Fillmore kept his promise and taxes went up

Everything you need to know about the Tuesday, May 27th, council meeting

Jun 02, 2025

Editor’s note: Please be advised, there will be no issue next week.

By Matt Stickland

For 49 glorious days, mayor Andy Fillmore’s campaign promise of a flat tax saved the average Haligonian less than $30 in property taxes. During last fall’s election, Fillmore campaigned on a promise of keeping the tax rate flat. Due to the rise in assessed values, property taxes still increased, but his campaign promise was nevertheless kept.

The mayor achieved his campaign promise by putting a motion on the floor during this year’s budget season to raid the central library’s rainy day fund and pay last year’s bills with savings instead of tax revenue. Council agreed and voted to spend $10 million from the central library’s reserve account. That money is gone now, and in exchange, people who own homes saved less than $30 on average for 49 glorious days.

However, the Eastern Shore Lifestyle Centre now requires an additional $9.5 million to complete construction. During the debate councillor Sam Austin asked staff why, 49 days after the budget was ratified, an additional $9.5 million was needed, calling it a “big miss.” Staff explained that, thanks to the American president’s deliberate tanking of the global economy, there are some knock-on effects, and things are now more expensive.

Councillor Austin blasted his fellow councillors, saying, “We chose to spend 10 million of central library savings, which was available for projects. Which we spent to artificially keep our tax rate low this past year, deferring the ability to use that money on a rainy day, and here we are two months later, and it’s raining in the exact amount.”

Whatever money you saved on taxes this year, you will start to pay back next year, with interest, thanks to mayor Fillmore keeping his promised flat tax rate.

Halifax will begin to enforce short-term rentals more strictly in the HRM. Regulating the short-term rental industry is a relatively new field of policy, and in Halifax specifically, this has only become possible within the past year with the creation of the provincial rental registry. However, a registry and rules are only as effective as their enforcement, so the city plans to hire staff to enforce the new short-term rental regulations. One year into the registration process with no active enforcement, it’s far too early to tell what impacts, positive or negative, the city’s regulations are having on the hotel and long-term rental industries.

The debate on short-term rentals took a moment of levity when Councillor Janet Steele, one of 17 people in this city who can regulate the number of cars that can be parked on a street, regardless of the number of people living in a home, asked staff what could be done about congestion caused by short-term rentals. She said that she hears “from residents that say ‘I can’t continue to live on this street with the congestion,’ but yet, we don’t have any levers at all. I mean, if people are parking for 24 hours and not moving we can do something with compliance, but we don’t prohibit the number of people that can live in a home, and thus there’s not much we can do about cars either.”

The reason calling compliance works is because councillors can and do regulate parking with levers like bylaws P-1200 and P-500, as well as special administrative orders like SC-38, which compliance officers go out and enforce on council’s behalf. Steele is one of only 17 people in this city with exclusive access to the only lever of power that can address the issues Steele’s constituents have with the excessive street parking.

Councillor Nancy Hartling had a strong meeting with a bit of a focus on getting things off the ground (pun intended), getting two motions passed.

As a rural councillor Hartling is concerned with the flammability of people’s yards and got a staff report to see if the city could do anything about helping people manage flammable yard waste in the more rural, fire-prone areas of the city.

Also on Hartling’s mind was the garbage that is littered throughout the city. She had a motion to determine if there was anything to be done about the litter epidemic on the sides of HRM roads and waterways. Multiple councillors chimed in to express their disgust about the things they’ve found when doing roadside cleanups with groups in their community. This debate was particularly strong from Kent, who, thanks to Eastern Passage’s unique trash day challenges, has become somewhat of a subject matter expert on the nuances of waste management.

More people in Halifax are going hungry since 2020 as the city has seen a six fold increase in demand for the mobile food market. The damand spiked so fast that it couldn’t be included in the budget this year. So council approved $175,000 to get the mobile food market out the door as approved by council 49 days ago, and hire someone to plan for the increased need of the future.

Halifax’s new crisis comms plan

By Matt Stickland

Thanks to 2023 being somewhat apocalyptic, the city was compelled to develop a plan to better communicate with Halifax residents in an emergency.

This plan aims to make the city’s emergency response more efficient, which includes things like defining what an issue, an emergency, and a crisis are, so that the city knows when and to commit resources as appropriate for the issue, emergency or crisis of the day.

Councillors were supportive of this plan and highlighted the need for involving the councillor of the affected areas when events happen, especially when considering a lot of people reach out to their councillors for more information. Deputy mayor Tony Mancini also pointed out that having good, accurate information people can rely on is important because social media allows us to “fill up those gaps” of information, which you would have seen in any community Facebook page in the summer of 2023. The ease at which misinformation can spread in an emergency is one of the big reasons for this strategy. If the city is able to communicate what is going on effectively, they won’t have to waste any resources trying to put out imaginary fires while real ones rage.

Even though Halifax’s emergency responses to the climate crises of the past few years have been exemplary, this is due mainly to the high levels of individual competence of our emergency responders. As an institution, the city is still pretty weak. On Monday, May 26, at the Executive Committee Meeting, the city’s director of public safety, Bill Moore, told councillors that the new plan was a big step up, as there was no plan before this one. This planning process also includes figuring out how vulnerable the HRM’s communities are to climate change (and any other emergencies) and how to evacuate in any potential issue, emergency or crisis.

This new strategy should also help Halifax free up resources to help prevent the slow collapse of humanity’s life support systems in the HRM. In 2019, Halifax declared a climate emergency, and now in 2025, Halifax defines an emergency as “situations, often dangerous, that require prompt action, sometimes beyond normal procedures, to limit impacts to people, property and/or the environment.”

Halifax reclaims bronze in congestion

by Matt Stickland

Every year, TomTom, the navigation company, announces the winners of the Car Congestion Championships, and in 2024, Halifax reclaimed bronze. In 2024, the city’s traffic engineers were able to add 50 seconds to every 10 kilometres of your commute. Thanks to the additional traffic generated by the city’s traffic engineers, our roads have also experienced a 1% decrease in efficiency since 2023. In 2023, Halifax had dropped down to sixth behind cities like Montreal and Winnipeg. However, Montreal and Winnipeg have both been making significant improvements to bike and bus infrastructure and have started to tumble down the congestion charts. Luckily, Halifax has stayed the course on car planning and has retaken 3rd place in Canada behind Vancouver and Toronto. Halifax has also improved from 171 on the global congestion rankings in 2023 to an impressive 117 in 2024.

The city has been able to achieve this feat by sinking resources into attracting drivers to HRM streets by centring drivers whenever possible to actively hinder competition from cheaper alternatives like Halifax Transit. For example, on the weekend of May 24, 2025, the MacKay bridge was closed for maintenance. Even though the city has bus lanes on Gottingen Street, one of the main approaches to the only open bridge, the city decided to keep the bus lane closed that weekend. In an email a city spokesperson explained that it would be hard to achieve council’s priorities so they didn’t bother trying, writing that the ”user expectation of how the bus lane operates are quite well established, so we would likely see a significant amount of parking violations, which would ultimately defeat the purpose of having the transit lane in force.” It’s too hard to enforce the rules of driving on drivers, which is why the city chose to make transit riders suffer.

Ceding to drivers’ contempt for traffic laws and their contempt for this city is how Halifax managed to climb the congestion ranks. Halifax’s new road safety strategy aims to make roads safer by making driving easier and more convenient for drivers, so drivers don’t suffer road rage and use their sport utility child murder machines as weapons. This encourages more drivers, and more drivers mean more deaths. So far in 2025, Halifax and Toronto are relatively close in road deaths, with about a dozen each. A tight race in absolute terms, but on a per capita basis, Toronto would need to have killed about 170 more people to be competitive with Halifax’s numbers so far this year.

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