Halifax Regional Municipality– Many familiar with Halifax politics are quick to blame City Council for our civic ills. While cynicism towards Canadian city councils is not uncommon, in Halifax our Council is often regarded as a barrier to the implementation of progressive ideas, a rival in civic-minded endeavour and an ineffective mechanism useful only to political stair climbers. But as political participation has waned, extra-political citizen engagement has spread, though this alone will not be enough to create the cities we envision. Instead it will require we embrace and integrate these engagement process outcomes into the formal political dialogue. This could be done through novel approaches that will ultimately serve to reconcile people and the political process for democratic renewal.
In our city, as in much of the mature democratic world, there is a growing disengagement between government and citizens. The 37% voter turnout during the last HRM election was nothing short of a collective act of attrition against civic good and a shirking of responsibility to each other. Considering the transformative effect that voting can have on election outcomes, future non-engagement is inexcusable. Have we forgotten that people and politics are two sides of the same coin that pays progress forward?
Today, extra-political measures of citizen engagement (public consultations, visioning sessions, world cafes and the like) have become ubiquitous. If done effectively there are few better ways to capture community sentiment and create a vision for the future. However, they can be detrimental by exacerbating citizen-government disconnect if in the end they serve as political smokescreens, are superficial treatments, wholly politically irrelevant or exclusive. Exclusivity is a common shortcoming that can be dangerous to the marginalized as lack of due engagement further reinforces systemic or process biases. Poorly designed engagement strategies serve only to put lipstick on a political pig; and they will never be a substitute for the political process (nor should they aspire to).
But the growth of extra-political engagement is a key factor influencing the renewal of the formal democracy, particularly at the local level. This is not because these strategies are necessarily new or progressive in nature but rather because they are reversionary: they create a feeling of a more directly representative democracy at the origins of our political system; revive a sense of ownership in governance and reveal in civics a simplistic beauty long obscured under bureaucracy, rigid process and regulation.
A resurgence in direct citizen involvement is needed to revitalize the municipal democratic system but it will require the greater relevancy brought through embracing ongoing public engagement trends to ease integration of citizen sentiment and formal politic process. While citizens are the key to civic vitality, the formal political process remains the gatekeeper to manifesting such a civic vision. In Halifax, there are a few potential avenues to hasten reconciliation and unlock the potential of our city.
The first suggestion is the creation of a municipal Shadow Council. A Shadow Council is an independent, quasi-political organization (possibly incorporated as a provincial society) that would play the role that the Loyal Opposition does in Parliament. It would add an element to local politics that could advocate for and be guided by outcomes of ongoing extra-political engagement mechanisms. Its Critics could speak to issues with expertise and directly critique Councilors on their decisions and voting, highlighting alternatives, focusing tangential debate and debunking speaking points. This visible and vocal organization could act as a place where potential Councilors could develop their skills and increase their public profiles between elections. These individuals would precipitate change by becoming viable alternatives to incumbents through building trust with the electorate, since their messages would be free of the political media cacophony that accompanies campaigns.
The second is the formal organization of political parties at the municipal level. This is a considerably more difficult endeavour and if done incorrectly can elicit both popular and media backlash (q.v. Citizens for Halifax). While it would be preferable that Councillors cooperate with the good of the entire region in mind, there is considerable evidence that this is largely not possible. Our municipality is too large, too politically fractured, too unwieldy and possesses nonsensical distribution of powers and influence over district-specific affairs.
Municipal level parties could bring cohesion and political coordination across our vast municipality. Voting in blocs would necessitate tradeoffs of support that would entail adoption of a broader vision and deeper empathy that could even help to bridge the pronounced rural-urban divide that tethers the economic and social engine of our urban core, which only seems to endow rural communities with investments that undermine rather than build district, and by extension, regional resilience. It may even allow for what is currently a near political impossibility: a Mayor from an urbanized area.
If Halifax fails to reach its potential it will have little to do with a dearth of energy or community involvement from its citizenry: Halifax’s got heart. It will require a renewed sense of civic duty and teamwork between citizens and political processes, along with the realization that we are City Hall. We are the people and in democracy all authority, legitimacy and vitality resonates from us.
Photos by CLICK Productions
4 comments
The political impossibility you present seems to crumble when you consider that the young HRM has only had two mayors, and they both previously served as Mayor of fairly urban areas.
If your point is to lament that the HRM is in line to inherit a string of rural/suburban mayors, perhaps it is because many of the City’s ‘urban’ councilors and political contenders invest their time and soap-boxing on what you call ‘district-specific affairs’.
Municipal politics IS district-specific affairs. There is no other level of government in Canada that deals with so many of the 1:1 scale decisions that affect the day-to-day lives of people. Whether its garbage collection, unsightly properties, noise complaints or snow removal, municipal governments exist as the bastard children of the province in order to take care of district-specific issues.
Councilors certainly need to be mindful of the ‘good of the entire region’. There’s no question in that. Its how you make a great city. In my (perhaps naive) opinion, people want open-minded, independent councilors that provide the best opportunity to bring positive resolutions to the issues that affect them most. Municipal level political parties are not the way to achieve this.
Re: James
The problem is that downtown district-specific issues, as you describe them, largely do not exist. What is good for the downtown will likely be good for the entire region. This includes investing in the vitality of downtown public spaces, housing, streetscapes, infrastructure like transit, cycling, etc.
The idea that downtown councilors need to be more mindful of the ‘good of the entire region’ seems counter intuitive when it’s suburban councilors who want continued investment in sprawling development that further stretches the resources of all of HRM. This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of good things going on in certain spots in the more rural regions, but generally many rural regional projects only impact the select few people who live or work there, unlike projects downtown.
I also think the fact that the HRM is young actually makes changing the political procedures and processes far more likely than if it were decades old and entrenched in the minds of councilors and electors alike.
Well said.
Thanks for your comment James; let’s examine the arguments.
First, these “fairly urban” areas you mention are definitely built up areas but physically do not possess the density, culture, composition of an urban core areas nor do they exist in the mind of the residents as necessarily “urban”; in fact both areas are suburban meaning by definition they are decidedly not urban. The urban character, particularly in the minds of residents, is paramount as it is an area’s distinct urbanity that can elicit a psychological response that breeds division: a “Downtown Mayor” could not relate to, and therefore not duly represent rural areas. Playing these divisions are the pedals of political power dynamics at all levels and are at play wherever there are votes to be cast. Yes, Walter Fitzgerald did win the first election to be Mayor of the HRM but he did while losing 15 of 23 Districts in a race whose character, in a time of amalgamation, brought with it many complicated issues unlikely to be repeated. He also lost the next race and he himself “didn’t know what happened.”
Secondly, this article is about civic reconciliation. I in no way “lament” a string of non-urban Mayors. In my mind, the ideal would be a balance between all potential divisions within the HRM. But considering the current state of affairs in the HRM a strong, vibrant regional economic and cultural engine is badly needed: right now that could only exist in relevant scale within the urban core. Without the financial and mutually beneficial resources, say local farmers’ markets within urban centers wherein rural producers may sell their products, rural enhancement initiatives may prove to be fruitless if we are to move to a resilient local economy. There is a mutualism between the urban and rural which has largely been overlooked in recent decades manifested as a product of many forms of social disconnect.
This having been said in time we may very well need a “rural” Mayor who understands rural challenges, issues and systems in a way an “urban” Mayor may not be able to. I believe the next major shift in urbanity will be the integration of rurality into urban systems and landscape (urban food production [including fowl and urban farming], skill trades, bartering, and urban modularization that mimic discrete small town systems capable of nurturing “small town” social capital).
I will yield that municipal politics is the most direct (“1:1”) form of politics but of no less or more importance than any other; its nature makes it somewhat more manageable but more importantly more accessible. In fact the most successful politicians will tell you that all politics are local, no matter what level you work in. Moreover, and it is at the core of this piece, that politics are just people.
To speak within the context of your metaphor: municipal politics is not the bastard child of the political sphere but rather it is the workings of the immediate family; the Provincial and Federal levels are the quirky and boisterous extended family that can be a bit much to take at times but you have to deal with because “they’re family, and in the end family has to stick together”.
I do not feel you are naive, in fact your opinion is widely held and you have articulated it well. But I will again stress that HRM is vast, it is fractured and its politics are often antagonistic in a way that is disruptive and detrimental to the ideals of “common good through collective action”. Political leadership is often not popular because it is often big picture, indirect and thus often interpreted as non-representative or capitulation. Our city Councillors are good citizens; are independent and represent their constituents well; but often to a fault through side-stepping, half-stepping and hard-stepping on regionally progressive issues for the benefits of optics on the home front. A superordinate, cohesive factor could buffer potential backlash though articulating a wider vision and making citizens realize the importance of “give and take” in politics along with other practical and organizational benefits. Vote trading already happens this is unavoidable in politics. Municipal parties would not add a layer, but merely enhance, coordinate and make transparent informal mechanism that are already at work.
In closing the mechanism therein presented are merely suggestions meant to open discussion. This was not so much written to be a political piece as one to make people recognize that politics, institutions, families, community are all the same thing in essence: they are all just people bound together by different types of understandings of one’s roles within these organizations. We are free to change these clades and their roles as we see fit but in the end we are all in this together and have to begin to recognize and actualize our visions within this political paradigm.