How Halifax became cool: City’s outgoing mayor sees even bigger things ahead

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Mike Savage may be an old football player, but that didn’t prevent the Mayor of Halifax from making a few strategic wisecracks at the expense of a certain hockey team during a speech to a business crowd in the “Toronto 1” conference room at a posh hotel in downtown Toronto.

“I have kind of come to the end of the useful part of my career,” the 64-year-old said, pausing a beat. “Kind of like Max Pacioretty, who has signed with the Maple Leafs.”

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The comment drew plenty of yuks from the folks who turned out for a bite of lunch and to hear him talk at the Economic Club of Canada last week. Jokes aside, it remains to be seen whether Pacioretty is indeed washed up, but what is beyond question is that Savage, a three-term mayor, will not be seeking a fourth term in Halifax’s October election.

An election, it should be noted, that he would have been heavily favoured to win, having carried 80 per cent of the vote in 2020 after attracting 70 per cent of the vote in 2016 and 60 per cent in 2012, the year he was first elected.

Back in those days, Halifax was barely treading water. Population growth was marooned at about 1,000 newcomers per year and the locals weren’t getting any younger. The old port town that had welcomed millions of immigrants to its docks, and been a leaping-off point for two generations of Canadians who fought in two world wars, appeared to be on a course of chronic stagnation and national irrelevance.

Except, that is, when the new mayor took a look around the place. Savage saw Halifax not as it was, but as what he believed it could be: the next great international ocean city, even if the world, let alone the rest of Canada, didn’t know it yet.

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It is a vision he would share with the suit-and-tie crowds in Toronto, university whiz kids at job fairs and companies looking to plant a flag somewhere new, as well as techies looking to start something new altogether. If you happened to find yourself, say, on a plane, and Savage was sitting next to you, well, watch out.

His admirers will tell you his one-man marketing blitz helped turn the tide on a city that was going down the drain. His critics, on the other hand, are hard to find.

“They don’t come any better than Mike Savage,” Chris Ronald, Royal Bank of Canada’s regional president for Atlantic Canada, said.

Ronald counts himself as a Savage “super fan.” He finds the mayor, as many others do, to be “crazy funny.” Having a good brain is an additional strength.

On Savage’s watch, RBC opened its Halifax Innovation Hub and grew its employee head count to almost 1,000. The bank expects the hub’s number of employees to double by 2030, nudged along by a provincial payroll tax “rebate” program.

As the name suggests, the hub is tech-focused. Among things that Halifax offers, and which Savage bends listeners’ ears about, is its world-class universities, which can serve as a talent pipeline for companies looking to hire locally. Once teetering on the edge of decline in 2012, Halifax has defied gravity and emerged as one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada, and today has a tech scene where none existed before.

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“When I ran for mayor in 2012, I came up with what sounded like three crazy ideas,” he said after his speech. “I wanted Halifax to be the most livable, entrepreneurial, inclusive city in the country. I think we have made strides on all those things, and we have certainly become a city that is seen as a city of growth.”

The numbers don’t lie. In 2015, a mere 956 souls moved to Halifax. Five years later, the number was closer to 10,000, propelled along by a pandemic effect, but that doesn’t explain how Halifax grew by almost 20,000 in 2023.

The rapid injection of human capital included 16,000 international migrants, and the city of 400,000 that Savage was first elected to lead is now a city of 500,000. Immigration has accounted for about 60 per cent of the population growth during that time, and it has been happening in a city with a well-tread history of discrimination.

“We are a community that has been riven with systemic racism, not only anecdotally, but proven in court,” Savage said. “Driving while black police street checks, for example. Systemic racism is something, as a city, that we have struggled hard to address.”

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It is unclear whether diversity on steroids could add a new dimension to Halifax’s old black-and-white problem. But Savage believes it is important to be aware that tensions could arise, and, in his view, the best way to avoid friction is to be proactive and give newcomers something more lasting than a welcoming East Coast wave and a smile, and instead work to foster a sense of true belonging, where they are made to feel like part of the community.

“For a long time, Atlantic Canada was behind the eight ball on immigration,” he said. “We were very friendly and approachable, but we didn’t work at it. We need immigrants to be successful.”

Piling more people into Halifax has been a net good. There is an undeniable energy to the place, coupled with its growing diversity. Take the waterfront. What used to be a ghost town after 6 p.m. has been transformed into a hip work-live-play destination. There has been a boom in bike lane construction, which the university kids and millennials love, and a plan is afoot to transform an ugly tangle of downtown overpasses into a new, walkable community.

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Forty construction cranes are active within the city’s limits. There are new corporate residents, such as Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a multinational tech outfit that has gone from having zero presence to opening an office and growing its employee headcount to almost 1,500 in less than two years.

It is, of course, an expansion helped along by millions of dollars in government incentives. But Halifax and the province are fighting to win companies over rather than watch them go elsewhere.

It is not all rainbows and boom times, however, and the rapid growth has come with growing pains. Halifax is not Vancouver, but it also is not cheap. The average home now costs close to $600,000, the rental market is stuck at on a one per cent vacancy rate and housing construction can’t keep pace with demand.

Homelessness has become a major issue, and climate change an existential one, since a city that has always been subject to storm surges is looking at a future of rising sea levels. There were even wildfires in the hinterlands in the summer of 2023.

Yet people keep coming. Savage envisions the Halifax of 2037 having 650,000 residents and a $32-billion gross domestic product, almost double the level in 2018. The word is out, he said. Halifax is “cool,” even if his two adult children don’t think he is.

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“We are a better city than we were in 2012,” he said, before teeing up another joke. “Do you know the Halifax Mooseheads had never won a Memorial Cup until after I became mayor?”

It is a compelling coincidence. Given the mayor is soon to be unemployed and is entertaining thoughts about what to do next, perhaps a certain hockey team that just signed Max Pacioretty and has not won a Stanley Cup since 1967 should give him a call to see if he can apply his magic to the Leafs.

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