A look at Halifax’s climate property tax, ahead of a civic election that could determine its future

On the property tax bill that goes to homeowners in Halifax, there’s a separate line-item for climate action.
This is unique among larger Canadian cities – many of which have put little money toward climate change even as they declare it an emergency – and raises about $18-million in dedicated funds each year. But its prominence on the bill is a recurring worry to the city bureaucrat who helps dole out the money.
“Usually when things are called out on the tax bill, they’re at risk,” said Shannon Miedama, Halifax’s director of environment and climate change. “Every year I freak out that it’s going to get debated and pulled, and it hasn’t happened yet.”
One of the tax’s primary champions, Mayor Mike Savage, is not running for re-election this month. When queried by The Globe and Mail, three leading contenders to replace him did not commit to keeping it.
Pam Lovelace said she would consider removing it if the provincial and federal government made changes to their own tax policies. Waye Mason said climate action requires secure funding but did not specify that this meant keeping the tax. Andy Fillmore did not respond to questions about it.
In 2022, Halifax city council raised property taxes by 4.6 per cent, earmarking about two-thirds of that for climate action. The average single-family household pays approximately $61 annually to the dedicated fund, according to the city.
“I don’t consider tax a dirty word, but I also don’t think you tax unless you absolutely have to do,” Mr. Savage said during a recent visit to Toronto. “It’s a statement for us, and it’s not an easy statement for politicians to make, that we believe that we need to invest in these things and we’re going to increase property tax to do it.”
Halifax faces specific challenges associated with climate change.
It is in the path of hurricanes, which are retaining strength farther north as seas warm. Its long coastline puts it at risk of sea-level rise. Its land is also sinking, at an accelerating rate.
James Boxall, a geographer at Dalhousie University, was part of a team of experts that told city council in 2010 that Halifax was subsiding at a rate of one-third of a centimetre annually. “It’s now 1/2cm/yr and the rate isn’t slowing,” he said in an e-mail last month.
Halifax’s sprawling footprint means lots of people are living in the wildland-urban interface, where fires pose substantial risk. A relatively modest blaze last year caused $165-million in damage and forced the evacuation of more than 16,000 people in Tantallon, a part of Halifax a half-hour drive from downtown.
The 2022 tax increase was a one-off rise but the money will continue to flow into city budgets unless council decides to change it.
The money helps fund the HalifACT plan for tackling climate change and its impacts. Projects funded under the plan include an energy-efficient community building in a park, solar panels and charging stations at a city depot and work to update flood hazard mapping and projections for extreme water levels.
Decisions about what to fund are made by Ms. Miedama and her team, who vet applications made by other city departments. While some proposals are rejected because they are not close enough to the plan’s goals, in other cases the team is able to shape a project to make it more effective.
“Someone like a parks supervisor will come to us and say, ‘Oh, we have this flooding issue, do you have money to re-sod the soccer field this year?’ ” she explained.
“And we’ll be like, actually, we have money if you’re willing to get some design work done to do a storm water retention pond under the fields and do this pilot project. Like, are you game? And in that situation they said yes.”
In some cases, she said, the city has been able to tap provincial and federal funds to make its own money go further.
“We take climate seriously, and we’ve taken the impacts of climate change very seriously,” said Mr. Savage, the outgoing mayor. “I often hear from people, well, you know, China and Brazil and India are using coal. Okay, that’s fine, but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to act.”