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by Gabrielle Drapeau

Staff, students, and parents have been left in tense limbo since they learned city council may cease funding school librarians as soon as April 1.

The word spread like wildfire amongst families that on March 18 council had recently voted (In Camera) to remove library support specialists (LSSs), i.e. school librarians, from the Supplementary Education Funding. Municipal Supplementary Education Funding is currently the only funding for school librarians. Changing the scope of the fund would move money that was paying librarians’ salaries and redistribute it.

City council has not made any indication that they are changing the amount they’re putting in the overall supplementary fund this year (they’re only allowed to lower it 10% per fiscal year). By removing LSSs from the scope of the funding, money would be freed up to put towards arts programming like music, dance, drama, and visual arts classes.

HRM has funded LSSs since amalgamation in the ‘90s through supplementary funding collected from municipal property taxes. This is in addition to the mandatory funding that every municipality in the province has to contribute to local education. While originally meant to support arts programming in public schools, the supplementary funding expanded soon after its creation to include LSSs, school social workers, additional teachers, and other staff.

Council pulling funding would threaten the jobs of 98 librarians across 137 schools in the HRM.

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by Katy Jean

Across the globe, all the time, at any minute, there are battles happening on as many roads as there are maps labelling them.

Drivers are fighting drivers. Drivers are fighting cyclists. Drivers are fighting pedestrians just making their way with two feet and a heartbeat.

Every city has their main arteries full of loud horns and pollution billowing out of the top of the street’s food chain, car drivers.

In the West End of Halifax, the battle has escalated.

At the intersection of Harvard and Allan Streets, there is war.

At first glance, the intersection is quiet. Residential. Old dogs strut down the sidewalk, flashing the whites of their eyes, checking in with their owners every few cracks in the concrete. Babies have the time of their lives floating along in their comfortable strollers, forming early memories of home.

Neither of them notices the casualties, the cannon fodder in the street.

At the end of February, the intersection was a site of carnage.

A series of pylons acting as the front line against drivers’ war on safety had lost. Their remains were fractured and fragmented down Allan nearly reaching Oxford Street.

The guerrilla pylon army had been deployed upon the tactical withdrawal of flexible posts, once posted in the middle of the Allan Street barricade/modal filter installed in November 2025.

The barricade’s intention was to create a bikeway and also to disrupt drivers cutting through Harvard and its side streets to avoid the car-clogged Quinpool, Chebucto, and Windsor.

Effectively, it cut Harvard in half. If you are driving from Quinpool, you must turn right onto Allan, and drivers from Chebucto must turn right onto Oak and vice versa.

Pedestrian and cyclist routes are unaffected. Or rather, protected.

In the afternoons in the last bit of February and a bit of March, the number of walking through the intersection was nearly equal to the number of people driving. About 40 every 15 minutes.

Most drivers are the vehicle’s single occupant.

The barricade’s flexible posts allowed emergency vehicles to drive directly through the intersection with minimal damage. Which was a direct answer to a Supreme Court case filed by local residents attempting to prevent the barricade from being built.

And court is where the Pylon War began.

In May 2018, the plan for the bikeways and diverter barricade was approved by the Halifax and West Community Council. As was the end of Allan Street becoming an extension of, and thus renamed, Oak Street.

In August 2018, 20 residents from Harvard, Allan, and neighbouring Lawrence Street, who are publicly named in court documents, took the city to court to stop it all.

The residents raised concerns that the barricade would slow emergency vehicle response times, lengthen their own travel times, and add congestion to their roads.

While the court case was happening, the city went on with plans for other surrounding traffic changes, such as redirection at Allan and Oxford Streets, where you must turn and not cut across to Oak, and are not allowed to race adjacent to the wild west that is Quinpool Road.

The residents also stated that they were not adequately alerted of these changes. That the city didn’t directly address or consult them.

The city had sent out postcards to residents and had given out surveys on the issues, as well as marketing online and in newspapers.

In the survey, 33% of respondents were not concerned about the diverter, 17% were somewhat concerned, 25% were very concerned and 25% left it blank.

The court did find in May 2023 that the city had done their due diligence and the case was decided in the favour of the city.

All was quiet on the intersection front. Except for the enthused cyclists and pedestrians celebrating the win.

Until the summer of 2025.

Laser-printed posters began popping up on lamp posts on the streets surrounding the intersection. Some still survive in various shapes to this day. In large font, they were titled TENANTS and underneath, PLEASE READ.

The poster explained that only property owners were invited to give their opinion on the diverter but not people renting the homes. It urged tenants of the area to call councillor Shawn Cleary or mayor Andy Fillmore to have their opinions heard.

Not long after, secondary posters printed in ink appeared underneath the anti-bikeway propaganda. They did not fare as well against the weather. But they protested the anti-barricade opinions and took their stance as pro-bikeway and pro-pedestrian.

The pro-bikeway posters were quickly found torn down.

And by the time the concrete started to be poured in November, the posters were all but gone, with an illegible few still stapled around the blocks.

The Facebook group Our Chebucto Neighbourhood began to heat up.

People were mad. People didn’t care. People were mad that people didn’t care, and people didn’t care that people were mad.

One photo of the diverter being started has 72 comments. Some comments have higher word counts than this page. One reads: “Amazing news. Finally reasonable fact based progress in this town.” which has the reply “sorry no this is pushing ideology. This will not help the traffic situation in the city or even this neighbourhood.”

The reply person was asked to elaborate on that comment. They did not.

Another comment says “What has happened to our city? Wow! And the city want more taxes? This is Ridiculous!!!!!! I feel like im living in the twilight zone lately.”

Utter disbelief at the concept of change. Change is something Haligonians tend to shy away from.

After the completion of the hot topic diverter, the snow fell. And a hole, or lack thereof, was found in the city plan.

Snow plows.

The middle flexible diverters and the length of the concrete ones did not allow for a snow plow.

Instead of creating a snow bank literally dividing the street, or you know, having someone physically shovel the snow, the flexible posts were removed for snow-clearing purposes around January 2026.

Immediately, drivers started to ignore the 32, yes, thirty-two, one more than 31, road signs surrounding the diverter, and reclaimed Harvard as a drive-through street.

And that is when the pylons were deployed.

First it was a single pylon.

Just enough to deter a driver in such a way that an elephant fears a mouse.

Then it was three pylons.

Then the pylons were gone.

Then they were back.

Most thought the city was putting down the pylons.

Most thought they would just move the pylons.

But again and again the pylons would appear and disappear.

Up in the morning, gone by night.

Up at breakfast, biffed into the winter sun by supper.

The re-spawning pylons seemed like far too arduous of a task for the city to do. Not once has “pylon checker” been discussed in the Halifax budget. A seemingly infinite job with the amount of pylons strewn about the city.

But that’s how the pylons came to be.

It wasn’t the city. It is a cyclist. A local cyclist simply decided to move a few local pylons where the barriers once were.

On their daily commute they use the bikeway. If the pylons are moved, they move them back. If they are where they left them, they carry on.

Other locals have joined in straightening out the pylons.

Other locals have run them down with their cars.

Which is when the cyclist found bigger pylons at a construction site nearby.

They somehow, without being detected, even on the ring cam of a house, hauled two large cylindrical pylons from near Oxford Street to the intersection of Harvard and Allan.

Now the pylons could not be run down. The driver would have to stop their car, physically get out of their seat, move the pylons to the side, get back in and illegally drive through and ignore the, again 32, road signs saying they mustn’t go that way.

Or a resident within view of the intersection could move them.

Can move them. Does move them. Along with the drivers. Cyclists and pedestrians set them up. Residents and drivers knock them down.

Every. Single. Day.

The war seemed to be over on March 4 when the city pyloned off Quinpoolto deal with snow banks. And the borrowed pylons at the barricade disappeared.

Likely, the city noticed they had an unknown area cordoned off. With no idea they were manipulating a battlefield in a war waged both for and against them.

But somehow, some way, the next morning, the pylons were back.

And on March 8 the war escalated.

An extra pylon appeared next to the two larger pylons.

Along with a metal signpost, with four sharp pieces jutting from the top and a long handle.

Invisible at night, if a car did drive through, it would be wrecked.

Worse, if an ambulance tried to drive through, it could be damaged or wrecked.

This would prove the 20 residents who went to court, and all who agreed with them, correct in the worst possible way.

The metal was moved to the side and then onto a planter of the diverter within a day.

Not disposed of, still available. Hopefully never put back.

It’s unknown when or if the flexible diverters will be re-installed. But they will be in view of the remaining Allan Street, the part which was not thus named Oak Street.

The pylons will be retired when the flexible posts are re-instatlled.

And drivers will again be diverted.

The Other Stuff

There is normally a podcast, and this week, there technically is one too, but it’s not for you. It’s for a computer.

Doing the crossword at home? Here’s the pdf for your printer!

Grand Parade Issue 42

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It's Questionable Solution

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by Katy Jean

The Halifax Forum entered its 98th year over the winter.

But the argument about its costs and purpose entered their 108th year at the same time and are poised to continue even longer.

The Forum started as a replacement of the Provincial Exhibition Building destroyed in the Halifax Explosion in 1917. And ever since, it has been cursed by price tags, questions of service, and threats of closure.

After the destruction of the Provincial Exhibition Building, a small covered ice rink was built while city council and the province argued over what to do with the property.

Everyone agreed the space should remain public. But it shouldn’t be too expensive.

But the project became more and more expensive the longer it took a few good men to agree on the budget.

Eventually, in 1926, alderman Louis Gastonguay suggested the budget should be $150,000 for the new grounds and buildings that would include ice rinks, a horse racing track and stables, an industrial building, and general exhibition facilities.

When the building was finally done in 1927, a decade after the explosion, it came in over budget at $373,804.

The brand spankin’ new Forum put out a call to boys 8-14 to come and play hockey on the first artificial ice surface east of Montreal on December 27, 1927.

A public skate that over 1,000 attended was held with a live band (a regular feature at public skates back then).

The first official hockey game was played, 40 minutes late, between the Crescents and the Canadian National Recreation Club. It was remarked that the game went very fast due to the perfection of the artificial ice.

Dartmouth’s natural rink failed to freeze that year.

The Forum officially opened its doors in August 1928 with exhibitions, horse racing, and vaudeville acts.

It was the place to be. Until the war.

The Department of National Defence wanted the Forum and Exhibition Grounds land. It needed training and housing space for soldiers. The city and the entire country wanted to help “the boys” in any way possible, unless the feds were only offering $150,000.

Halifax wanted $800,000 for the Exhibition Grounds and all of its buildings.

The federal government counter offered $250,000. The city held a vote on what to do with the offer. Against the provincial government’s wishes to give up the property, the offer was rejected.

A special meeting was held to vote, again, on the fate of the Forum.

The vote in 1940, like the one last week in 2026, came to a deadlock with 8 votes for and 8 votes against.

The forum was sold, as decided by the mayor William E. Donovan’s tie-breaking vote.

The military tore down many of the buildings to create housing and training facilities. Though the brick Forum building remained for dances and recreation, for morale and soldiers’ socialization.

After the war the federal government had no use for the property or buildings. So the city bought it back, tore down most of what the military had built, and restarted the skates and exhibitions.

The Forum was doing well, it added a new rink, attracted popular artists, was home to local hockey teams, boxing matches, and circuses, to name a few highlights. But the activity faded.

The grandstand was torn down, the horse track and stables left. In 1978, a huge parcel of land was sold off to Canada Post to make a hub sorting facility for Atlantic Canada.

And then in the heart of downtown Halifax, a few blocks of affordable housing were bulldozed and up went the Forum Killer - The Halifax Metro Centre.

The Forum, which had attracted Johnny Cash, KISS, The Bee Gees, Ray Charles, and countless others, couldn’t offer the largest capacity anymore.

The Forum quickly came to be known as “the Old Forum.” And ads for developers to take bids for hotels, shops, or other facilities popped up across Canada.

By the 1980s the Forum was considered dead.

With smaller bands and acts using it as a local venue, the Forum has survived.

But slowly, it has torn itself down.

Brick by brick the Forum has tried to end the argument over what to do with itself.

Currently, the cost to fix up and modernize the building sits at $126 million—up from $38 million 12 years ago. The roof of the building seems to be trying to carry the weight of the cost added with each day of inaction.

Will the Forum continue its legacy of being an argument? Mayor Andy Fillmore has already tried to defer the conversation. Another brick loosens in the process.

The curse may be broken in April when City Hall brings the Forum fate back for debate for the 109th year.

Long term budget woes linger

by Matt Stickland

After months of debate, which kicked off late in 2025, at last Tuesday’s Budget Committee meeting Halifax’s councillors put the finishing touches on Halifax’s city budget. Procedurally speaking the budget still needs to be ratified at the end of March, but in reality, the budget is set except for the crying.

The crying will come later, when the city is forced to repay all its current debt, with interest, starting next year. Halifax has been keeping taxes low and deferring maintenance for so long that the city has a backlog of about $4 billion in needed capital projects. But the city can only borrow about $1.8 billion before their credit limit is maxxed out. As a result, council tweaked the long-term capital budget to find a billion dollars worth of desperately needed infrastructure to cut.

And even with those cuts to the capital budget, Halifax’s debt repayments are projected to require an almost 50% tax increase by 2031 to pay back all the borrowing.

One of the city’s major drivers of debt is the municipality’s road maintenance requirements. Just shy of 45% of the city’s road maintenance budget has to be funded by debt going out to 2030. The city just does not have the revenue to take care of the regular, predictable costs of road maintenance in the operating budget or reserves, where regular, predictable maintenance would normally be paid from.

Since road maintenance is a predictable expense, if Halifax were truly concerned about fiscal sustainability, it would charge drivers fees to fund repairs directly or through a reserve contribution to avoid putting regular, predictable maintenance expenses on the city’s credit card.

Fewer of the city’s roads qualify for debt spending as the city can only borrow money for roads that are older than 10 years, and as the weather gets more volatile and vehicles become heavier, fewer of Halifax’s roads qualify for debt-funded maintenance spending. Should this continue in the future, Halifax can expect its road maintenance costs to start seriously limiting the city’s operational budget.

Council passes solid annual budget

by Matt Stickland

The city budget this year was mostly a good news story, and despite pushes from the mayor for austerity measures council mostly chose to invest or keep investing in the city.

Halifax’s special climate tax survived a potential cut. This funding is used to make muncipal buildings more resilient to climate change as well as updating buildings to be more energy efficient. Many of these retrofits include adding renewable energy sources, like rooftop solar. Making buildings more resilient and efficient saves the city a lot of money in the long term.

The African Nova Scotian Road to Economic Prosperity almost wasn’t funded, but instead council voted to reduce their year over year funding from $1 million to $750k.

Council also voted to put tax money where their mouth is and invested almost $1 million dollars to increase road safety. This money will be used to expedite ‘tactical’ road safety measures as well as improving crosswalks with rapid flashing yellow lights.

Some of the bigger ticket investments from council were for 10 busses and 10 new firefighters. The 10 new firefighters were added to the budget by Lower Sackville councillor Billy Gillis because his district, 15, when fully staffed only has 12 firefighters available and the city’s baseline standard response requires 14 firefighters.

The 10 new busses were added by District 10 councillor Kathryn Morse, who wants to see more investment in Halifax Transit to help with overloads, like on Route 28 to the new Bayers Lake Community Outpatient Centre which often struggles for capacity. However, these busses are expected to add three new routes to Transit’s service.

Council flatly rejected cutting the living wage requirement for Halifax’s tenders. Councillors were concerned that cutting janitors’ wages to give landowners a tax break would not help affordability. Councillors also rejected cuts to Parks and Rec and food security.

Besides being laser focused on lowering taxes to the detriment of the city’s fiscal health in future years, the only foolhardy thing council did was try to swindle the Federation of Canadian Municipalities as covered in the last issue of the paper. The city’s application has not been rejected, and sources with knowledge of the funding’s status have indicated to Grand Parade that the city will get the grant. As of right now, Halifax is expected to successfully swindle the FCM, which in turn is expected to save taxpayers $1 million in tree replacement funding.

The Other Stuff

Book club’s next book will be The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, by C. Thi Nguyen. Meeting in May (date TBD). We will be meeting in District 7, location also TBD!

There’s a new episode of the podcast this week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and also maybe on the radio down on the Eastern Shore? Stay tuned for that potentially exciting update. But here’s the show from the RSS feed in the meantime.

Doing the crossword at home? Here’s a printable version of the paper!

Grand Parade Issue 41

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How did you do on last week’s puzzle? Here is the answer key!

The Opposite Effect Solution

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by Matt Stickland

Halifax’s city council all got elected on promises to improve transit, and year over year transit keeps losing time to congestion and busses to age. As the city grows, transit demand increases and more busses are needed to meet the needs of the growing population.

On a note of optimism, councillors decided during this year’s budget debates to invest in some new busses for Halifax Transit.

These new busses will cost about $10 million. Just before council was going to start debating this spending, chief financial officer Jerry Blackwood interrupted proceedings to tell council these busses could not be bought with debt. The city has too much debt already.

“We have been saying debt is coming for four years,” Blackwood told the Budget Committee. “The day has come, the debt is here.”

Council’s credit cards are maxxed out and can’t be charged for 10 new busses.

The path to Halifax’s debt crisis is paved with fiscal unsustainability, the same unsustainability that forced Halifax into amalgamation. Halifax’s suburban and rural communities cost more money for the city to service than they make in taxes. This leads to annual operational and capital shortfalls in the city’s suburban and rural communities.

But the city locked into the debt crisis sometime around the start of the mayorship of Mike Savage in 2012.

During Savage’s 12 years as Mayor and in the last two years under the second former-Liberal-member-of-parliament-turned-mayor Andy Fillmore, council has been laser-focused on lowering taxes in the name of affordability.

And that laser focus on lower taxes has led to councils for the past 14 years making shortsighted decisions, including but not limited to: using windfall money to cover regular operational expenses, using debt spending instead of generating new revenue (e.g. using debt for local improvements instead of local area rates or local improvement charges), spending reserves on operating expenses, cutting social programs, getting rid of local area rates to increase dependency on the general tax rate, deferring desperately needed maintenance, and just not building needed new infrastructure.

This problem has been allowed to grow to such a catastrophic level because the severity has been papered over in two key ways.

The first is that even though Halifax can’t take on debt for operational expenses, it can borrow money to pay for capital projects. Which means council can get stuff built and fixed now for cheap, but pay for it later, with interest.

To be fair to past councils, paying for capital projects with debt when interest rates are low is a good idea. If the city can pay back what it owes.

Which leads to the second major issue: the city of Halifax has to balance its operating budget every year. It is not allowed to go into deficit on its day-to-day expenses, like other orders of government. And even though suburban and rural districts run at a loss, downtown Halifax, Dartmouth, and Bedford all run at a pretty substantial budget surplus. An inability to run a deficit on day-to-day expenses combined with an overreliance on property taxes means low-density dwellings in suburban districts rely on downtown’s surpluses — downtown’s dollars are discreetly distributed to the dilapidated suburbs to disguise their decimation.

In other words, if all the city’s districts were sustainable, we could use our surpluses to pay off debt accumulated when interest was cheap. But since low-density districts are not sustainable and since Halifax needs to balance the budget every year, the surpluses generated by good land use have been used to cover the shortfalls in districts with bad land use instead of paying off debt.

There are also budget pressures left over from COVID, the growth of the city necessitating more spending on both new construction and maintenance, on top of over a decade of low taxes. All this means council now finds itself in a situation where its decision in the past to do debt spending and keep taxes low will require a 50%+ tax increase by 2031 just to pay back debt. Add the annual inflationary pressures to that debt and all of a sudden the money required to pay for population/infrastructure growth and debt, and taxpayers are looking at a 50-100% tax increase by 2031 to pay back, with interest, all the of the quote unquote savings of the past 14 years of low taxes.

Or, more simply, the cost of low taxes for the past 14 years is a 50-100% tax increase by 2031.

But in good news, the Budget Committee did find $10m in non-debt money to buy 10 much-needed new busses this year.

After voting to buy the busses councillor Nancy Hartling put forward a motion asking council to consider putting some of the new bus spending on debt. Hartling argued that even though the city’s credit cards are maxxed and even though this would make the busses more expensive, using debt would lower the tax rate this year.

Hartling’s motion failed.

Council tries to swindle charity, risks $1 million grant

by Matt Stickland

During last week’s Budget Committee councillor Sam Austin accused council of “swindling” $1 million from a Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) tree planting grant.

In this year’s budget, the city had $1 million for tree replacement and $1 million for new trees. The $1 million for new trees comes from the FCM grant, which is to be used for “a new tree planting project, with municipal government involvement and accountability.”

But Halifax is in a budget crisis, so council wanted to know if they could spend this $1 million grant for new trees on the city’s planned $1 million for the annual tree replacement program.

Lucas Pitts, the executive director of Public Works, assured council the city’s lawyers read the agreement and using the grant to replace trees instead of planting new trees as promised isn’t breaking the terms of that agreement. This is likely correct as the FCM’s guidelines for eligible costs for the grant program outline eligible tree-related costs and relies on the “municipal government involvement and accountability” bit of the application to ensure the money is spent on new canopy instead of tree replacement. And the only time the grant checks that the money will be spent on new trees is during the application process.

Deputy mayor Patty Cuttell took issue with Austin’s use of the word swindle, saying council wasn’t swindling this grant program by deceiving FCM about what it would be used for once obtained.

But doing a swindle is only possible if council obtains the money in the first place. In an email response to Grand Parade asking if Halifax had obtained this grant money, an FCM spokesperson could “confirm that an application for tree planting funding was submitted.”

When council voted last week to spend grant money on the existing tree replacement program, the city’s pending application became ineligible for the $1 million grant.

Council sends mixed signals on Transit

by Matt Stickland

Last week’s Budget Committee had a big win and a big loss for Halifax’s beleaguered public transit and its riders.

Halifax was supposed to implement a new core service plan for Halifax Transit in time for budget this year. The plan was for a massive investment in busses, for new routes, and increased reliability and it was initially all in this year’s budget.

However, due to over a decade of low taxes, the city suffers from reduced staff capacity. As a result when city staff were tasked with re-examining the Morris Street bikeway they had to stop working on implementing the new transit core service plan.

But staff were able to do enough work on the new plan to have councillor Janet Steele consider it as a last-minute addition to the city’s budget during last week’s Budget Adjustment List (BAL) debates.

The city’s top accountant Jerry Blackwood told council there wasn’t enough debt to borrow money for the busses so if council wanted to buy them they’d go right onto the tax rate.

Councillor Sam Austin pointed out that even though there would be a small (~1% or $30) hike to the tax rate next year, the city would save $4-7 million in interest payments.

The busses were added to the budget on Wednesday and stayed in the budget in spite of an effort from councillor Nancy Hartling to pay for some of the busses with debt to get rid of the spike in this year’s tax rate in favour of a bigger one sometime later.

Later in the meeting, councillor David Hendsbee argued that since council invested in more busses and since tap pay was coming this summer, fares should go up to match the increase in service. Councillor Sam Austin argued that raising fares for transit regularly was probably needed, but small amounts, $0.05-$0.10 at a time, and he hopes tap pay makes that possible.

There is a concern that raising fares increases congestion as people opt for a car instead of paying more for the notoriously reliable for being unreliable Halifax Transit. But councillor Trish Purdy pointed out that the war in Iran is likely to drive up the cost of fuel so much that transit becomes the only affordable option, even with the increased fares.

Councillor Janet Steele told her peers she supported this increase because “it’s just-, it’s 25 cents.” For people dependent on transit, this is roughly equivalent to an additional 3-4% or $90-120 tax increase, which will start this summer and can be paid by tapping your credit card.

The other stuff

Book club’s next book will be The Score: How to stop playing someone else’s game, by C. Thi Nguyen. Meeting in May (date TBD). Where should we meet? Email a suggestion!

There’s a new episode of the podcast this week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and also maybe on the radio down on the Eastern Shore? Stay tuned for that potentially exciting update. But here’s the show from the rss feed in the meantime.

Doing the crossword at home? Here’s a printable version of the paper!

Grand Parade Issue 40

1.63MB ∙ PDF file

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How did you do on last week’s puzzle? Here is the answer key!

A Change At The Top Solution

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by Katy Jean

For a century, people have forged resistance against certain fundamental truths:

Halifax traffic is a nightmare. The only thing more nightmarish is the drivers creating the traffic. And the robots are taking over.

Roughly half a million cars are registered in Halifax today.

In 1930, less than 40,000 were registered in the entire province of Nova Scotia. There are also roughly 40,000 drivers today pretending they don’t see you when you’re attempting to cross Barrington Street.

Halifax’s first attempt to control traffic and drivers was the ingenious ‘stop street.’

Stop signs at the end of roads was the novel idea that prevented the earliest drivers from whipping around corners and into intersections without any discretion.

Mind, the first blinker wasn’t until Buick made it an option in 1939. And then a decade more for manufacturers to catch on; longer still until regulation.

The other form of traffic control was people, cops.

In heavier traffic areas, like the pre-bridge-era ferry that used to carry cars, traffic police were used for traffic control.

Seven men a day were stationed around the city, including Spring Garden Road at South Park Street.

And that is exactly where the first “traffic robot” stationed itself.

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by Matt Stickland

Cuts for thee, but not for me, argued Andy (hypocritically) during last week’s budget committee.

Halifax is debating severe cuts this budget season as mayor Andy Fillmore keeps pushing austerity to grapple with past city councils keeping taxes low.

For those just tuning into budget season, the city’s operational budget this year is $1.2 billion. Thanks to keeping taxes low by deferring maintenance and by deferring the construction of critical infrastructure, the city is now $3 billion behind in paying for the HRM’s infrastructure needs. Unfortunately, due to council’s heavy debt and reserve spending in past years to keep taxes low, the city no longer has strategic reserves or debt to pay for our much-needed infrastructure. And since council seems to want to continue keeping taxes low instead of raising fees to make the city sustainable, the city can only afford $1.8 billion of the $3bn needed for the city’s critical infrastructure. A desire to keep taxes low and not to invest in the needed infrastructure for the city seems to be what is driving mayor Andy Fillmore and why Fillmore has been leading the charge to find cuts, repeatedly saying that everybody needs to “do more with less.”

Everyone except him.

At the committee, the mayor’s chief of staff Joanne Macrae, age 45, explained that as the city has grown and the world has changed, the mayor’s office needed to reorganize and modernize. This modernization and it’s $192,800 price tag is mainly for a comms person to make social media posts and answer emails. This drew criticism from councillors like District 2 councillor David Hendsbee who said that this comms person “may get you another code of conduct issue from time to time if you disagree with the consensus of council and stuff like that after the fact.” Hendsbee was referencing Fillmore’s Instragram reel on Jan. 30, 2025, where Fillmore publicly disagreed with council, which appeared to contravene Clause 16(1) of the Municipal Code of Conduct and earned Fillmore a formal investigation into his conducts as mayor.

This was the first of several code of conduct complaints lodged against Fillmore, back when the public was still allowed to lodge code of conduct complaints.

Councillors expressed concern that the mayor’s office staff positions were political and could cause issues for the city. As Hendsbee noted, Fillmore is already making posts that explicitly go against council’s decisions; like the Jan. 30, 2025 reel, or the social media campaign urging council to kill Halifax Forum repairs after already awarding Pomerleau construction company a contract to start fixing the Forum.

“We need to rein in spending and reduce the tax increase” and “I’m working with my council colleagues to bring that number down,” (emphasis in original) are phrases from Fillmore’s Instagram that work against the mayor when he’s trying to hire more staff to his office, which will increase taxes and bring that number up.

Councillors like Nancy Hartling were also concerned that since this would be public money going towards political staff, these mayoral staffers would become publically paid campaign staff at election time. And Macrea, the mayor’s current chief of staff, first started working for Fillmore in 2015 when she helped him beat Jhoanna Miners in a contested nomination to see who would be the candidate for the Liberals in Halifax’s federal riding back in 2015. And again in 2019. And again in 2021. And again for his mayoral run in 2024.

Macrea told the committee that the increase to the mayor’s office was fine because it was so small, saying that “the mayor’s office budget represents 0.1% of the overall municipal operating budget.” District 12 councillor Janet Steele pointed out that council debated the city’s bike lane spending for “days, hours, evenings, meetings, meetings, meetings.” The city’s bike lane spend this year, ($900,000) is to the capital budget as the mayor’s budget ($1.1 million) is to the city’s operational budget, a similarly insignificant portion of the overall budget.

The mayor also undercut his arguments later in the meeting. When council was debating cutting $8,000 from Engage Nova Scotia’s funding in this year’s budget, some councillors criticizied it as being a bit too nickel and dime-y, even for this time of self-imposed austerity. But Fillmore argued that big players like Engage Nova Scotia and Discover Halifax were big players and understood that in these hard times people in positions of leadership need to be leaders. They need to demonstrate, as leaders, that the belt tightening applies to everyone, even if it’s only saving three cents a year on the average tax bill. And Fillmore argued that “this isn’t about finding the three cents on the tax bill. It’s about applying the rule fairly” to everyone.

Everyone, that is, except him.

Then, on Friday, after defending his new office hire, Fillmore proposed sweeping cuts of up to 7% of the city’s employees, excluding front-line workers.

$13,000 on speech is new spending

by Matt Stickland

On Thurdsay Feb. 19, 2026, the HRM’s Budget Committee met to talk about the Mayor’s budget. During that debate, the Mayor’s chief of staff, Joanne Macrea, told councillors about the $13,000 Fillmore’s office spent on the annual state of the municipality speech that the mayor gives at a luncheon hosted by the Halifax Chamber of Commerce. The luncheons are put on regularly by the chamber and have an admission fee. The mayor’s speech in 2025 cost $109.95 for Chamber members to attend and $139.95 for non-members. This is higher than the normal luncheon price charged by the Chamber.

During last week’s budget debate, the public learned that this $13,000 speechwriting contract was directly awarded by the mayor’s office and was not a competitive bidding process. According to the Canadian Freelance Guild, the appropriate compensation for a freelance speech writer is $500 to $8,000 per speech. District 9 councillor Shawn Cleary wanted to know why the mayor’s office needed a speech writer. Cleary noted the previous mayor’s chief of staff, Shaune MacKinlay, wrote the speeches which were then edited by then mayor Mike Savage. But Fillmore’s chief of staff, Joanne Macrea, told the committee that “this was a practice that mayor Savage used in preparing his state of the municipality speeches as well. So we were continuing that practice.”

But in an email to Grand Parade the office of the Lieutenant Governor confirmed that Cleary’s understanding of Savage’s speech-writing process was correct and that the annual state of the municipality speeches were written by the mayor’s chief of staff and edited by the mayor. When a speech writer was hired, like for Savage’s address to the Toronto Economic Club, the writer was hired by The Halifax Partnership, and was not paid for by the taxpayer.

Grand Parade asked the mayor’s office to clarify what Macrea meant when she told the Committee that Fillmore was “continuing” to hire speech writers when that was something Savage did not do, but did not receive a response prior to deadline.

Landlord’s astroturf campaign

by Matt Stickland

Mayor Andy Fillmore tried to decimate the city’s staffing levels last week, but was outvoted by the rest of his peers. Fillmore put forward a motion at last week’s Budget Committee meeting to slash the city’s employees by up to 7%, and even though he failed in his effort to ruin the city, two questions remain. 1) Why is Fillmore so embarrassingly bad at his job? And 2) is his office running an astroturf campaign for the city’s landlords?

The first question concerns how Fillmore attempted to decimate the HRM. Fillmore told the Budget Committee that he worked with staff on his motion, but both of the Committee’s liaisons to staff, CFO Jerry Blackwood and CAO Brad Anguish, denied that they worked with the mayor on his motion. The CAO, Brad Anguish, later clarified that the mayors chief of staff, Joanne Macrea, asked Anguish on a Friday if cuts were possible and Anguish said he needed more details to answer that question. Then about a week later, Macrea dropped a note in Anguish’s lap that read: “don’t open in front of people. Private. Hoping to discuss. Follow-up to Friday conversation,” and that private note, according to Anguish, was a motion to reduce city staffing by 7%. Making major staffing cuts this large would be a huge undertaking for the city and it would take months to cut so many people without bringing the city to it’s knees. In short, by trying to make cuts via secret note to the CAO, the mayor and his team let everyone know they are amateurs who would be cut from a bush league hockey team.

The second question that persists is why does the mayor want these cuts?

After getting trounced by Budget Committee for attempting one of the stupidest cuts ever seen at city hall, the mayor put out a press release that explains why he did it. The release reads that “a recent survey found that 74% of residents want to limit tax increases - and 71% support cuts to staff positions to accomplish that.”

That study, paid for by Kevin Russell’s landlords’ lobby group, Rental Housing Providers Nova Scotia, was done by a company called Crestview Strategy. Crestview Strategy lists a man named Dale Palmeter as a senior consultant, and Palmeter used to work with one Joanne Macrea for premier Iain Rankin’s brief tenure. Macrea and Palmeter were chief of staff and principal secretary, respectively. All of this begs the question: is the landlord’s astroturfing campaign to wreck the city with lower taxes being championed by the mayor’s office, thanks to the incestuous, circular, patronage appointments of Nova Scotia’s political elite?

The Other Stuff

Podcast this week? You betcha! The run time is long because there’s a meeting hidden in this week’s episode. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Grand Parade Issue 38

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Oh, Dear! Solution

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by Giancarlo Cininni & Antonia Zwissler

Last week, city hall was no stranger to controversy. During public feedback at a Feb. 11 budget meeting Urchin Property Management Inc. owner Ursula Eckoldt let slip that she has a second home in Europe while bellyaching about how high taxes hurt “mom and pop” landlords. Much more boring, yet more important, transit planning was also on the agenda.

Executive director of Halifax Transit Robin Gerus presented Halifax Transit’s $66.5m 2026/27 draft budget, which costs $158m but makes up $91.6m in revenue. Four new Access-A-Busses and eight operators are to be delayed until a service review is done this year. Transit also wants to hire two electricians to repair electric bus infrastructure. Another upgrade is the 320 airport bus becoming the first 24h route in Halifax, planned for next year. And Mayor Andy Fillmore marvelled when Halifax Transit’s Mark Santilli said bank card tap and pay could be here by summer.

Many of the upcoming changes fall under a new three-year plan called the Core Service Plan (CSP). It could cost $70m between now and 2029. Much of the plan is designed to bolster transit between the HRM’s growing suburbs “We are seeing a lot more jobs and people choosing to live in the suburbs,” said Halifax Transit planning technician Reuben Walker.

This year, the plan adjusts four routes, including running the 5 more on Sundays. Next year, 21 routes would be expanded, and 20 busses added. The third year adds 10 busses and expands four routes, including the 54 and 55 to Port Wallace which would only expand once Port Wallace is denser. Furthermore, microtransit, an on-demand service that relies on smaller vehicles, is also on the way.

The Winners

Jean St. Amand (District 16) won the CSP lottery. His district is slated for a new north-south bus route, the 95. The plan also cuts Cobequid Terminal out of the 92 route, ending in West Bedford instead.

Robin Gerus, Transit ED has kept his job for a year, and hasn’t made council uncomfortable by asking for too much money. When considering Halifax’s $1.21b operating and $304m capital budgets, the $70m CSP is modest. It meekly asks for more aggressive improvements in a veritable footnote of the 110-page plan; improvements like 35-100 extra busses (for $10m-$30m annually) to get routes 1-10 running every 10-15 minutes. Or $2m-$10m for daily regular busses to the Burnside business district, instead of reduced weekend schedules. Bolder changes are expensive, and not officially recommended to the ascetic budget committee.

The CSP also exposes the nine lowest performing bus routes, including the 401, 415, and 433. Cutting these routes would save $4.5m, but weren’t recommended for those three lines because no other busses run there. Halifax Transit’s Patricia Hughes told council cutting routes that aren’t used much disproportionately decreases ridership. Riders see the bus as less reliable, or may have to drive sometimes and fully switch to driving. So riders of the 401, 415, and 433 are winners too, for now.

John Young (D14) had a win with Lucasville being chosen for a microtransit pilot, because it’s close to Sackville Terminal and relatively small. The pilot would start in 2027 at the earliest. At the Feb. 9 Transportation Standing Committee meeting Young defended Lucasville from other councillors hungry for more transit. “There is a lot of, why just Lucasville as a pilot?” he said. “Currently Lucasville is without transit, there are no sidewalks, near road shoulders […] It’s a historical Black community that is 199 years old and still without the service.”

The Losers

Billy Gillis (D15) was disappointed Beaver Bank didn’t get the microtransit pilot. “We have two fulltime filmsets out there now, plus a senior’s home with a CCA training program that advertises its jobs saying ‘you must have a car to commute.’” Gillis pointed out Beaver Bank once had the oldest transit service in the HRM, but lost it in 2019. However, the 8 will run every 15 minutes at peak weekday times.

Cathy Deagle-Gammon (D1) was snubbed by both the CSP and microtransit. “It’s good for everyone except those who live in Fall River,” she said. The option to reroute the 320 to Fall River was rejected, and it isn’t getting the microtransit pilot although it was almost neck and neck with Lucasville for need.

Nancy Hartling (D13) tied last with Deagle-Gammon as St Margaret’s Bay and Prospect didn’t get much, the creation of the 21b branch route which will serve Marketway Lane area was meagre consolation. “If I could follow Gammon’s profound disappointment, if you are in St Margarets Bay this represents a letdown,” she said. “Even if I look at the Microtransit this plan doesn’t represent Prospect at all.”

But the grinding wheels of bureaucracy won’t stop here. Whether or not any of these plans get approved, will have to be decided at a later date at Regional Council some time in March.

Council steers city towards bankruptcy

by Matt Stickland

Last year, during budget season, the city’s chief financial officer, Jerry Blackwood, warned council that the city was well into a trajectory of fiscal decline. He was responding to a comment from councillor Trish Purdy (D4:-$5m/yr) who was implying council can keep asking for cuts and staff will always manage to figure it out; pull a rabbit out of the hat, as it were. In response, Blackwood warned that “staff always pulls a rabbit out of the hat or does something—that’s not a way that we should be doing budgets; like at the end going into reserves, going into one-time funding, like, we are running out of options.”

And even though everyone on council presents as adults too old to believe in magic, at the end of Friday’s budget meeting councillor Shawn Cleary (D9:$28m/yr) asked staff for yet another rabbit.

During the fall pre-season budget debates, mayor Andy Fillmore asked staff to keep the tax rate flat this year. In response staff said that the city was growing and council had already approved some things like new firefighters, which a strict flat tax rate would eliminate.

So council relented and instructed staff to do a flat tax after including the already approved by council spending. Practically speaking a flat tax this year means finding $40 million in cuts or new revenue.

And so, following council’s instructions, staff came up with $40 million in cuts and included them as options in this year’s budget. Things like stopping transit at 10pm, forgoing maintenance to let roads degrade, and not funding Halifax’s climate change resilience plan know as HalifACT.

These cuts are (unsurprisingly) unpopular, so no councillors have included them in the budget, which means the tax rate will go up.

The tax rate going up is unpopular thanks, in part, to a special interest group called “Stop the Property Tax Hike” spending $27,585 on Meta ads. And Kevin Russell, the Executive Director formerly of the Investment Property Owners of Nova Scotia, which has now rebranded itself to the Rental Housing Providers Nova Scotia, presented Budget Committee with a survey of thousands of respondents asking for lower taxes. Russell did not mention in his presentation to council whether the survey asked if people wanted city services, which are paid for by property taxes.

Nevertheless, at the end of Friday’s budget meeting, after all the unpopular cuts were rejected, councillor Cleary put forward a motion asking staff to come up with a new set of cuts, or maybe the same set of cuts, but either way, the motion asks staff to find yet another rabbit to pull out of a hat.

Hopefully, the next set of cuts will also be unpopular and be rejected by council, because the fact of the matter is that the majority of Halifax’s districts run a shortfall every year, and it’s impossible to cut our way to sustainability when over half of the city’s districts are themselves unsustainable. That math is why the city is on the path to bankruptcy in two major ways.

The first, is that the majority of districts are unsustainable, which means a majority of councillors (and the mayor, if we assume his political incentives lie with the majority) win their power by looting the surpluses of downtown to subsidize their residents. Every single vote in council chambers, if done for strictly political reasons, would be a vote 10-7 for unsustainability. Every time. The good news is that some councillors, like Janet Steele (D12:-$2m/yr), sometimes vote for the best interests of their city rather than exclusively for their residents who want to keep downtown’s subsidies flowing to their suburban and rural money pits.

And constituents don’t always have the best grasp on how city finances work, for example, a surprisingly large number of otherwise intelligent people believe that motor vehicle registration fees collected and spent by the province completely cover the costs of the city’s road budget. And sometimes, otherwise intelligent councillors have similar blind spots, for example Billy Gillis (D15:-$15m/yr) in a debate about bike lanes wanted to know why bike lanes were paid out of the general rate, and not by the downtown districts who primarily benefit from them. And the answer is that downtown District 7 and its $86 million annual surplus could pay for the entire bike lane network this year and still have $41 million to kick into the general tax rate pot. But District 7 can’t use its surplus to fund the bike lane network because it must cover District 15’s annual operational deficit.

Besides the politics, the other half of the reason Halifax is headed for bankruptcy is that it’s impossible to cut our way to sustainability when the majority of Halifax’s districts run an annual deficit. But that is unlikely to stop our council, who by a structural majority, are more than happy to keep trying to do the impossible until reality catches up with us and the city gets a public trustee appointed to manage our finances because council hasn’t.

The Other Stuff

Book club, Sunday, March 1st at Celtic Corner. Will we see you there?

New episode of the podcast is out, and only half of it is a fever dream.

Doing the crossword at home? Here’s the pdf of the paper.

Grand Parade Issue 37

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How’d you do on last week’s puzzle? Here is the answer.

Misplaced Modifiers Solution

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