District 15 voting guide: Rookie Billy Gillis vs incumbent Paul Russell
District 15 used to be the only district in the HRM made up entirely of one community, Lower Sackville. With the recent district boundary changes, District 15 picked up the Beaverbank and Kinsac communities from the neighbouring District 14.
Lower Sackville got its name from its founding as a fort named after Lionel Cranfield Sackville. Once the threat of French and their Mi’kmaq allies had receded the town’s location near the mouth of the Sackville River made it a key link in the early days of communication and an ideal spot for logging. Thanks to the strong economic base and its strategic location for communication, Sackville slowly grew as a farming community until the 1960s.
In the 1960s as population was booming in the urban parts of Halifax, the Nova Scotia department of housing started building out infrastructure after Lower Sackville was deemed suitable for residential development. This caused the population of Lower Sackville to balloon from 3,000 to roughly 50,000 residents today.
The modern day community of Lower Sackville is centred around Sackville Drive, which is the main drag through town with a mix of local shops, national chains, car dealerships, a mega church, the only place to get used hockey equipment in the city and a library. Even though Sackville Drive is a main community hub, and about 10,000 people live within walking distance of the stroad, the adjoining properties are designed for cars, which means it sucks for humans so everybody drives.
One of the things the HRM is trying to do as the city evolves into one capable of surviving another 250 years like Sackville has so far, is to create complete communities. Or places within the city where people can get everything they need, from nightlife, to libraries, to recreation, to necessities, within their immediate vicinity. As the city starts changing its policies and bylaws to create complete communities, it will be interesting to watch what happens in Lower Sackville because this community already has a solid foundation for a complete community in the area between Glendale and Sackville Drives.
In order to determine which candidate will be the best to lead this community on their path to another successful 250 years, The Coast sent out a substantial questionnaire to see what each candidate knows about the issues facing the city ahead of the municipal election on Oct. 19. The Coast followed up with more detailed questions to test each candidate’s policy chops.
This race is a head to head between an incumbent and a rookie, and we’ll start with the one who filled out The Coast’s candidate questionnaire.
Billy Gillis
The rookie candidate for District 15, Billy Gillis had decent responses to The Coast’s questionnaire but in a follow up interview with The Coast he demonstrated a much more thorough understanding of a lot of the issues facing the city and the municipality’s plans to fix them.
When it comes to transportation, Gillis likes the Integrated Mobility Plan and thinks its aims are good, but believes there needs to be some special consideration paid to Lower Sackville and Beaverbank, especially when it comes to transit. Although getting people commuting on bikes is a good idea for the Downtowns, or even Downtown adjacent communities like Cole Harbour, Lower Sackville’s geography means it’s set apart from the rest of the city, and only really connected to other communities via highways. This, plus the distance from Beaverbank to Lower Sackville means for Gillis improving transit is key for the future of Lower Sackville.
One of the areas where Gillis wants to see Lower Sackville improve is Sackville Drive itself. He would like to see Sackville Drive be revitalized to a better main street. In the conversation imagining what a revitalized Sackville Drive might look like, Gillis demonstrated a good understanding of the tradeoffs and viability of various options, like a road diet, or adding bus or bike lanes.
Although Gillis is a rookie he demonstrated the ability to think through the implications of various policies or design choices on the fly. It is likely that should he get elected to office, this skill would only improve with the additional time and support given to councillors by the bureaucracy when crafting municipal policies.
Paul Russell
Paul Russell did not fill out The Coast’s candidate questionnaire, but like other incumbents it is possible to look at Russell’s past performance to see how he’d be likely to perform in a second term.
Russell’s an interesting case because his first foray into politics was a contested nomination in which he was vying to be the candidate for the federal Conservative Party in the 2019 federal election. In the nomination campaign, Russell made some pretty rookie mistakes, specifically a long since deleted campaign video. The mistakes of Russell’s past are not super important, other than to serve as a benchmark to measure how Russell has grown as a politician in the past five years.
In the past five years Russell has really come into his own as a politician. He has consistently demonstrated a good understanding of risk management in his time on the Audit and Finance Standing Committee. Russell also tends to be a champion of good fiscal management and fiscal sustainability. When the city is crafting its suburban plan Russell’s numbers first mindset is likely to be a positive influence on that planning process.
Russell also provides a counterfactual of what a “common sense” Conservative could look like. For example, Lower Sackville has a land lease community called Sackville Manor Mobile Home Park. Right across the street from the Manor is a Halifax Transit terminal and many of the residents cross the street to get to that terminal. The only problem is the street that people are crossing is Highway 101. In 2019 then councilllor Steve Craig made a motion to put fences up to stop people from taking the most direct route to the bus. When that, predictably, didn’t work another solution needed to be found. Although spending money on a pedestrian bridge due to bad planning is not the most ideal use of municipal money, Russell used common sense and reasoned that, providing a viable alternative is the only way to keep people safe even if it’s not otherwise a municipal spending priority. So he put forward a motion to do just that and get people a safe way to cross the highway and get to the bus.
ANALYSIS
Like any head to head between a rookie and an incumbent, it’ll be a tough slog for Billy Gillis to pull off an electoral success. Especially when the incumbent, Paul Russell, has proven himself to be a competent councillor. The road gets even harder for Gillis if Russell still has ties to the blue electoral machine in Lower Sackville that flipped the provincial riding from orange to blue.
