Pam Lovelace, councillor for Hamonds Plains and St. Margarets, will run for mayor.

Lovelace announced her plans to run at Mount Saint Mary’s University Friday morning.

She says she should be mayor because she’s not like other politicians, who may have come from academic or business backgrounds. She’s experienced first-hand many of the issues facing the region, she says.

“I know what it’s like to not have a home or a roof over my head. I know what it’s like to experience gender-based violence. I know what it’s like to live in a very precarious situation, and too many people are living and experiencing that right now,” says Lovelace.

She says there are also a lot of women in politics who are leaving because of how they’re treated, and she’s running to fight that head-on.

Lovelace has been a Halifax councillor since 2020, and council appointed her deputy mayor for the 2021-2022 year.

The current mayor, Mike Savage, has said he won’t run again, leaving office after serving as mayor since 2012.

She says she wants to run to create more housing and improve affordability, especially for young people.

“We’ve got young people that are leaving because they can’t afford housing here. If we lose more young people, we will again see an economic decline,” she says.

Although the federal and provincial governments handle a lot of the funding for housing, Lovelace says she wants to build better relationships with those levels of government.

Lovelace says she’s grateful that she could work with the current Halifax city council, but she says the council has not done enough to create more affordable housing.

She says the council is opening up land for housing but that doesn’t necessarily mean housing is getting started or finished.

“We can’t just continue to talk about building more homes. We’ve got to do it right now,” she says.

Two other candidates have announced they’re running, Clay Bowser and Nolan Greenough.