Halifax Regional Municipality is in the middle of a municipal election, and it’s also in the middle of a period of transformative change. The effects of COVID-19, of course, loom large for Halifax, and indeed for municipalities across the country. Yet the foundations of life in Halifax were shifting long before the pandemic upended the status-quo. Hurricane Dorian was yet another reminder that we are enmeshed in a global climate catastrophe that we cannot ignore; rental prices in the municipality rose faster than anywhere else in North America over the past year; and the city is at the heart of debates about policing and the perpetual injustices that the police visit upon Black and Mi’kmaq residents.
In short, this election matters. All municipal elections matter. Municipal governments control many of the vital functions we depend upon to function on a day-to-day basis and have a crucial role to play in the defining debates of our time. As residents, however, we are not conditioned to engage with these vital institutions with anywhere near the rigour that they ought to demand. Instead, we tend to leave big, lofty decisions to the prime minister or the premier, and our municipal institutions are left neglected and underfunded. Just one look at the voter turnout rates for the past municipal election (a woeful 29.7% of eligible voters participated) would indicate how little HRM residents seem to care about who is elected to run their municipality.
These turnout numbers also indicate how little of a reason many residents have been given to engage in municipal politics in the past few years. With a quarter of the councillors getting acclaimed during the last election, and with little obvious differentiation between candidates on some of the core policy issues of the day, it’s easy to see why residents might have turned away from the HRM elections in 2016. But this lack of engagement may contribute to a decline in the quality of our local democracy. One need only take a look at the confusing, opaque machinations of the Board of Police Commissioners to understand why meaningful scrutiny of municipal issues will be vital in the uncertain months and years to come. 2020 has too much at stake for such apathy.
That’s where the work of the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group comes in. The Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group (NS PPWG) is a coalition of organizations and citizens concerned with advancing legislative and policy reform relevant to policing in the province [full disclosure: I am a member of the NSPPWG Steering Committee.] So far, the NS PPWG has been focused on policing in the Halifax Regional Municipality and has engaged, quite vigorously I might add, with the Board of Police Commissioners on the topic of defunding the police. I’ll speak more about that in a future post.
Sensing the gap in a meaningful, detailed discussion of policing policy in the municipality coming into this election, the NS PPWG also designed and disseminated a questionnaire sent to all candidates. The questionnaire was accompanied with a curated list of resources to better educate candidates about key policing issues in the municipality. The survey was a success, with 71% of candidates choosing to participate. You can read more about the results in the report linked to above, but here are some key highlights:
– 100% of respondents answered “yes” when asked if they would support holding the Halifax Regional Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police accountable for implementing the recommendations of the Wortley Report and the MMIWG Final Report;
– 92% supported pushing the Halifax Regional Police to use a publicly available gender-based policy lens for arrests, policing services, and the development of policing policy;
– 79% of respondents did not believe that the present policing arrangement in HRM, which is a shared jurisdictional arrangement between the Halifax Regional Police and the RCMP, is working;
– 96% of candidates would support a more detailed line-by-line accounting of the Halifax Regional Police’s budget, and 72% of those respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the budgets used for polygraph tests or the mounted unit could be better spent elsewhere.
Results like these offer residents a useful foundation to hold the next Municipal Council to account as they enter into a broad-based conversation about defunding the police, among other matters. They also indicate a path forward – a broad consensus about where the issues in policing in the municipality lie, and potential options for how they might be addressed. As polling day approaches, I hope that we use our opportunity as residents to harness that potential energy to deliver a clear mandate for a better municipality. I’ll certainly be paying attention.
