The Grand Parade

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...

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 “st...

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...

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

Short one this week as the Board of Police Commissioners meeting was cancelled.

Hey folks, bit of a lighter show notes this week because I've done a bonus show and had to put a newspaper to bed. See ya next week, don't forget to grab a copy of the first issue of the paper this week at Atlantic News in Halifax and The Dart Gallery in Dartmouth

Since journalism is homework the job, after last episode where I explained in great details the issues with the HRM's planning, I felt obligated to explain how I'd fix it. For this bonus episode I invited Kevin Wilson aka HFX By Bike and the two of us work through fixing the BRT. Over on his YouTube Channel, Kevin does this sort of thing on a regular basis in his let's fix video. Recently he took...

I suspect most people don't usually read the show notes, but if you're here for the study, scroll down. If you're here for information in this episode Matt Stickland, recaps council and goes deep into the weeds of Halifax's Bus Rapid Transit Plan. Here's the promised study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920919314026?via%3Dihub

Bit of a light week at city hall and since I forgot it was Good Friday, a bit of a lighter episode. Councillor Janet Steele is trying to get the city to protect and create more heritage districts. Councillor Cathy Deagle Gammon is trying to remove parking spots in land use bylaws because toddlers don't drive cars. All of that and a deep dive into the difference between Halifax's transportation pla...

Last week was a relatively slow one as far as the schedule was concerned, with only a Tuesday council meeting and Thursday’s African descent advisory committee.  Halifax now has a budget, and thanks to Mayor Andy Fillmore, next year’s budget will be wildly different from this year's. Also, last week, Halifax once again found itself standing in the long shadow of its more than slightly racist histo...

In a week dominated by breathless international news Halifax's city hall had a relatively slow week. This week there were only two meetings of consequence, which allowed the Board of Police Commissioners to do a deep dive into intimate partner violence and the Envrionment and Sustainability Committee to learn about the failures of the green network plan.

Now that budget season is done, as threatened, this show will now become a weekly roundup of what happened at City Hall last week. The obvious high/lowlight of last week was when council finished the budget adjustment list debates on Wednesday, March 26, but did you know that other meetings also happened last week? There was an audit that missed some key financial information, public housing grant...

Halifax's budget playoffs wrapped on Wednesday March 26 and Halifax has a budget! The budget itself was a political victory for our new mayor, Andy Fillmore, who promised to keep Halifax’s property tax rate flat, which the council did. However, property values went up by 4.7 percent, and so will property taxes.      Those property taxes will pay for Halifax’s $1.3 billion operating budget and $318...

Halifax council’s budget meeting on monday March 24th was a stinker, quite literally, and also because council almost voted to make Halifax’s poorest people just a little hungrier because of how Canadian governments divvied up their power and responsibilities. But the good news is that your odds of dying in a fire are going to decrease slightly in the next few years, probably. Still, the bad news...

It's the second intermission of the budget playoffs and a lot happened in Friday's debate. Council approved an armoured personnel carrier, the central library got it's reserves cut and council avoided making a terrible cut. All that and more in this budget playoffs' second intermission update!

In this episode of the Grand Parade Matt flys solo to update folks on the future of the podcast and the future of Halifax's budget.

The wait is over, it's finally here budget season started on Wednesday. In this episode Matt and Martin dive into what's being going on at city hall from strategic plans, to Windsor street exchange and of course, the start of budget season.

This past week has been a huge one in municipal politics with Halifax's city council getting an update about how their strategic planning is going. Spoiler alert, it's going very bad. In this emergency episode, Matt and Martin break down the failures of Halifax's bureaucracy