Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development - Halifax Port Authority

Full Hansard transcript available on the Nova Scotia Legislature website.

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CLAUDIA CHENDER: Thank you for these answers. A lot of this is more in the federal realm, so we don’t hear about it as much here. I think I’ll leapfrog off my colleague and sort of pay attention to the port as an outsize corporate presence here in HRM. As an urban councillor, I guess I wanted to ask a little bit about the port as a landlord, of which you are big and small.

To start with, I know the Seaport Market has struggled somewhat. I think there was an announcement to develop an urban market hall to make that a more permanent situation. I also know that there was some kind of call for proposals for a group that might manage the market. I’d like to hear what, if anything, has happened. 

I had heard from a number of vendors that in fact they weren’t able to access any of the tenant relief that some other organizations were able to avail themselves of during the pandemic. I know many of the permanent vendors have closed there. I’m wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.

ALLAN GRAY: The RFP that went out - or expression of interest - to run an urban market didn’t return a successful proponent. In the end there were two proponents that went through and one we had a lengthy discussion with, but it wasn’t successful.

COVID-19 is certainly at play in that, but also the view of most of the market that we talked to is that Halifax at this time is not at the level to support that style of urban market. It doesn’t have the foot traffic of, say, Montreal or Toronto where they’re putting them right in the city centre. They get a lot of office block foot traffic past them all the time. We’re not quite at that maturity and perhaps the Seaport Market a little bit further away to be able to achieve that foot traffic.

We continue to work with looking for the right solution. COVID-19 obviously has made it difficult this year for the farmers’ market where, for a while there, we had to close completely until we could find ways to open with reduced capacity or outdoors. A learning, certainly, is that the outdoor component of it was extremely successful. A lot of feedback from the public was how much more they enjoyed wandering around the outdoor market and experiencing that. That was an excellent learning factor for us.

As far as the relief, at one stage the port had been told that we weren’t eligible for any of the relief components from the federal government. The ports were excluded from that mainly because the initial component of the relief relied on you having a mortgage over the land, and the ports own their land or it’s gazetted to them. That was later changed through lobbying from the Canadian Ports Association to say, look, we want to assist these people but we can’t do that if you restrict the industry in this way.

There are a number of tenants that have got relief down there, but the Seaport Market vendors who are the table tops weren’t eligible in that sense. The ones that had true leases with us have applied, I think four of them were successful in getting relief. Once we were able to we applied and some got it but some couldn’t.

Obviously, we didn’t charge fees to the farmers’ market proponents to when we couldn’t open, and we’ve got a reduced value at the moment.

CLADIA CHENDER: Thank you, that’s helpful. I certainly hope that through some creative collaborations that market is able to continue. 

I guess my second question is about NSCAD. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design has kind of a funny history down there, but down there is it nonetheless on a long lease with poor conditions for them - but they signed it, I suppose.

I guess my question is whether there’s any conversation about the future of that port campus that you could disclose to us, just in terms of thinking about the future viability of the whole site. Obviously it does feel right now like the Seaport Market is a bit tenuous. That’s a big piece of publicly enjoyed and available land, and the other big anchor tenant of course is the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

ALLAN GRAY: I haven’t had any conversations for any change for NSCAD, although they’ve requested a meeting soon, but there’s been no discussion as to what that meeting is about. But they are on a long lease there.

We are looking at the whole area and the Seaport district and what we can do with it to keep it activated. It’s important for us to keep it as a public-access environment, so the port’s not seeking to turn it over to industrial or anything else. It’s an important buffer zone, I would call it, for us between what’s operational and what’s community and waterfront, so a transition area of land.

What uses we have in there have to be consistent knowing there’s operational components with the cruising and that sort of thing, but it needs to be transitional to the waterfront. We work closely with Develop Nova Scotia to look at what things we can do in the Seaport that are compatible and encourage people to move all the way along. 

One of the things we’re also working with them in is a project for urban planning, a bit like a hackathon, to look at how we get connectivity between the waterfront and Point Pleasant Park. With an operational area in the middle, how do we get continuity of connection? I can say that the work we’re doing with the rail solution for removing trucks - we’re looking at overpasses so that coming down that Marginal Road that we can overpass the primary rail areas and people can get access to the park without disruption.

We’re constantly looking in our planning process as to how we can do that better and make it sustainable and engage with the community so that there’s still public use and port-related use. We’re actively looking at solutions for the farmers’ market. We know it’s successful on a weekend. We think maybe we’re beating against a tree a little bit trying to make it seven days when maybe that’s not what it’s really about. Let’s focus on how to make it really good on the weekends and promote it as a weekend market and look at what we can do for the rest of the week.

THOMAS HAYES: I just wanted to add to what Allan said from a governance perspective. The Seaport district is very important, and we’ve created a separate committee at the board to deal with the variety of options that our management team is presenting to us.

We were disappointed, as Allan referenced, in terms of the response we got to the RFP, but frankly, some of the ideas that are floating around now are even more interesting than, say, where we were about a year ago, so stay tuned. I’m very optimistic that will remain a very vibrant part of the community. Of course, with the return to cruise, that’s also important to us.

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CLAUDIA CHENDER: I’m hesitant to weigh in, but I want to say that having served on most legislative committees except for Community Services, Chairs do it differently, but I do appreciate when the question rotation goes by caucus. It doesn’t really bother me who goes first, but I do think giving caucuses equal time versus members equal time seems to be more equitable, where we have a majority of Liberals on every legislative committee who have access to information that the Opposition doesn’t. Particularly at this moment, it is poignant at a time when we haven’t been in the Legislature for many, many, many months.

It just feels to me like that is the most equitable arrangement. I don’t care who goes first. If people run out of questions and other members have questions that’s great, but I think in the committees where we go by caucus in rounds, I just find that to be an equitable arrangement.

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CLAUDIA CHENDER: Just a point of clarification. When we attempt to discuss issues surrounding committees with the Speaker and with that committee, aside from changing the rules, committees are in fact their own creature. This probably accounts for some of the differences we see across committees.

I’m fine to continue, so I’m not making another substantive comment, but I just want to say that that may not, in fact, be the right place for that, and we should determine that here. I think it’s your prerogative as Chair - we can continue or we could bring it up in the future as an agenda item, but I don’t think we’d get very far in that venue, unfortunately.

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