A Budget Discussion Primer
Note: I’ve done my best to be as complete as possible in my description of the process as I have experienced it and as I have come to understand it from my perspective.
In the time I’ve spent on HRM Council, my professional life as a communicator has become increasingly useful. It’s extremely important to me to play a role in helping residents understand what I do now in this job, how things are handled at the municipality and how I envision it working in the future. And it’s deeply concerning to me when information to which residents are regularly exposed fails to tell the whole story – or worse. The more complex the topic, the shallower the information upon which opinions are formed seems to get – I’m not entirely sure why. But to the best of my ability I aim to do something about it. You don’t need to look any further to see the sandbox simplified to a single grain of sand than HRM’s budget. Everyone has an opinion, but most have not seen below the surface. This will be a bit of an explainer series on that topic. Besides, it really helps to have a common framing of what this series will include – not only for your sake but mine.
As I share this series, it should help residents better understand how the municipality really works and how council steers and supports the municipality’s work through policy setting. It will also provide residents with greater insight into my approach to the job to which I was elected, representing District 16 Bedford-Wentworth on Halifax Regional Council. In that representation, I do the homework, work with staff, collect feedback from residents, and use my judgement as a 40+ year resident of this community to balance what is right for the District and what is right for the municipality as a whole. Often they are aligned. Sometimes they may be slightly out of sync. Often, I get feedback from residents on wildly different sides of the same issue. Reconciling that clash is just another part of the job.
The budget for the municipality is one such divisive issue. Naturally everyone has an opinion. Sometimes it’s deeply considered and granular in nature, and sometimes it could be a natural emotional response to a social media comment or news headline that glosses over specifics. More often than not, it’s somewhere in between. What quickly becomes clear is that most of where people are divided lies balanced on an incomplete picture of how the municipality works. It’s not at all surprising. Even as engaged as I was before deciding to run for Council, once in the job, the volume of learning I would have to do became apparent.
Now that’s I’m a little over a year in, and having been through 2 budgets (we’re not quite done with this one at the time of this posting), I can tell you that it’s far more complex and nuanced than you would think. Considering it’s a $1.2B budget, I suppose complexity comes with the territory. The layers of how municipal governance works are considerable – and that’s just the policy side of things. Council sets policy in the form of bylaws and direction to the CAO’s office, and then the staff operationalize the documented policies in the form of municipal services. Councillors don’t “direct” the operational side of things, but we try to steer attention to the things residents care about that are already ostensibly well defined in policy so that the operational folks can be aware and take things on – snow removal, garbage collection, police, fire, transit, pot holes, traffic lights, construction permits, sidewalk maintenance – the list is extensive.
The purpose of this series will be to dispel some myths, reveal some truths, and be open and honest about where the grey areas lie. Policies are only as good as the imaginations that dreamt them up. Which is to say, there are sometimes gaps and they can always be improved. They can be informed by new learning, and be appropriately challenged by real-world versus theoretical thinking. That’s how policies get amended. That’s how new policies get drafted. It can be a tedious process because it’s a thoughtful series of stages to implement such changes. Barriers to rapid change are there by design, as policies unto themselves. Mayor and Council are not of royal ascent, able to make a change on a whim. Everything is vetted by council, staff, the public and whatever best practices of the day apply (which can also be challenged). That methodical, transparent process may be maddeningly slow by some standards, but it’s meant to be more representative of the public interest as a result.
So where better to kick this series off than by my taking a crack at explaining the budget from my perspective? How it actually gets crafted, from start to finish, with the many layers of feedback and revisions along the way to final approval at the end of March. I’ll use this budget year’s discussions and some of my votes on the record as real-world examples of these factors at play, shaping the direction of the 2026/27 budget.
I will start the series off with some definitions and context to help set the stage for the discussion to come.