In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt and Martin look back at the past two weeks in municipal politics and answer some hard hitting questions like: Will transit ever get better in this city? How do you cook a crow? And is there any point to the city's advisory committees?

Plus, we also have a new show format! Except for the any other business segment at the end your listening experience should be largely unchanged but we'd like any feedback if you have any. Please send it to [email protected]

At long last Coast reporter Martin is back after his paternity leave and he joins Coast city hall reporter Matt Stickland to catch up on everything he'd missed since being out.

In this episode, the two talk about how the council is shaping up three meetings into their term. Which councillors are making mistakes? Who's looking promising?

The conversation then turns to the HRM's committees and the upcoming budget season. Matt explains why he's mostly optimistic about the city's future, even if some shakey debate performances have sown some early seeds of doubt.

All of that plus traffic planning, boomer assumptions and sneaky good provincial legislation in this first episode of Season 2 of the Grand Parade

After an impromptu summer break the Grand Parade is back! Host Matt Stickland sits down with the owner of Atlantic New Chris Greene to talk about how to interview candidates for the upcoming fall election.

Chris will be sitting down the candidates of District 7 to interview them and find out who would be the best candidate for his district and wanted to advice.

Happy to oblige, Matt explains how he and The Coast are vetting candidates for the fall election.

In what was supposed to be the last episode of the HFX Votes 2024 election podcast series The Coast's city hall reporter Matt Stickland sat down with The Coast’s newsletter editor Julie Lawrence to answer some listener questions. 

The conversation bounces around as the two try to answer as many questions as possible. There are a bunch of simple questions like “Does Halifax have enough parking?” that have relatively simple answers like “Yes.”  

But some questions sparked more interesting and nuanced conversations, like ‘Should Halifax reduce the size of its bureaucracy?’ and ‘What makes a suburb?’ There is also a definitely real award given out to the listener who asked the best question. 

But this will not be the last episode in the series, I heard back from the infrastructure expert I was trying to interview, and we’re in the process of setting up the interview. So stay tuned for that in your podcast feeds.

There are two types of people in this world. There are people who think that headline is needlessly dramatic, and then there are people who understand risk management. The Coast has covered risk management extensively since Halifax’s Auditor General released his scathing indictments of the city’s Risk Management Team, but this is one of those things that just can’t be talked about enough until the issues are fixed. 

In this episode of the Grand Parade, Matt talks through his research to date from a 2014 Halifax Transit oil spill to today. The conversation covers the big things like Halifax’s risk management team being the wrong people for the job to the minutia, like taxing under-utilized parking lots near transit terminals. 

The long and short of it is that this city is not taking Risk Management seriously, and your future is in jeopardy in the most boring possible way. The next crop of councillors needs to do a better job of addressing these risks, which means we need to do a better job of vetting them when they come to our doors. This, unfortunately, requires you to consume the civic education version of your least favourite vegetable and gain a baseline understanding of what risk management is and how it affects your life. You can do this by listening to the latest episode of the Grand Parade here.

In this penultimate episode of the HFX Votes 2024 election explainer series, Matt interviews Risk Management expert Bruce Manion. This episode is a direct result of Halifax’s Auditor General’s recent audits in which he found the HRM’s risk management framework to be a bit of a hot mess. 

In this episode, Bruce explains to Matt how the city should be thinking about Risk Management and the problem with the city moving its risk management team from the accountants to the lawyers back in 2021. This conversation moves around a lot, from crashing ships to various levels of government approving the building of death trap subdivisions.  

This conversation also launched Matt into the rabbit hole of the municipal Enterprise Risk Register, and it looks like how the city identifies risks in the first place is fundamentally flawed. More on this when Matt finishes reporting it out, but subscribers of The Coast will get a little preview of what Matt is investigating in City Hall Insider, which hits inboxes at 10:30 on Monday mornings.

The HFX Votes 2024 series is in the process of wrapping up, with three episodes recorded yesterday to be released over the next few days. Up first is an interview with Céo Gaudet, a former member of the Regional Watersheds Advisory Board. 

For a little bit of history, the RWAB had a predecessor, the Dartmouth Lakes Advisory Board, which started in the 1970s. At the time, there was a lot of development going on and very few, if any, environmental assessments of procedures. But what was noticeable was the increase in silt in Dartmouth Lakes. 

So, the city of Dartmouth helped form this board, which was filled out with scientific, environmental, and local experts and organizations. Once formed, the board advised Dartmouth’s city council and the city of Dartmouth listened.

In the intervening years, the city has professionalized its bureaucracy and added some in-house environmental assessments to the development agreement process. This led to the city trying to disband the RWAB last council term, but councillors voted to keep it because they deemed independent oversight as important. Now, thanks to some provincial legislation, the RWAB is gone for good.

In this episode, Matt and Céo take a deep dive into what the city of Halifax has lost in losing its independent environmental oversight. Just an administrative note: We got sidetracked, so Ceo never finished explaining the issues with blue-green algae. When plants and/or blue-green algae die, they fall to the bottom and decompose. That takes up a lot of oxygen and makes the lake anoxic, which kills other lake life, like the eels mentioned.

In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt Stickland sits down with Wes Marshall, the author of Killed by a Traffic Engineer.

His book is a meta analysis of traffic engineering studies, and he tells Matt how to determine if Halifax's traffic engineers are doing a good job.

Just one note: In the episode Matt says that the HRM has made it's traffic impact statements better, and Wes points out that if they were an improvement they would consider safety. The good news is that the new traffic impact statements consider non-car modes of travel, but only consider safety in the context of car on car collisions. Not driver vs pedestrian. There's still a long way to go before Halifax's traffic impact statements are good, even if they are slightly improved from 2017

In this edition of HFX Votes 2024 I sit down with two of the authors of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report: Building Inclusive Communities: A Policy Agenda for Nova Scotia Municipalities that Leaves No One Behind. 

In this conversation, Christine Saulnier the CCPA’s Nova Scotia director, explains how the city could save a lot of money by bringing services, like snow clearing, in-house. She also explains how the way we do snow removal might be a little bit sexist.  

The other other, Kyle Buott, gives some practical solutions to the city. Did you know there’s a way the city could make more revenue *and* get Canadian National Railway to let us use their tracks for light rail? 

Two administrative notes: First, in the episode I say that the land lord registry is coming into effect, that’s not true, it’s been in effect since April 1, 2024. And second, you may notice that citation 169 has me as an author, please calibrate your critical thinking appropriately.

In this episode of the Grand Parade's ongoing series of municipal issues explainer, I sit down with mayor Mike Savage to find out what the mayor does. This conversation bounces around from the fiscal challenges facing the city, some practical advice for running a good meeting and an answer to the question: Does Mike find it weird that people call him "Your Worship?"