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When people refer to the Common, they usually mean this open field. But the Friends of the Halifax Common notes that the Common extends to South Street and includes the hospitals and schools in the area. Photo: Jamie Lee

Beverly Miller shakes her head as she listens to Halifax planning officials list deficiencies in the city's own plan for the Halifax Common.

“I’ve been very familiar with it,” says the co-chair of Friends of the Halifax Common. “I don’t see those contradictions.”

At the group’s meeting on Tuesday night, Peter Bigelow from the Halifax Regional Municipality said the Halifax Common Plan has paragraphs that contradict themselves. He says everyone has to re-address the plan and amend it before moving forward.

But Miller doesn’t think the plan needs revising at all. “Leave it alone. It’s fine,” she adds. “Start enforcing it.”

Bigelow, manager of Real Property Management, was a guest speaker at the Friends’ public meeting. He spoke alongside Andy Fillmore from the city's urban task force about what the city plans to do with the Common.

Bigelow talked about future meetings that would address certain parts of the Common such as the site of Queen Elizabeth High at the corner of Robie Street and Quinpool Road. A review of the entire Halifax Common Plan won’t come until winter, he says.

The question and answer period became passionate as the meeting’s participants wanted to know why the city wasn’t following the plan.

It seems the city doesn’t care, agreed many of the residents, who believe the city has given in to development interests. The Common has been designated for public use since the 1700s but the city has since been carving off pieces of the Common for development interests.

About 30 people attended the meeting to remind the city that the plan was written to protect the Common.

The city authored the Halifax Common Plan in 1994. The document lays out the Common’s purpose and how it should be maintained.

When the plan has been ignored for over a decade, Miller and co-chair Peggy Cameron started Friends of the Halifax Common to bring awareness to how the Common is often forgotten in the city’s plans.

The Friends point out that the Common extends much farther than the open fields east of Robie Street – technically the North Common. The entire common actually extends from Cunard Street to South Street and Robie Street to South Park Street. The downtown hospitals, parts of Dalhousie University and the Public Gardens are all part of the Common.

Most importantly, the Friends want to enforce the plan so that the city reclaims as much land as possible for open space. For example, if the high school is given back to the city after its vacancy, then that should be reverted to open space for people’s use. But it seems as though the city has already given the land to Queen Elizabeth II Hospital for its expansion.

City planning official Peter Bigelow says the plan needs to be revised. Photo: Jamie Lee

Bigelow agrees the plan was put on a backburner. He attributes this to the city’s amalgamation in 1996 and Hurricane Juan that caused extensive damage to the region a few years later. The city got distracted, he says.

But he adds that the city wants to re-address the plan. Since it was written in 1994, he says there are many new policies that contradict clauses in the document. The winter meeting will hopefully address the confusion, he says.

But the Friends were surprised with this comment. “We’ve never heard this before,” says Miller. “I think they’re grasping at straws.” The participants asked for an example of contradicting paragraphs.

Bigelow said the plan asks to revert land to open space as soon as the lands are given back to the city. But the plan also advocates building of hospitals. He’s referring to the first clause: “The city will continue to promote a diversity of activities in the Halifax Common which will include health care, education, sports, recreation gardens and cultural activities.”

“You gotta give me that,” Bigelow says to the participants.

The Friends of the Halifax Common and city planning officials discuss the future of the Common. From left to right: Peggy Cameron, Beverly Miller, Peter Bigelow, Andy Fillmore. Photo: Jamie Lee

Cameron doesn’t take this as a promotion for hospitals exclusively. She says the paragraph recognizes that the city should support the activities that already exist in the Common. She adds that the plan also suggests that at the very least, the public should be a part of any city plans to change the Common.

Nilgun Erkoc, a planning student at Dalhousie University, came to the meeting to learn what the Common plan is. She says the issue is that it’s common practice for policies to be written with enough wiggle room to get out of these kinds of plans.

This worries Graham Read who has lived in Halifax for more than 15 years and is also a member of the Friends group.

“People who are here tonight reading that document would say, ‘Oh, this gives us lots of good protection for the Common and it lays out clearly what is supposed to be done’,” says Read. “But … he’s the expert telling us, no, it’s not as clear as we think.”

Miller doesn’t think this is going to set back their goal for the city to start enforcing the Common plan. She says the city is looking at loopholes as their last attempt to get out of the plan.