Halifax's city council passes $1.3 billion budget
Flipping Elon the bird and reforming taxes in the HRM, all that and more from April 8th's meeting
On Tuesday, April 8, Halifax’s city council met and passed it’s annual budget, which clocked in at $1.3 billion this year.
Council also did other stuff, like flipping Elon Musk off with his own bird and fundamentally restructuring the annual budget process, but while Grand Parade is in its pre-launch subscription drive, you’ll have to endure a bit of a pitch to subscribe before the rest of the news.
The pitch is simple: There are three reasons you should subscribe.
The first reason you should subscribe is that the plan for Grand Parade is for it to be a weekly installment of city hall news, with a weekly publishing schedule. The podcast and newspaper will both be published on Mondays with the paper currently on track to start being available on May 5 at Atlantic News. If you are a municipal news junkie and want to follow meetings as they happen in between issues of the paper I’ll be publishing short committee meeting recaps as they happen and all of those will be behind a paywall.
The second reason is that becoming a paid subscriber means this publication has a budget to hire journalists. Watching and reporting on city council meetings is a full time job, but what happens in council chambers is only half of the story. How do the decisions in council chambers impact the lives of Haligonians? I’m happy to say that with the amount of people who have subscribed so far, I’ll be able to hire writers for at least the first three issues of the paper. Back of napkin math while operating expenses slowly firm up suggests that with about 120 paid subscribers, I should be able to hire a writer for every issue indefinitely. But to be safe, I think aiming instead for 1200 subscribers is prudent.
The third reason you should subscribe is that every Monday, you can get a paper copy of the paper sent right to your home!
But enough with the sales pitch, onto the news.
Halifax’s city council meeting on April 8, 2025, started with a brief budget committee meeting where the committee approved the budget they’d debated for the past three months. The $1.3 billion operational budget was a political win for new mayor Andy Fillmore, who campaigned on keeping the tax rate flat, which council did. Then, this committee took a short break, Fillmore and councillor Cathy Deagle Gammon switched seats, and a regular council meeting started, during which they, too, approved the budget. And like magic, Halifax now has a budget for the coming fiscal year.
With the dust still in the air from the last budget debates, Fillmore kicked off budget 2026’s preseason about nine months early when he put a six-part motion on the floor to reform Halifax’s budget process. Fillmore immediately amended his motion because, as initially worded, “Hold expenditure levels flat for the 2026/2027 budget to keep the total budget at 1.35B with consideration for an increase for inflation based on CPI.” It may have prevented council from adding new municipal services this year, even if they’d already been approved. So this was amended to allow council to still do its job and direct which services get funded with tax dollars, but prevents council from doing that mid-year and restricts changes in spending levels to the annual budget process.
In plain English, Fillmore’s motion wants the city staff to find efficiencies, increase and/or diversify municipal revenues, and make the city sustainable. This new framework needs to be done by June to be used for next year’s budget, and next year’s budget needs to be done by March 1, 2026, so Halifax is first in line for bids on capital tenders.
There is always concern whenever a politician uses the word efficiencies because it’s often code for austerity, but there is reason to be optimistic that this motion is more than it appears. One of the big reasons the city of Halifax is not sustainable is because municipal taxation, planning and service delivery models are incredibly inefficient. Big box stores, for example, are an incredibly inefficient use of land from a municipal revenue perspective. Even though a place like the Dartmouth Crossing Costco pays a tax bill with an impressively large number, in the vicinity of $681,353.22 last year. The city earns $45,122 per acre from Costco in Dartmouth.
Meanwhile, Parklane Mall on Spring Garden earned the city about $1,258,158 last year, or $1,560,115.92 per acre. And according to a study the city commissioned over a decade ago, low-density developments like Costco cost the city more to service than dense downtown developments. Even so, in 2025, Costco paid fewer taxes for more in services than Parklane Mall.
To be clear, the question here is not “how does the city raise Costco’s taxes by $22.9 million so they pay the same rate per acre as Parklane Mall?” but rather if Fillmore’s motion has directed staff to diversify revenue and find efficiencies, it means that this report should answer the question: “How can the city make 137 Country View Drive as efficient and sustainable with it’s municipal revenue generation and municipal service delivery as 5657 Spring Garden Road?” And if the city has all-star city staff, whatever solutions they come up with will come back with suggestions on how to use existing municipal powers to achieve those proposed solutions.
Of course, it is always possible that city staff read efficiency as austerity and come back with cuts. However, there are a few signs that won’t happen this time around. The first is that the city’s top bureaucrats are keenly aware of the current state of disrepair of many municipal facilities, and there’s mounting concern over Halifax’s growing infrastructure deficit. The bureaucrats are also keenly aware that the city, thanks to our low taxes and inefficient land use, has borrowed and will continue to borrow money to pay for a lot of needed infrastructure in the next decades. And even councillors who voted a few weeks ago to make the fiscal crunch worse know that the city is unsustainable and that dark fiscal clouds are on the horizon.
On top of that, during the just-ended budget season, councillors started the debate on charging the Costcos of the world higher parking fees to begin to cover the gap of an inadvertent $22.9 million in municipal parking subsidies given to Costco last year. This budget reform bill is coming back to council a month after the suburban plan is expected to reshape and densify suburban development patterns and a month before this council sets its strategic priorities for the next four years.
This summer will be a consequential one for the city of Halifax one way or the other, as multiple major strategies will come before council. Council will ultimately decide whether to correct the city’s foundational mistakes and set the city up for long-term success. Or they’ll decide to kick the can down the road and maybe have a slightly easier time getting elected in 2028.
Also at this meeting, council voted to ditch Twitter, ultimately deciding that even though communicating with residents is essential, it’s not that cool to give Haligonians’ property tax dollars to a guy evicerating the American government. Councillor David Hendsbee was the only one to vote to stay on Twitter.
The city of Halifax is going to let 100 more unhoused people ride the bus for free.
The city is going to spend just over $1.2 million to take part in the federal “Growing Canada’s Community Canopies Fund.”
The city will ensure firefighters get advanced cancer screening no later than Jan 1, 2026.
Council will get a report on whether it wants to take over and/or partner with the Dartmouth Curling Club as they need renovations and money.
6-20 Ropewalk Lane in Dartmouth will get a public hearing to become a heritage property.
Finally, Deputy Mayor Tony Mancini asked for a staff report to get an update on the Auditor General’s outstanding recommendations.
To hear from the councillors themselves on the budget reforms be sure to listen to Monday’s Grand Parade.