Jen is the brains of the operation, and I'm the voice. I am reading from her submission.
For the past two years, Jen has been coordinating the Our HRM Alliance through the Ecology Action Centre. The Ecology Action Centre is Nova Scotia’s oldest and most respected environmental action organization. The Our HRM Alliance is the Ecology Action Centre’s municipal campaign. Though the EAC has a provincial focus, the fact that HRM, or Halifax, makes up 40% of the province’s population means that it needs special attention. The Our HRM Alliance is a coalition of over 40 member groups, which includes health groups, business groups, and environmental groups from across the municipality—urban, suburban, and rural—who have all agreed to principles of sustainability and conservation.
Jen is trained as an urban planner, and through her training she was exposed to the regional municipal planning strategy for Halifax Regional Municipality. In theory, it’s to be the plan that guides all community decisions about where and how to develop. That includes where residences are built, where commercial and industrial activity are guided, and what areas should be preserved. In the years from the approval of the plan to the first five-year review that is currently under way, we have seen a lot of development that seemed to go against the principles outlined in the plan. We have sprawl, we have development on sensitive lands, we have beautiful wilderness areas being threatened by residential development, and we have a downtown that is losing key businesses to business parks on the fringes.
The regional plan is built on the principles of sustainability, and it is just not being adhered to.
When it comes to urban conservation, the focus should not be on the municipality or community as a whole, but must specifically target downtowns, uptowns, and the centre of the community. These are the areas that often were built 100 years ago and were essentially left to develop themselves while the municipalities and cities focused their attention on other areas, such as suburbs and industrial parks. In HRM, no investment was made in the downtown for the past 50 years. The downtown now desperately needs investment.
Society is making the shift back to urban cores. The attention of government must also shift. There was a move away from car-oriented suburban life back to urban lifestyles that involve living within walking distance of work and other amenities. As people age, they recognize the value of this kind of lifestyle. Younger people don’t want to spend their money or time on the highway. A U.S. study, “Exploring Changing Travel Trends” , found that the average number of vehicle miles travelled per person is decreasing.
According to a report by the Frontier Group entitled “Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People are Driving Less and What it Means for Transportation Policy”, more North American young people are choosing not to drive a private vehicle. This means they are taking transit, walking, and biking. They are not even bothering to get their driver's licence, because they know that a more active lifestyle is better for their health and easier on their pocketbook.
The ill effects of sitting in cars is well documented. An article entitled “Obesity relationships with community design, physical activity, and time spent in cars” concludes that each additional hour spent in a car per day is associated with a 6% increase in likelihood of obesity, while each additional kilometre walked per day is associated with a 4.8% decrease in obesity.
We know that having cities expand outward threatens agricultural and forestry lands. Once a field is paved over, it cannot be used again for growing the food that the citizens of the country need to survive. We know that the health of our watersheds, our lakes, and our streams is threatened by development and the ensuing effects of a substantial population living nearby.
To deal with this, Our HRM Alliance proposes a suite of seven solutions to help HRM get back on track. These same seven solutions would help any municipality. This is not the forum to go into the details of the solutions, but they are meant to be adopted as a suite. Choosing to implement one and not the others will not achieve the type of conservation that is needed as we navigate a world rife with the challenges of an aging population and climate change.
The seven solutions proposed by the municipality include greenbelting, investing in downtown cores, prioritizing transit and active transportation, adhering to residential growth targets, evaluating development charges, protecting water—and we have a lot of it here in HRM from our lakes and rivers to our coasts—and committing to measuring successes and deficiencies of identified actions.
The first solution, to use greenbelting, is a multi-faceted approach that centres on the use of an urban containment boundary to require that cities make the best possible use of existing infrastructure.
The greenbelting solution proposed by Our HRM Alliance consists of four separate but interlocking areas to cover the municipality as a whole, starting with perhaps the most protected areas and natural corridors, which are great places for overnight camping.
The second category is natural resources and agriculture. We don't have much agriculture in HRM, but we have a lot of forestry going on, so that's where forestry would take place, along with fishing and hunting.
The third category is rural communities and coastal management area, and the fourth is the regional centre and suburban growth centres.
It calls on the municipality to replace, repair, and maintain the sewer and water pipes that it already has in place, rather than building new ones. Within the municipality of HRM, there is enough serviced land to handle at least 30 years' worth of growth, even at the highest growth scenario, yet the municipality is approving sewer and water line extensions. The new federal standards will require massive upgrades to the existing pipes, so we ask why we should put in more infrastructure.
While obtaining federal assistance on new projects is great, most cities are facing the same problems as Halifax. They need to maintain existing infrastructure. A report compiled by the Canadian Urban Institute, entitled “The Value of Investing in Canadian Downtowns”, substantiates this point.
Having this concept recognized by the Government of Canada would move the issue of urban conservation ahead. According to Human Resources and Skills Development Canada in 2011, over 81% of the nation’s population lived in urban areas. Having a department dedicated to the conservation of the urban areas they live in is crucial.
The urban containment boundary would ensure that agricultural and forestry lands are preserved for that purpose. Wetlands and watersheds would also be protected. At the same time, investment in transit within the urban containment boundary could happen. A federal vision for transit would support this.
The HRM Alliance's second solution calls for a tri-party investment in both the downtown core and in the downtown main streets of the 50 other municipal growth centres in HRM. Candidates in the municipal election have agreed that this type of investment, as long as it is led by the federal government, is crucial for the conservation of all the municipality's urbanized areas.
Finally, the idea of urban conservation must look at preserving green spaces within our urban areas. It must also look at maintaining the areas already built. It is by giving these already-built areas primacy that there will be a disincentive to add more pavement to the size of the city. It is possible for cities to grow and develop without vastly extending their footprints.
Things will need to be done differently as society's standards and expectations change, but with this change will come a more sustainable urban environment.
Thank you very much.