money to keep it functional. If you include the department itself and the annual paving costs, roads cost the city about $137 million last year. Every one-off automotive interchange project, like the Windsor Street Exchange, is easily $100 million. Roads are the only infrastructure so expensive they require massive capital spending every year in routine maintenance, which is expected to cost over $250 million over the next five years. So the city spends upwards of $180 million a year on roads, and brings in about $7 million in parking fees to cover all those costs. Behold the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy at work in the Department of Public Works.
And making just that much in parking fees required an investment of political capital. In 2023, parking rates got nudged up from $6.5 million to that ~$7 million, by charging a couple bucks an hour for parking on Saturdays in downtown Halifax. This raised $656K in annual revenues. Council considered doing more, but the changes were wildly unpopular with a few small business owners who surveyed themselves to find out they all didn’t like the proposed increase, and then used that survey to tell council they did a survey that found that raising parking fees was unpopular with the survey respondents, who were themselves.
If we want our democracy to be available to everyone, even those without a policy background, where can our amateur politicians learn about the consequences of unsustainability if these consequences aren’t laid out in staff reports? If staff later decide to delegate that responsibility to folks like the engineers who build roads, are we supposed to just hope amateurs will notice that engineers who design unsustainable infrastructure are probably not also experts in fiscal sustainability? Especially if Kendy still believes the accountants were doing this work because that’s what they voted to approve. No one seems to have told council the plan changed, and sustainability assessments are absent from business unit reports. In this context, how can Kendy be reasonably expected to notice the plan to fix the city’s unsustainability that they voted for is missing?
In the 2023 budget debates about the new parking fees, the closest staff get to telling council they’ve killed the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy and replaced it with nothing is when they write: “The cost to provide municipal services continues to increase. Implementing Saturday paid parking is one option that can be used to attempt to address rising costs of maintenance.”
There is no mention of how much these fees need to go up to cover the $1.4 billion shortfall in infrastructure and road maintenance predicted for 2030, there’s no mention of the role fees play in sustainability, there’s no mention of the fiscal strategy. Councillors are supposed to intuit, one supposes, that a $656K increase in revenues, representing a meagre 0.004% of the total cost of automotive infrastructure maintenance in 2023, *is* Halifax’s Fiscal Sustainability Strategy inaction.
It’s weird that DPW is so consistent in not mentioning the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy, considering they’re responsible for implementing the bulk of the problem, the unsustainable automotive infrastructure. Still, the plan’s absence is notable in all of their reports. At this week’s Transportation Standing Committee meeting councillors debated parking fees for larger vehicles. In that report, all staff write about money is this:
Potential Revenue increase – Alternatively, assuming the vehicle mix and permit demand both stay the same, a premium on larger vehicles would create a corresponding increase in revenue.
But cities are not businesses; they don’t raise money for no reason. In Halifax specifically, staff have been instructed to raise taxes and fees to ease the financial burden of unsustainability looming on our horizon. Even though councillors voted to do this via the overarching strategy, staff decided that business units are responsible for implementing the sustainability strategy. Is the DPW’s business unit-level implementation of the “intent” of the council-directed Fiscal Sustainability Strategy working as council intended if that one line is all of the sustainability information in a parking fee report?
The tragedy of it all is that even though the unsustainability will be our demise if left unchecked, what would really make succumbing to it embarrassing is just how avoidable it all is. But our councillors aren’t being given the choice to do the right thing. The last batch of councillors tried to set themselves up for success by passing the overarching Fiscal Sustainability Strategy, it would have put councillors in a position where they would have needed to vote down fiscal sustainability. But with staff’s decision to change how the plan was implemented, in places like DPW reports, councillors are instead put in a position where they are asked to raise fees with no information about why or how much fees need to be raised to be sustainable. Councillors are asked to vote on an increase in fees, with nothing telling them they’re the ones who asked for these increases in the name of sustainability to keep taxes and fees from doubling in 2030. Councillors are routinely being presented with the option to raise a fee; and while the political downside is obvious and costly, the fiscal cost and long-term damage of not raising the fee is hidden, obfuscated or omitted.
Kendy doesn’t have enough information to overcome their political instincts, so of course Kendy is going to vote against raising the fee. Every time.
The bad news is that we still live in a democracy, so even if presented with good information, our councillors could still choose to drive our city into the ground. But that is a choice they can only make after giving informed consent. Our city staff need to be giving our councillors a chance to save us, especially because our councillors instructed staff to do exactly that in Jan 2021. Until that changes, the city staff’s decision to downgrade the Fiscal Sustainability Strategy will lead to the slow decline of the city of Halifax. As Halifax falls into disrepair throughout the next 5 to 10 years, city staff can rest easy knowing that their campaign against good fiscal management was a resounding success.
Related Stories
Halifax’s bureaucracy fails two emergency readiness audits
Planning to fail, an HRM strategic plan update
Halifax city staff’s status quo sedition
Will council end driving subsidies and let Halifax Transit succeed?
How cutting property taxes can end up costing you
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
Matt. You did a lot of research and produced a good report. HRM mayor and councillors take note.
Thank you so much for this detailed explanation of sustainability for our city. This is real journalism and I really appreciate it.
One comment lol. This was longer than nine words. So much for journalism. Back to pretty pictures. This should be mandatory reading. Great writing Matt. I’d but ya a beer. Celtic Corner?
So many councilors advocate for bike lanes but forget that they need more than just bikes to be able to get into our hilly city center. Our busses are far to big for our road ways and stink, we should look for alternative transport method. We lack just ground routes policing to stop just basic infractions like load Harley like mufflers on these little cars or oversize tires on makeshift monster trucks, or how about not signaling when intending to turn?? Basic rules but no cop does anything because they have the same bad habits. This news letter has sparked my interest in getting involved and hopefully stopping some out to lunch councilors from making compounded mistakes! So much to do and so little time. Thankyou!!!!
You are a walking talking breathing treasure trove! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! You make the inconceivable, readable. I can be incensed knowing you have our backs!
Agreed. This is real journalism. The attention to citation is fantastic. Every citizen needs to engage and be informed in some way about the very tangible change that could happen in our city – if only people were more informed and gave a s**t. The price of road infrastructure is horrid. Even the Premier is announcing more road projects. The idea of a municipality is density. That’s WHY it’s a city. Suburbs are really killing the budget. But as Ronny Chieng says in his love to hate it comedy sketch, when you only read a hash tag like “lower taxes” and don’t have the vocabulary to express your affordability pain, all off the anger towards taxes comes out as “Lets Go Brenda!”
Great piece. Have it bookmarked.