Learning is not transactional. It’s foundational and it’s transformative.
Our job as councillors is to learn, analyze and apply both to our decision making on behalf of residents. Is it difficult to provide objective and easily defined benefits from attending the annual conference of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities like the one I attended with many of my colleagues last week? Sure. But that doesn’t mean I can’t easily make a strong case for how valuable the exercise is.
Every councillor will derive different benefits that tie into the choices of sessions, connections made and study tours taken at the FCM conference coupled with who they are as councillors – which undoubtedly benefits their residents because the defining characteristics of that councillor were in part responsible for their voters putting them in office as their representative on Council. We can amply the benefit by either deepening our understanding of a topic about which we are passionate, or conversely on a topic about which we feel we would benefit from learning more. The opportunity to ask questions in real time, and in many cases in the spaces were there to observe, analyze and discuss, offers and invaluable opportunity to broaden our understanding, benefiting from the breadth of experiences recounted by counterparts from municipalities larger and smaller than HRM. They benefit from our knowledge as well.
Elected office – in having the honour of representing our fellow residents – is a lonely place, truthfully. It’s a rare job, held by select few before and with us. As a result, finding people who relate to our particular challenges, large and small, is hard. Staff are the experts in their fields, unquestionably. They have a depth of knowledge in their area but not every area of the municipality. By contrast, residents demand that we as members of council have at least a little bit of expertise in every facet of the municipality. That takes time, effort, a lot of collaboration and mutual support, including knowledge sharing with elected officials and staff from other jurisdictions. It’s a learning and expertise accelerant. That most certainly benefits our residents. As a rookie councillor, I took away a LOT from my first experience at FCM2025 in Ottawa last June. Now, with an additional year as a councillor, I have that experience to draw upon, to focus my intentional learning and receive information – both delivered and drawn from experiential learning. If you’ve ever been a part of a high functioning team wherein you’re not the most experienced person in the room but you’re also not the least, I’m sure you immediately understand what I’m getting at. You learn and you mentor at the same time. Both of those exercises make you better at your job.
So I can tell you that I believe every dollar spent on the conference delivers more than a dollar of value to residents – orders of magnitude more. Because I learned, observed, questioned, and analyzed a terrific volume of information across a multitude of service areas of our municipality in a concentrated periods of time and in a level of depth and breadth not possible any other way without occupying a LOT of our own team’s time. This was powerful learning exercise to see things to which we might aspire as a municipality or roads we want to be sure not to go down, ideas we can borrow and customize to meet the unique needs of HRM residents, geography, priorities and budgetary limitations. And everything learned helps inform questions I will ask of staff, of my colleagues on council and of my residents in pursuits of better, more informed outcomes. While it’s hard to put a price on that, I have no doubt that for me it greatly exceeds the cost of attending the conference.
With the “why” out of the way, here are some highlights of the “what”, from my perspective, that I thought I would share from my experience:
Workshops/presentations
How to Pay for Growth: Alternatives to property taxes and development charges
- this session didn’t quite deliver the information I had been hoping to glean. The focus would up being on particular financing programs – still useful, but it didn’t dive into revenue diversification as I had expected it would.
AI in Action: Real World Wins for Municipal Service Delivery
- this was an excellent session that used a structured panel discussion followed by Q&A from the floor, which resulted in a number of real-world examples, present and forecast
- I asked a question about the quality of data going into AI-based data analysis and the benefits of structured, unsiloed data to benefit outcomes of analysis. I got great feedback from the panel.
Barriers to Builds: Sharing Perspectives on Housing Priorities Across Orders of Government
- we heard much about the Build Canada Homes program coupled with land use planning and zoning to accelerate housing delivery
Atlantic Caucus Meeting of FCM
- We of course discussed the fact that FCM is coming to Halifax next year, we heard updates on a number of areas of advocacy from FCM and the subcommittees that help provide input on these areas of advocacy. Later that day, our Atlantic Caucus vide chair, Patty Cuttell, was nominated for and confirmed as Chair of the Atlantic Caucus.
Study Tours
Data in the city
- Open house format allowed me to ask questions of multiple business units about how data supports municipal operations – planning, implementation, management, monitoring and improving. I got to ask questions of staff about heat mapping of emergency and public safety calls, and I asked about extrapolating that means of data analysis to other service areas, such as 311. It was a really interesting discussion. I also spoke with their planning team about how their permits and applications maps provide the facility for a radius search around an address – which is a feature I’m eager to see in HRM – and that’s just the tipping point of what I think we can ultimately achieve to improve resident awareness of what’s proposed or approved for their area.
Bringing Vision Zero to Life
- We had discussions with engineers and leaders from traffic team as well as the Councillor representing the area we visited on this tour, speaking about the combination of strategy/policy, budget priority, design and infrastructure implementation supportive of goals to reduce collisions causing death and serious injury to zero. I was also able to ask their engineers about any experiences they had with dynamic signalling powered by AI. They indicated they had some a limited amount of testing on two key corridors (much like we are in coordination with the Province) but not rolled out anything system wide just yet.
Community Safety: Edmonton’s Multi-agency Approach
- This walking tour included detailed discussion of policy support for community safety, a visit to a street reconstruction marrying best practice design with implementation of infrastructure upgrades to improve public safety, from lighting to sitelines, to pedestrian orientation, and a guides tour of the downtown public library, tasked with the delivery of a myriad of community safety services in addition to traditional modern library services.
LRT Construction Alignment Tour
- This was a multi-stop tour of the expansive construction project to add 18.5km to Edmonton’s existing 28km of LRT corridors and its connectedness to centres of density and cross linkages with the city’s bus routes, as well as a view of several expanded sites to deliver maintenance services for the LRT expansion supported by substantial federal funding. We also saw creative ways that a mall on the route chose to enhance their public space to complement the design of the nearest station, creating a more seamless integrated flow from the station to the mall entrance. They did it on their own dime too, but with design input from the municipal design team
Edmonton City Hall
- We did a guided walk through of the public spaces of city hall, had a discussion of the security measures implemented in the building (very much like our own), and visited their Council Chamber and their Committee meeting room. Even their committee room was quite a bit larger with more space for the public than our own Chamber in city hall – but then again the building was built in 1992 and not, like ours, in 1890!
Inglewood Infill Walking Tour
- I didn’t attend myself but saw photos and spoke to several councillors that attended this tour about creative approaches to infill densification that respects community design and neighborhood character. And on the LRT tour, we passed by some of the same infill projects and Councillor Austin pointed them out to me so I was able to see them in person in the end.
Explore the Coronation Park Sports Recreation Centre
- I didn’t attend this one because it was at the same time as the LRT tour, but Councillors Steele and Purdy did (we try to divide and conquer where we can) and when we all met up afterward, they spoke highly of the sophistication and integration of recreation opportunities at this new facility. Councillor Steele sites on the board at Canada Games Centre and Councillor Purdy has a long relationship with Cole Harbour Place so I felt we were very well represented with Councillors with considerable experience with public recreation spaces.
City experiences
Homelessness is heartbreakingly more severe in Edmonton than Halifax
- Acuity stood out, drug use was apparent. Even just on the way to and front the convention centre downtown, I witnessed hard drug use multiple times each day and many people living on the streets and int he parks, but I did not see encampments.
- Community response with non-police intervention with peace officers and mental health navigators was notable and I witnessed this a few times while in the city. Edmonton has had peace officers, a branch distinct from their police service, for many years.
Transit was noticeably frequent throughout the downtown and into the closest suburbs
- A transit bus went by every few minutes throughout the core but also quite frequently when much further from the core, something to which we continue to aspire in HRM and the 10 buses approved as part of the 2026/27 budget are a step in this direction.
Traffic flowed a bit better but was also noticeably lighter in our limited experience commuting in Edmonton
- The volume of traffic seemed lighter than HRM even at rush hour. I don’t have a reasonable explanation for this given the city’s population other than the anecdotal observation that buses and trains were very well used, as were alternative modes of transportation, including bikes, scooters and of could pedestrian walkways, theoretically taking some of the pressure off of the roadways.
Networking
- I made my rounds of the trade show over a couple of days, speaking with vendors that included modular housing companies, transit consulting firms, public space design experts, volunteerism and social connectedness enablement organizations, and more.
- I spoke with many councillors and mayors from across the country and the hot topics that were asked about first revealed much about the most pressing challenges from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
- We had many lengthy discussions with Atlantic Canadian councillors and mayors about the opportunity presented by FCM2027 in Halifax.
- I and several councillors and the mayor represented Halifax by attending a reception hosted by the Canadian Ports Association and had a number of discussions with other delegates of port cities.
I can’t begin to articulate how my role as a member of Council would be different had I not had the experiences, but I know I benefitted immensely. That’s a net gain for the residents I represent in District 16 and across the municipality as a whole. As I stated at the start, education is foundational and transformative. Every decision with which I am tasked from here on in will be informed by these experiences – experiences I could only have had by pursuing them – they weren’t going to come to me.
Get in Touch
Please reach out to me via my official HRM points of contact.
HRM City Hall
1871 Argyle Street
Halifax NS B3J 3S1
Canada
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