Last council meeting in July council started some pretty beefy discussions about tax reform. During that debate in early July, mayor Andy Fillmore suggested Halifax could learn lessons from how Hamilton and Winnipeg do their budgets. Since council isn’t meeting this week, it gave city hall reporter Matt Stickland time to go read other cities’ budget documents and bring you a budgetary book report about what Halifax can learn about sustainable budgeting from Winnipeg and Hamilton.

Council is on vacation, but Matt is not, and the last council meeting on July 8 was a beefy one with a lot of really important debates. Among those debates was one about strong mayor powers in which our city councillors performed really well! So we’ve put together a highlight reel of the strong mayor debate.

We are back with another full show covering last Tuesday's (and Thursday's) council meeting.

Hello it's summer vacation season and I've been taking full advantage. This is a live to tape episode with a recap of last week's one meeting and a preview of Tuesday's council meeting.

Just a quick programming note from Matt this week

On Saturday May 31, 2025 Halifax Wanderers travelled to Quebec City, to play York United in a Canadian Premier League on tour, regular season game.

The Halifax Wanderers put on a bus to Quebec City. Grand Parade reporter Matt Stickland embedded with the fans and watched the game.

This is that story.

As promised during the episode, here is how, in my opinion, the Traffic Calming Administrative Order should be amended.

It would be beneficial to get rid of the TCAO all together so road safety money could be spend on more efficient strategies, like the Integrated Mobility Plan, however, since politicans seem to want to keep it, clause 21 of the TCAO should be amended (changes in bold) to read

“staff shall prepare an evidence based traffic calming plan, in line with the Road Safety Strategy and Integrated Mobility Plan, for each project on the annual proposed implementation list and shall consider the physical characteristics of each street.”

That's it. That's how we could save money and make roads safer in the process. Write your councillor and ask them to change the TCAO.

Enough is enough please share this episode with everyone you know in Halifax.

In this podcast Grand Parade's city hall reporter Matt Stickland recaps what went down at city hall last week.

There's a development on a heritage property, Halifax is making slow progress police reform thanks to an unlikely hero.

And there's also a pop quiz!

We trust you can find any legislation yourself, and if you can't, you should be able to, but otherwise here are the sources mentioned in the show:

https://timharford.com/2023/07/cautionary-tales-the-v2-trilogy/

https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/aviation-military-history/the-rocket-and-the-reich-peenemunde-and-the-coming-of-the-ballistic-missile-era/

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f229e86a-a3f0-4899-9631-71335f654f79/content

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119020300899

https://news.mit.edu/2021/ride-sharing-intensifies-urban-road-congestion-0423

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/ride-hailing-makes-road-congestion-worse-study-finds-again

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-study/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652621042694

In this episode a recap of everything that happened last week. Can you tell that I'm writing this blurb too late on a Sunday? Yes, probably.

For more info about city hall, head over to www.grandparade.news

To follow Matt on Social media, find him @landofsticks

Tootles