The Crime of Halifax: How a City Government Has Pillaged the Past, Poisoned the Present, and Mortgaged the Future of the Province

April 1st is the Anniversary of Amalgamation in Nova Scotia

April 1st is a dark day in my calendar.

It’s the day 29 years ago Halifax was forced into an amalgamated bureaucracy that has caused more damage to Nova Scotia than any other thing in our history.

I’ve written in detail about HOW WE GOT AMALGAMATED.

Coming up to the sad anniversary, 29 years without ever stopping even once to consider the consequences of what was done or how we could progress from here I’m stopping today to write about the current situation, what it would take to get out of it and why we should.

Halifax was not the only city caught in this crazy 1990’s idea. Other cities across North America are struggling with the same disaster, and a new word has been added to the vocabulary of engaged citizens - Deamalgamation.

Here’s an anniversary reflection on amalgamation from THE BEE.

It’s important, in these difficult conversations, to state clearly — Just like you, I love Halifax and I love Nova Scotia. I’ve been just about everywhere, and could live anywhere, but I choose here for reasons as deep and complex as the place itself.

When someone truly loves something—be it dessert or design—they don't just enjoy it, they care. And caring means seeing its full potential, the creative possibility, not just its sweet side. That’s why the fiercest critics of Nova Scotia are often the ones who love it most.

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April 1st, 1996. Without a vote. Without public debate. Without any clear rationale beyond bureaucratic convenience and political cowardice, the Province of Nova Scotia erased centuries of self-government and local identity in a single sweep.

That was the day the Halifax Regional Municipality was born—and the day Nova Scotia lost control of its largest and most important city.

It was no April Fool’s joke.

In fact, it was one of the most damaging political experiments in Canadian history.

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The Quiet Coup

What really happened on April 1st, 1996?

• Four distinct, functioning municipalities (Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford, and Halifax County) were forcibly merged into a single, massive, centralized government entity.

• No referendum was held. No public consultation shaped the plan.

• The people affected—hundreds of thousands of Nova Scotians—had no say in the process.

This wasn’t reform. It was a hostile takeover of government by an out-of-control bureaucracy.

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The Broken Promises

Amalgamation was sold with a few simple promises:

• It would save money. It didn’t.

• It would improve service delivery. It didn’t.

• It would create stronger, more unified communities. It didn’t.

Instead, what Nova Scotians got was:

• A government too large to listen and too distant to care,

• Bloated departments and runaway budgets,

• A planning machine that erased communities with plans and visions of their own,

• And a capital city that now grows without purpose, destroys without vision, and spends without discipline.

The people of rural and suburban Nova Scotia were promised efficiency. What they got was extraction: of resources, of decision-making power, and of hope.

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Why It Still Hurts

Nearly 30 years later, the effects of this mistake are visible everywhere:

• Soaring housing prices.

• A planning department that serves its own culture of rules and fear instead of citizens.

• Lost villages, visions, and a sense of place that’s being paved over.

• A rising class of urban sharecroppers who own nothing and owe everything.

Worse still, Halifax’s bloat and arrogance now cast a shadow over the entire province. Every policy, every program, every decision made by the HRM bureaucracy ripples out to rural communities, draining Nova Scotia’s resources and spirit, stifling local voices and denying economic opportunity.

Now, over 200 communities swept up in amalgamation have effectively no government at all. They pay taxes to Halifax's machine and, at best, have a single representative on council—a voice that is, by definition, drowned out by dozens of other starving voices. These communities have no control over their finances, their planning, or their future. They are governed by a system that doesn't even pretend to see them.

This isn’t just a Halifax problem. It’s a Nova Scotia emergency.

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Uneconomic Growth

Continuing to grow the economy when the public costs are higher than the benefits is called uneconomic growth. The United Nations has classified five types of uneconomic growth:

• jobless growth, where the economy grows, but does not expand opportunities for good paying, longterm employment;

• ruthless growth, where the proceeds of economic growth mostly benefit the rich or little of the benefit remains in the community;

• voiceless growth, where economic growth is not accompanied by extension of democracy or empowerment;

• rootless growth, where economic growth squashes people’s cultural identity, traditional sense of community, or the things that made the community good to begin with; and

• futureless growth, where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations.

You’ll probably find all this familiar territory in Halifax.

After so many years of being told the same thing, it is barely surprising that we believe it. Economic growth is good, we are told, and essential to all we do. Growth creates work. Work creates wealth. Wealth closes the gap between rich and poor.

Once we have a stronger economy, the City says, we can tackle our environmental problems, our social problems, our transportation problems, our tax problems, and our sustainability problems.

The only trouble is, this is all wrong.

Growth without prosperity in an economy is like the logic of cancer. Yes, it's growth, but it's not a good thing.

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Halifax and Nova Scotia - Lost Together

For almost 30 years, Halifax has pursued a hollow ideology of "growth" with the fervour of a cult and the wisdom of a wrecking ball. This isn't just a bad plan. It's not just poor policy. It is a full-blown, generational catastrophe—a slow-motion crime against common sense, community, and the people of Nova Scotia.

The central planning ideology now gripping Halifax—this deranged, developer-driven, bureaucratically bloated cult of “Urban and Up”—has done more harm to the wealth, health, and hopes of this province than any recession, war, or storm in living memory.

And no one voted for it.

No family, no neighbourhood, no village in Nova Scotia asked for this. Yet all are being made to pay for it. In the name of “growth.”

Growth Without Grace, Meaning, or Endgame

What Halifax calls growth, we might more accurately call destruction. Destruction of hope, of the heritage of representative government, neighbourhoods, green space, character, affordability, livability, and any connection to what made this place meaningful to begin with.

In the pursuit of abstract numbers—GDP ticks, housing unit quotas, visitor numbers, and population targets—city planners have tossed out the essential: joy, beauty, comfort, human scale, and the trust in a shared future that creates that future.

They speak of growth as if it were salvation. But it is not. It is just change, and not all change is good.

This ideology of urban growth has no strategic plan, no end goal, and no accountability. It is a machine that measures its own momentum and declares victory. It builds towers, not homes. Adds lanes, not solutions. It’s a treadmill dressed as a triumph.

And most devastating of all: it has replaced the idea of progress. Growth is not progress. Progress is about people and prosperity. Growth is about growth - it’s the logic of cancer.

What Has Been Lost

The cost is real.

• The wealth lost by the deliberate obstruction of rural and village development across the province, in service of a Halifax-centric plan, is incalculable. Thousands of young families priced out. Billions in stalled investment. A housing market turned into a panic room.

• The opportunity lost as regulations and red tape choke small builders, heritage projects, and family-scale development. The city grows—but not with us, and certainly not for us.

• The opportunity cost of bigger is better has been all the things that are human in the community.

• The spirit lost as people feel ever more like tenants in their own communities. As places once rooted in meaning and memory are paved over for yet another empty concrete and glass box.

• The future lost as young people leave, as birth rates collapse, as no sane parent sees this city and thinks: yes, let’s build a life here.

This growth cult has literally undermined the one thing Nova Scotia needs most: babies. Families. Hope. People who believe the future will be better and want to be part of building it.

Because what average working person would choose to raise children in a city this alienating, this expensive, this hollow?

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A Call to Other Governments: Intervene Now or Doom Nova Scotia to Growth Without Progress or Prosperity Forever

This city government is not merely failing. It is actively causing harm, and not just to its own residents. Its policies are dragging down the entire province and region.

The blame lies with a broken amalgamation model—a Frankenstein creation that merged city, suburbs, and country — over 200 real communities — without clarity, consent, or competence. The result is a monstrous machine that is too big to listen, too slow to change, and too arrogant to notice what it's doing wrong.

And what it's doing wrong is everything.

It’s time for other levels of government to act. Intervene. Audit. Dismantle. Reimagine. Whatever it takes.

We cannot let this failed ideology continue to erode the real assets of Nova Scotia—our communities, our sense of place, our birthright to live in towns and cities made for people, not planners.

There is still time. But not much.

Because what Halifax is building is not a city. It is a catastrophe.

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Growth Without Prosperity: How Halifax Became the Definition of Failure, and What We Must Do Now

There’s a word for what’s happening in Halifax. It’s not progress. It’s not prosperity. And it sure as hell isn’t planning.
The word is failure.
Long, slow, expensive failure.

For the past 30 years, Halifax has been racing headlong in the wrong direction, all the while congratulating itself on how fast it's going. The political and planning class call it “growth.” But that’s a lie. It’s growth without prosperity. Growth mistaken for progress. Growth that’s left most people poorer, more anxious, and utterly disconnected from the idea that tomorrow might be better than today.

A City That Builds but Doesn’t Create

Even profit-seeking, the animating force of capitalist development, has failed here. Developers aren’t building to sell or to serve—they’re building because they have to. A generation of builders are now trailed by a flaming Halley’s Comet of debt, compelled to keep moving or impode. Projects are launched not to fulfill a need, but to feed obligations. What was once a business is now a compulsive, headless sprint toward… nothing.

And all of it is happening in a city where ownership is vanishing.

Pride in place has been replaced with precarious existence. Halifax is fast becoming a city of urban sharecroppers—people who own nothing, owe everything, and live forever under the boot of rent that climbs faster than wages, faster than inflation, faster than hope. People pay more to survive than they’ll ever earn in surplus. That’s not a city. That’s a racket.

The Original Sin: Amalgamation

And at the root of it all is a sin so original it barely gets mentioned anymore: amalgamation.

Thirty years ago, without meaningful debate, public consent, or strategic clarity, Nova Scotia’s government took a gamble on scale. It crammed together city, suburb, and country to create an accidental empire of bureaucracy with no central purpose, no shared culture, and no democratic foundation.

There was no vote. No convention. No vision. Just a decision.

Now we live with the consequences:
A government too big to understand us.
Too powerful to hear us.
Too aimless to lead us.
Too broken for us to fix.

No other time in Nova Scotia history would tolerate a three-decade municipal experiment that has never once been seriously reviewed—despite its obvious failure to deliver anything close to progress or prosperity. Yet here we are.

The Last Hope: Immigration

Having squandered opportunity, overregulated everything, alienated families, and destroyed any sense of fiscal restraint, Halifax then turned to immigration as a last-ditch economic plan.

This wasn’t about diversity or justice or nation-building. It was a bailout. The hope was that new people would bring new energy, new money, new babies. But even after the mayor admitted it hasn’t worked, the city continues to lure innocent and unwary newcomers into the trap. The immigration wave, welcomed as salvation, has become a net cost. A source of suffering for thousands.

We brought people here with promises of opportunity we couldn’t keep, then charged them for the privilege of watching the city decay in real time. That’s not leadership. That’s a con.

The Bookends of Nova Scotia

There’s a cruel symmetry in all this.

Once, Nova Scotia led the world in the invention of responsible government. Our ancestors built a political culture on Enlightenment ideals—liberty, public service, democratic deliberation—shaped by fiery community meetings and a world-class free press. We gave birth to governance with meaning, purpose, and beauty.

Now? We lead the world in the opposite.

We are the case study in how not to run a city. We are governed by an unaccountable, unstrategic, unexamined machine—created without democracy, operating without empathy, and expanding without end.

Stop. And Start Again.

This cannot go on. We need more than reform. We need rebirth.

We must stop this city government—freeze its expansion, audit its practices, and end its ideological monopoly—before it drags all of Nova Scotia down with it. And then we must do something radical, but not new.

We must do what Nova Scotians once did best:
Convene. Deliberate. Design. Decide.

We must build a new municipal governments with clear strategic goals: progress with prosperity, not growth without end. Not a monolithic vision. We need a diversity of voices and and ideas competing to imagine a better future. Learning from each others small bets. Building on successes. Sharing the best ideas. And being there to help each other when things don’t work.

We need governments that reflect who we are in all our variety of mind and manners—not a bureaucratic accident from the 1990s.

This is our moment. We’ve reached the end of a bad chapter. But not the end of the story.

April 1st, like every day, is our opportunity to stop and start again with a better goal in mind.