Councillor Steele moves to protect heritage

On Thursday April 17, before the Easter long weekend Halifax’s Community Planning and Economic Development Committee met for what promised to be a boring meeting until councillor Janet Steele used an often-neglected council power to try and protect Halifax’s heritage.

The Nova Scotia Heritage Trust presented to the committee about the importance of protecting Halifax’s heritage buildings. To paraphrase, heritage buildings draw tourism, create jobs and create a sense of character for the city. And, even if buildings are in rough shape, fixing them up is better for the environment than building new—more affordable too. The Heritage Trust wants to see some changes, but the province told the trust to get the city to ask for changes, so the trust found itself presenting to the HRM committee.

When a committee receives a presentation, one of the powers of councillors is to make a motion based on that presentation. This is not a power councillors often use, but at Thursday’s meeting councillor Steele put forward a motion asking for the province’s help and also asking the CAO what, if anything, the city could do to protect and foster heritage buildings within its current powers. This led to a phenomenal debate as councillors had a very weedy discussion about the motion's wording down to semicolon placement. It was also a rare window into how the councillors on this committee think about the mechanical, legislative aspect of policy writing, and this committee members proved themselves competent legislators.

Staff, for their part, said that councillors had had a lot of good debate, but maybe staff should take this motion away and come back with a motion based on what they thought councillors wanted it to be at a later date? Councillors decided to back themselves and press on. The committee passed Steele’s motion so city staff will come back at some point in the future with suggestions on what Halifax can do to better protect its heritage. Councillors should do more of this nitty-gritty policy work in public.

This meeting also received a presentation from the Halifax North West Trails Association, which was concerned about the city’s potential plans to put pickleball courts behind the Canada Games Centre on the Mainland Commons. Staff have not been instructed to do anything, and there’s no active planning; the group just wanted to get ahead of the planning process with their concerns. This committee was on a policy kick at this meeting as the committee, led by councillor Becky Kent, dipped their toes into some deep philosophical questions.

For seniors, groomed trails in urban centres are an easily accessible way to be in nature. For seniors, pickleball courts in urban centres are an easily accessible way to play sports. Both are easily accessible ways to stay active, and all of those things are municipal priorities. But land in urban centres is limited and often can’t be used for things like groomed trails and pickleball courts at the same time. So, how does the city achieve its priorities within its geographic limitations? Like the debate itself, that question was mostly rhetorical; if/when a plan comes to council we’ll see how staff propose answering the rhetorical question.

Finally, this committee got an update report on the 2023 Tourism Master Plan. In brief, our food and drink scene is a huge draw, and our infrastructure deficit means we lack concert venues. Better public transit would make us more attractive to tourists. There is also a shortage of accommodations in suburban and rural parts of the HRM. The report says short-term rental regulations limit the availability of suburban and rural accommodations. It should be noted that there’s also a shortage of long-term accommodations, so it's just as likely that this is a number of accommodations problem rather than a short term rental regulation problem.

With the committee meeting over it’s time for your reminder that Grand Parade is doing a subscriber drive. In the future, post-meeting articles like this one will be behind a paywall. Your subscription also gets you a digital copy of the newspaper on Mondays. And I just want to thank the folks who have already become paid subscribers. Thanks to you, I’ve been able to line up writers for the first four issues and will have interesting feature stories about a bus stop, infrastructure deficit and a statistical analysis which proves that Halifax just isn’t that into you anymore.

In addition, due to the number of people who’ve subscribed, I’ve been able to add some bells and whistles—one bell to be exact: Each issue will have a crossword.