When four became one, and Halifax Regional Municipality was born  Halifax Regional Municipality was fittingly born on April Fool’s Day 1996, amid rancorous debate over everything from governance to the name.  HRM formed after a diktat from the government of Dartmouth-mayor-turned-premier John Savage, ordering the amalgamation of the Town of Bedford, the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth, and the Municipality of the County of Halifax in a bid to cut costs.  “When we formed the new Halifax Regional Council back then, they called it the Super City election,” recalls District 2 Counci ..read more

Premier Houston talks rent caps and preparing to double Nova Scotia’s population Premier Tim Houston says Halifax real-estate developer and landlord Scott McCrea sold him on to the idea of rent caps. The Armour Group Ltd. CEO is big donor to the provincial Progressive Conservatives and served as chair of Houston’s transition team after he won the leadership bid. “He was the one who was promoting extending the rent cap to me because he knew that’s what’s important for Nova Scotians,” Houston tells Advocate Media in a year-end interview. “He cares to the extent that he puts his on personal situa ..read more

Looking ahead to 2022, the premier is promising Nova Scotia a lot — can he deliver?  At the end of his first 100 days in office, Premier Tim Houston has been hearing a lot about Nova Scotia’s challenges and inequities.  “I feel an incredible sense of urgency to respond to the challenges, so I do think we’re moving very fast,” he says. “I know that if we move fast, sometimes you make mistakes. That’s the kind of thing you have to balance, but when we make those mistakes, we have to have the confidence to say, ‘That was a mistake; we have to fix that’ … Sometimes, if you find it hard t ..read more

Nova Scotia has never elected a woman premier — Angela Simmonds and Claudia Chender are both working to change that Approached about running for the Liberals one month before the provincial election in 2021, Angela Simmonds didn’t just have her eyes on a seat in the legislature — she wanted to lead the party.  While she was executive director of the Land Titles Initiative, a government project to help Black Nova Scotians get clear title of their land, she came to a crossroads.  “I was in a position where I could make some changes, but also wasn’t at the top to enforce the changes,” s ..read more

A recent immigrant takes listeners on a tour of his new country’s government Not long after Rhys Waters and his family immigrated from Wales to Nova Scotia, COVID-19 hit. He’d been trying to learn more about his new country’s politics, with little success, so his pandemic project became Canadian Politics Is Boring, a very tongue-in-cheek podcast about how the country is governed, featuring Waters and his decidedly apolitical friend Jesse Harley, a local filmmaker. It began as a way “just to pass the time, have some fun, focus on doing comedy work,” Waters said on The Rick Howe Show in 2020. “I ..read more

As he settles into his job, the new premier sees a Nova Scotia with a ton of potential — if he can sort out health care and housing New premier Tim Houston says he believes that the government should be doing more to improve the lives of Nova Scotians. Nova Scotia’s first Progressive Conservative premier since 2009 faces the challenge of an overburdened health-care system, an economy still grappling with the pandemic, a housing crisis that has hit a breaking point, and a province struggling to find its identity. Recently, he talked with Unravel Halifax about public health, health care, policin ..read more