HALIFAX — Five city councillors are asking regional council to revisit the municipality’s logo and whether it should appear on all signage throughout their communities.
The Harbour East – Marine Drive Community Council has voted unanimously to ask all councillors to give the go-ahead to a staff report “regarding the removal of the Halifax logo from all signage in the Harbour East-Marine Drive Communities.”
The area covers places like Dartmouth, Cole Harbour, Musquodoboit Harbour and Eastern Passage.
READ MORE: Opposition of ‘Halifax’ re-branding spanning across HRM communities
Councillors Gloria McCluskey, David Hendsbee, Tony Mancini, Lorelei Nicoll, and Bill Karsten sit on the community council. McCluskey and Hendsbee have been against the new logo from the start, and were the only ones to vote against it at Regional Council in April 2014.
Karsten and Nicoll voted in favour of the logo change. They did not reply to Global News’s requests for comment.
The new logo was introduce almost two years ago. It dropped the words “regional municipality” from the logo for signage, but Halifax Regional Municipality remains the official name.
The debate over whether the name “Halifax” should appear on signs in communities like Dartmouth was pushed into the spotlight last summer when the city updated a sign at Sullivan’s pond.
It kept a similar layout to the old sign but the former Halifax Regional Municipality logo was replaced by the Halifax logo.
“Its taking away our identity. We were promised at amalgamation that we would not lose our identity,” McCluskey said Sunday.
A residents’ group called the Coalition to Promote Harbour East Marine Drive Communities is also calling for the “Halifax” signage to be removed.
“Wherever there’s a Halifax sign I would like to see a Dartmouth sign,” said spokesman Warren Wesson.
The issue prompted a blog post from Halifax South Downtown Councillor Waye Mason.
“Several unrelated things have led a lot of Dartmouthians to wrongly believe that the municipal government is trying to officially erase the name Dartmouth,” Mason wrote.
“It isn’t true, and anyone who tells you that this is the plan has not done the research or has some other agenda.”
Councillors will debate Tuesday whether to go ahead with further study on the issue.