This is the second article in a series that looks at the gap between climate rhetoric and reality in terms of what municipal governments say they are doing versus what they are actually accomplishing. The series compares and contrasts policies and outcomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia with its nearest comparable American neighbor, Portland, Maine.
Previously, Part 1 placed municipalities at the center of the climate crisis. Here in Part 2, we look at how culture can support or undermine credible attempts to reduce emissions. Part 3 illustrates the extent to which a municipality’s climate action plan can be little more than an exercise in virtue signaling.
Portland Aspires to be a Better Version of Itself; Halifax Aspires to Be More Like Dubai
Over the past twenty-five years, Halifax and Portland have gone in opposite directions in terms of urban planning and development. The implications regarding CO2 emissions are significant. To make sense of these differences, it’s helpful to understand the cultural context in which municipal leaders in these two places are making decisions.
But first, I’d like to highlight the different outcomes that these two municipalities produce in terms of development. My focus is on: 1) building demolition, 2) constructing climate-damaging high-rises, and 3) expanding auto-dependency.
Since 2010, Halifax has been tearing down large numbers of its older, historic buildings. To date, Portland has not. Halifax aggressively pursues high-rise construction inside its urban core. To date, Portland has not. And Halifax is rapidly expanding auto-dependency outside the urban core. It does this with a combination of high-rises, mid-rises, and a more conventional mix of suburban-style housing. Beyond the city, the Portland metropolitan area is growing much more slowly. Notably, they don’t build high-rises in suburban Maine.
Three decades ago, Halifax and Portland’s urban fabric shared things in common. Both were historic maritime cities at the edge of the North Atlantic with a mixture of buildings dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Today, Halifax aspires to be more like Dubai. To date, Portland has aimed to be more like itself, but better.
So why the diverging outcomes? In short, the cultures of Maine and Nova Scotia look nothing like one another.
Portland: A Communitarian Culture with Engaged Citizens
Maine has what’s called a communitarian culture, rooted in the state’s tradition of town meetings. In smaller communities, people gather to talk, debate, and vote on issues. Portland is too big to govern using town meetings, but the idea of citizen involvement is still prominent. It’s expected that community members will take part in public life. The pervasive attitude is that government is supposed to serve the people, not powerful private interests.
This has implications for the way urban planning and development works. Portland has twenty-seven different community organizations that they recognize in their master plan. Eleven of these are neighborhood organizations. Each has its own board of directors, and they hold monthly meetings with residents. Most, like the Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Organization, have their own website.
These organizations have worked with the city’s planning department on initiatives such as Portland’s city-wide master plan and revising their zoning ordinance. Getting people involved doesn’t mean everyone is happy with everything that goes on in their communities. Yet the people I met during my visits to Portland over the past year are noticeably more invested in their community than the people I’ve lived around in Halifax over the past two decades. Walk into a Portland restaurant, shop, or cafe, and ask someone about what’s going on in their community, and more often than not, you get an informed opinion. All of this has implications for planning and development.
Talking with Portlanders about Portland feels different from speaking with Haligonians about Halifax. Many that I’ve spoken with in Portland have some sense of agency, even residents who are angry and heap criticism on the city government. In contrast, residents of Halifax often speak about planning and development in the city with an air of resignation, passivity, or indifference.
Halifax: A “Governmentally Organized Town,” Shaped by “Top-Down Decision Making”
To gain insight into Halifax, we can go back to 1970 to find an assessment of its culture that’s as relevant today as it was five decades ago. That year, the province brought in a team of twelve prominent “urban specialists” that included luminaries such as a former director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Seven of the twelve were American. Five were Canadian.
Their official job as outsiders was to spend a week in the Halifax metro area, meet with hundreds of people, conduct an analysis, and make recommendations that would help, as the sponsors said, “maximize and create the greatest growth and development.” Over five 19-hour days, the team met with thirty-six separate groups representing business, government, and ordinary citizens. It turned out to be a fascinating, conflict-ridden, week-long televised town hall in which influential people got defensive, and ordinary citizens had a voice for the first time in memory.
Early in the week, the team realized the situation was, as the American journalist Ken Hartnett wrote, an “opportunity of a lifetime.” In short, they clashed with the powerful, upset the status quo with their criticism, and called out the “complacent” and those who were “smug about their own contributions to the society’s advancement.”
In the end, it was opined that Nova Scotians were “part of the debris of the British Empire.” Halifax, their capital city, was a “governmentally organized town” that sat in a province where the “economic process is completely riddled with political intervention.” Its economy was hamstrung by a longstanding practice of having the government subsidize “non-viable enterprises.” Their “top-down” decision-making occurred within a series of “authoritarian, bureaucratic, not very productive” ways of doing business. Those in power were more concerned with “keeping industries and bureaucracies going” rather than doing well by ordinary citizens.
Of the insights the team provided, one stood out above all the rest. They came to Nova Scotia tasked with providing strategic guidance to drive a “growth and development” agenda. Having experienced the historic city and its people, they found Halifax had a charm of its own. Some on the team seriously questioned the wisdom of provincial elites putting “annual growth rates and GDP in a position of absolute value,” noting that “much would be lost.”
Pursuing growth for growth’s sake would only produce “more traffic jams and pollution.” It was suggested the region make a “quantum leap” by pursuing a quality-of-life agenda focused on research institutions, universities, arts, and culture. These things were interconnected in that they “attract the sort of people who are at the heart and core of the footloose scientifically oriented industries that make for dynamic growth.” And if Halifax could make a “commitment to building this kind of community,” their “economic problems would be solved anyhow.”
Halifax’s Cultural Embrace of Mass Immigration Supercharges Real Estate and Development
As the years passed, Nova Scotia’s body politic proved itself unable to change. In the past, it supported marginally viable or polluting industries with subsidies. Today, it relies on mass immigration—mostly from India and China—to drive growth in construction and real estate. In 2024, construction and real estate accounted for almost a quarter of the province’s GDP (23.3%). Taken together, they represent the largest sector of the economy.
All this is taking place in a province where 63% of GDP ties back to government spending. The “authoritarian, bureaucratic” systems spoken of decades ago remain in place as Nova Scotia’s per capita GDP lags further behind the poorest U.S. state, Mississippi.
Support for mass immigration in Nova Scotia and Canada as a whole is higher than in other countries. It’s become a part of Canada’s national identity in a country whose prime minister recently said, “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”
And what better way to show this difference than by acting as if borders don’t matter—especially when the U.S. is doing the opposite? Both federal and provincial governments can now bring in large numbers of foreign nationals on their own. Nova Scotia, for example, has a Department of Immigration and Population Growth, though it’s recently been quietly renamed after several fraudulent practices came to light.
Politicians in Nova Scotia from all parties support the goal of doubling the population to 2 million by 2060. They are on track to meet that goal, with most new residents settling in the Halifax metro area. It’s to become what Canadian supporters of mass immigration call a “mega-region.” Despite past warnings, pursuing growth for growth’s sake has long since trumped the pursuit of quality of life as a basis for economic prosperity.
Nova Scotians are told by those in power that mass immigration is needed because its population is aging and growing slowly. The message is effective in a culture where deference to authority and passivity is normalized. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest that dramatically increasing the population makes life better for individuals. It’s a simplistic, crude approach to increasing GDP. And it’s one that Maine, which has similar demographics, does not follow.
Like Nova Scotia, Maine has an aging population and has experienced sustained sluggish population growth. This was particularly the case between 2010 and 2019 when annual growth rates averaged a paltry 0.12 percent. Yet, in Maine, there’s no talk of immigration targets or doubling the state’s population. Discussions about economic growth focus on innovation and quality of life. As a result, outcomes in terms of population growth are vastly different.
In 2023, the Portland metropolitan region grew by 3,170 people from 563,159 to 566,329. That same year, Halifax, which had a slightly smaller population, grew by over 19,237 people, from 472,962 to 492,199. These figures tell us the growth rate for Halifax was 7 times faster than Portland’s (i.e., 4.1% versus 0.6%) and outpaced all the fastest-growing developing nations on earth except Chad.
The cultural embrace of mass immigration has contributed to serious problems in Nova Scotia and across Canada, such as spiraling housing costs, homelessness, and an over-burdened healthcare system. These issues won’t be easy to resolve. For our purposes, we’ll focus on how this policy is shaping urban development in Halifax. As this series will show, these policies are leading to the worst possible outcomes for the climate.
Portland’s Master Plan: A Statement of Community Values Focused on Quality of Life
Just fifty-three miles of ocean separates Maine and Nova Scotia at their closest point, yet they’re a world apart. To better understand the sharp cultural differences, let’s compare the master plans for Portland and Halifax, focusing on their values, urban design, and population growth. The differences shed light on mindsets that are, at their core, incompatible with each other.
| Before going further, I’d like to answer a question, namely, “What’s a master plan?” A good master plan starts by expressing a clear vision for a community. How does a community think about itself today, and where does it want to be in, say, ten years? This vision is supported by a set of strategic goals that, among other things, shape urban development. Each goal is supported by one or more measurable objectives which, when pursued, enable the municipality to achieve that goal. Each objective gets mapped to one or more policies. Policy implementation runs the gamut, from creating new zoning regulations to funding infrastructure projects to conducting a study of relevance to a municipality’s well-being. As we’re about to see, not all master plans are created equal. |
Portland’s master plan is called Portland’s Plan 2030. It’s very well written and easy to read. Its single most important sentence is the one that says, “The plan is a statement of community values and a framework to advance those values.” The plan does not read like a government document and explicitly states that it’s intended to be widely read by the community and easily understood. Reading it, you get the sense that residents helped write it. And they did.
The “heart” of Portland’s Plan 2030 is the plan’s two-page vision statement. This vision reflects the communitarian culture I mentioned previously. An article in the Portland Press Herald written by resident Lisa Whited answers the question, Whose vision does Portland’s plan reflect?
Portland’s new comprehensive plan is by the community and for the community. It is not the vision of a singular person—not the mayor’s vision, the city manager’s vision, the planning director’s vision, or even the City Council’s vision. It is the city residents’ collective vision.
Portland resident Lisa Whited
Portland expresses its vision through thirty-one declarative, community-based statements, most of which start with the word “we,” as in “we the residents of Portland.” Maintaining and enhancing Portland’s “authenticity” is one of the plan’s pillar themes. It’s reflected in vision statements such as, “We will maintain our character through preservation, innovation, and excellence in design for the built environment.”
Portland’s plan notes that the widespread success they’ve had to date with historic preservation has stimulated private investment. It’s a reference point for future development. The expectation among Portlanders is that today’s “city builders” will maintain Portland’s “authentic character” in a way that enables the city to “flourish.” Portland’s expectations regarding the quality and character of development are clearly stated.
Keeping Portland’s authenticity in mind, the plan focuses on how design, quality of life, and density are connected. So far, Portland’s residents have not pushed for density for density’s sake. Instead, their plan shows that density comes naturally from well-designed, people-friendly neighborhoods. This plan also includes pictures of these kinds of developments to set clear expectations.
Halifax’s Master Plan: A Pronouncement of Government Intent Focused on Strategic Growth
The Halifax master plan is something entirely different. Referred to as the Centre Plan, its actual title is the Regional Centre Secondary Municipal Planning Strategy. Bureaucratic and cumbersome to read, it’s not an expression of community values or vision. It’s a pronouncement of government intent.1 The plan speaks of planning staff doing “extensive community engagement.” However, like much of the plan’s content, the language used here is performative and misleading. In reality, the government made all consequential decisions shaping development before they unveiled the plan to the public. It’s just as if they built a house and then let residents pick the curtains.
More than anything else, Halifax’s plan is concerned with so-called “strategic growth.” It’s by far the most prominent idea expressed in the document. As this series will show, strategic growth in Halifax is a euphemism for using mass immigration to fuel development of a sort that maximizes emissions.
To better understand why strategic growth matters to those in power in Nova Scotia, we need to return to 1970. Recall the twelve outsiders tasked with providing recommendations on how to maximize strategic growth. AP reporter Ken Hartnett recorded their analysis for posterity. The publication is aptly titled, Documentary of a Community’s Week-Long Confrontation with Itself. In it, we learn the outsiders, “most of them men of international reputation,” found a society “dedicated to underachievement,” possessing a massive “inferiority complex.”2
Here again, in the present day, little has changed regarding those who operate the levers of power. Politicians and pundits in Nova Scotia talk about the need for “growth” to make Halifax the next “world-class city” or the “next Boston.” Media boosterism celebrates the municipality’s seemingly desperate need to be something that it currently is not.
In Maine, you won’t find expressions of aspirational desperation. This is despite, again, the state having the oldest population in the country and a sluggish population growth rate. Maine’s economic plan expresses trust in its people and takes a smart approach to population challenges. Like Iceland, Estonia, and New Zealand, Maine illustrates that it’s possible to do well economically with a stable population. While demographic challenges exist, Maine focuses on innovation, quality of life, and encouraging employers to make the case why people should come to them. What they don’t do is chase population growth to fuel an economy propped up by real estate development.
Halifax’s push for “strategic growth” comes, in part, from something that happened in 2014. That year Nova Scotia’s government commissioned a report that delivered an alarmist warning about “accelerating population loss and economic decline.” The report told Nova Scotians they needed to change their mindset and direction. It also called for the provincial government to pursue “significantly higher rates” of immigration.3
Many in academia found the Nova Scotia report troubling and misleading. One critique noted that the report’s authors framed Nova Scotia’s circumstances as a catastrophe to heighten fear to ensure compliance with their “call to action.” The most prominent recommended action in the report was, notably, to embrace government-engineered mass immigration at the provincial level. It was sold as being the key that would unlock the door to untold prosperity. In keeping with Nova Scotia’s culture of top-down decision-making, politicians, the media, and the public at large all bought into the messaging.
One of the most noteworthy things about the report is that it failed to even mention the existence of climate change. It follows then that the relationship between significant population growth and emissions was never considered.
This brings us back to the use of the term strategic growth throughout Halifax’s master plan. The term refers to a policy of incentivizing the erasure of large swaths of the city and replacing older, historic buildings with larger high-rises and mid-rises made of concrete, glass, and steel. Mass immigration gives Halifax’s plan its coherence. Without a continual stream of people continuing to come to Halifax to occupy space in all the new mid- and high-rise buildings going up, little in the plan makes sense. As of this writing, most of these newcomers are what the media describes as “international migrants” who are furthering the government’s “stretch goal” of arbitrarily doubling the population to 2 million by 2060.
Writer Edward Abbey noted that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Besides the environmental consequences of Nova Scotia’s brand of “strategic growth,” there are, as I mentioned previously, social and environmental costs. Spiraling housing costs, a growing homeless population, record levels of child poverty, a healthcare crisis, and increasing traffic congestion that is now worse than all comparably sized U.S. cities are all byproducts of Halifax’s “plan.” The government’s response to a series of government-induced problems has been to double down and say the benefits of the “population boom” outweigh the “challenges.”
These benefits are said to be economic, yet the figures may not support the claim. Aside from significantly increasing its population, Nova Scotia has failed to meet the economic targets it set for itself. And per capita GDP has slipped back to what it was nearly a decade earlier. Nova Scotia ranks behind all other Canadian provinces. Maine, whose per capita GDP was $63,117 in 2023 outperformed Nova Scotia’s figure of $41,727 USD. That’s a difference of $21,389 USD per person.
Culturally speaking, Halifax remains the same governmentally organized town it was in 1970. The results speak for themselves.
Culture Matters
Tellingly, “strategic growth” is not a term you will find in Portland’s plan. Conversely, “authenticity” and “excellence in architectural quality and urban design” are ideas not found in the Halifax plan. Nor will you find a discussion about quality of life in Halifax’s plan. In the end, culture matters a great deal.
Emphasizing quality of place as seen with Portland has drawn skilled workers and entrepreneurs from Boston, NYC, and California. More people with education and higher-than-average earnings want to call Portland home. In terms of affordability, the city has become a victim of its own success in terms of enhancing quality of life through planning and development. Portland draws talent in part because residents and government alike understand that the well-being of the city is tied to the quality of its human-scale environments. They pay attention to the quality of space, placemaking, and architectural excellence. To date, Portland has not made the mistake of believing that tearing down and densifying the city will lead to a bright new future. Today Portland has far more in common with Vienna than it does Dubai. The hope is they see the wisdom of continuing to become a better version of themselves.
Up Next: Part 3 looks at the climate action plans produced by Portland and Halifax and answers the question, “To what degree does each municipality engage in virtue signaling?” Previously: Part 1, explained why municipalities are at the center of the climate crisis.
- In fact, the reader is told that material in the plan cannot be “properly understood” unless “read in the context of the whole document”, and 7 other government documents. ↩︎
- Urban Planning Professor Emeritus Jill Grant discuss Hartnett’s work, and the 1970 Encounter week in her book examining the cultural dimensions of planning titled, The Drama of Democracy: Contention and Dispute in Community Planning. (University of Toronto Press, 1994). ↩︎
- This message was being delivered at a time when influential lobbyists from Black Rock and McKinsey were in the initial stages of molding federal policy to triple Canada’s 2015 population of 35 million to over 100 million by end of century. ↩︎
