Halifax has led the country in downtown recovery out of the pandemic years, with experts saying the secret to success has been the area’s diverse economy.
Numbers from the Downtown Halifax Business Commission show about 10.22 million unique visitors in the area from mid-June through Dec. 29 last year. They include tourists as well as people living or working downtown.
In 2019, those numbers were 10.26 million people for the same period. With a difference of about 46,000 and New Year’s Eve falling after that time frame, it is likely that downtown Halifax has by now or will very soon reach that pre-pandemic level.
“Halifax has consistently led Canadian cities, since the very beginning, doing much better than the others,” said Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities and professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto.
The business commission numbers come from Environics, a data analytics company that collects information based on cellphone location pings.
Chapple said Halifax bounced back quite quickly and has maintained that upward trajectory, unlike some cities that flatlined after early success. The School of Cities also tracks visitor numbers using cellphone data.
Comparing October 2024 to October 2023, data from Chapple’s team found Halifax visits were up 11.7 per cent — the highest percentage change in the country. Calgary was second at 10.5 per cent and Edmonton third at 7.9 per cent.
Chapple said Halifax in particular benefits from a diverse downtown economy, including bars and restaurants, retail, universities, arts and culture, a tourist sector, services like government offices and hospitals, and residential buildings.
“All that is really helping to drive activity downtown and making it really the leading Canadian comeback city,” Chapple said.
Looking more closely at the Halifax numbers, Chapple said people from all over the municipality come downtown, and include long-term residents, immigrants and people from various ethnic backgrounds to create a “really wonderful” mix of residents and visitors.
Chapple said the diversity of Canadian downtowns has in general helped them bounce back from the pandemic more quickly than American cities, because many had turned their downtowns into financial districts full of office buildings.
“I think sometimes we forget about the jewel that we have here,” said Paul MacKinnon, CEO of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission.
“We’re far from a perfect city, but we’ve got a lot to offer here.”
A commission report found the downtown’s employment base was 22,374 people in 2023, a jump of 24 per cent over 2022. Of these, about 4,200 people work in the food and drink, retail, and accommodation sectors, with the remaining thousands in real estate, banks or government offices.
“There’s more people employed by downtown organizations than there was pre-COVID,” MacKinnon said.
A recent CBC analysis showed that while many Halifax residents still do work from home at least some of the time, the city’s rapid population growth has also meant congestion levels are worse than in 2019 and concentrated midweek.
Downtown Halifax has likely especially benefited from government return-to-work policies. Federal public servants returned three days a week as of September, while non-unionized Nova Scotia government employees were mandated to return full time in October.
To address congestion, MacKinnon echoed the call from traffic researchers for better transit options, and encouraged people to go into the office Mondays and Fridays, which are less busy.
He also said the city should use the harbour in “much more interesting ways,” like making the ferries free and bringing private operators online to run boat taxis.
“We just need to improve our transportation systems to make it much easier for people to come downtown whenever they want to,” MacKinnon said.
Quebec City, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are the other top cities nearing pre-pandemic visitor levels, Chapple said.
