Halifax Lays Off Nearly 1,500 Staff Due To COVID-19
HALIFAX—The Halifax Regional Municipality has laid off 1,480 staff members as it grapples with financial pressures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is not a scenario any of us predicted, and certainly not one any of us wanted,” Jacques Dubé, the city’s chief administrative officer, said in a press conference Wednesday.
According to Dubé, everyone laid off was either a casual, temporary or seasonal employee.
With nearly all the municipality’s summer programming cancelled this year, Dubé said most of the layoffs came from the parks and recreation department. About 500 of the layoffs were given to seasonal employees who aren’t working right now but would normally be hired in the spring and summer.
Dubé added that none of the municipality’s full-time workers have been laid off “at this point,” but couldn’t guarantee that won’t change in the future.
“My objective, frankly, is to keep everyone employed to the extent possible,” Dubé said, adding that any further layoffs, should they happen, would be temporary “with the intent to bring them back when service levels are back to normal.”
Prior to the layoffs, about 5,000 people worked for the municipality.
Along with the layoffs, Dubé also put in place a hiring freeze at the municipality, meaning no new staff will be brought on for the foreseeable future.
Speaking alongside Dubé April 15, Halifax Mayor Mike Savage said the layoffs are a necessary part of keeping the city financially afloat.
“Municipalities are not like other orders of government. We don’t have the ability to rack up large sums of debt, even [for] a good purpose, and we don’t have the same financial capacity either,” he said.
“Less than 10 percent of all your taxes go to municipal governments, but we pay for the police, the fire, we pay for the people who pick up the garbage, we pay for those who are operating our busses … so we have to take decisions in the best of interests of all the residents and the businesses.”
Yesterday, Halifax Council agreed to defer until June property tax payments to the city.
The decision will help residents and businesses weather the financial strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also means the city will miss out on about $188-million until those taxes are paid.
The municipality will also lose another $35-million from things like bus and parking fees. That, Savage said, is money the HRM will never get back.
Savage said the HRM is in about as good a financial situation as it can be “given the circumstances,” but that it just can’t afford to pay people for work that they aren’t doing.
“It’s a simple fact of life that at this point we can’t continue to pay people for work that isn’t being done. There’s no love in that, there’s no joy in that. It’s simply a fact of life,” he said.