The Bloomfield Act authorizes municipal councils in Nova Scotia to pass by-laws that impose an additional tax—called a vacant residential unit or land tax—on vacant residential units or land zoned for residential use. The statute inserts the new power into the Municipal Government Act and mirrors it in the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter.
The bill ties the tax to two policy goals: (1) encourage the timely development of housing within serviced municipal boundaries, and (2) increase funding for affordable housing. It requires municipal by-laws to include procedural elements (rate, vacancy definition, exemptions, audit/inspection, dispute resolution) and directs that revenue be allocated to furthering access to affordable housing.
The Act leaves the substantive design (rates, exemptions, enforcement) to local councils, creating a tool that could change incentives for land holders while shifting implementation burdens to municipalities.
At a Glance
What It Does
Authorizes municipalities to levy an additional tax on the assessed value of vacant residential units or land zoned residential; requires collected revenue to be used to further access to affordable housing and compels by-laws to set rate, vacancy rules, exemptions, audits and dispute procedures.
Who It Affects
Municipal councils (who gain an option to adopt the tax), owners of vacant residential units and residentially zoned land (who would pay the tax if their municipality adopts it), and local affordable-housing actors who would receive earmarked revenue; municipal finance and planning teams must build enforcement systems.
Why It Matters
The Act supplies municipalities with both an economic disincentive against land-banking and a locally controlled funding stream for affordable housing. Because it leaves key choices to local by-laws, it creates scope for wide variation across municipalities and for new administrative, valuation, and legal challenges at the local level.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The Bloomfield Act adds a new municipal power in two places of provincial law: the Municipal Government Act and the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter. Each gives a council the option—not the obligation—to pass a by-law imposing a vacant residential unit or land tax.
The tax base is the assessed value of either vacant residential units or land zoned for residential use; the Act frames the tax as an additional municipal levy with a specific housing-focused purpose.
Instead of prescribing rates, definitions, or exemptions, the Act sets process requirements for any by-law a council enacts. A by-law must state the tax rate, define what counts as vacant, set exemptions and other relevant conditions, provide audit and inspection powers, and establish dispute resolution procedures.
The Act also requires municipalities to allocate revenue collected from the tax toward furthering access to affordable housing, but it does not define eligible programs or spending rules.Because the Act is enabling rather than mandatory, its practical effect depends on municipal choices: councils will decide whether to adopt the tax, how to define vacancy (short-term vacancy, renovations, probate, seasonal use, etc.), what exemptions to allow, and how aggressively to enforce compliance through audits or inspections. The legislation repeats the same structure for Halifax’s Charter to ensure the regional municipality has access to the same tool.Notably absent from the text are rate caps, provincial oversight of local rates, a definition of “serviced municipal boundaries,” and detailed enforcement limits.
Those gaps mean municipalities will set the substantive contours of the tax—and the legal and administrative issues that follow—through by-laws and practice rather than through provincial standards.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The Act authorizes municipal councils to impose an additional tax on the assessed value of vacant residential units or land zoned for residential use.
Any municipal by-law must state the tax rate and must define the conditions that qualify a unit or parcel as 'vacant.', By-laws must establish exemptions, provide audit and inspection powers, and set dispute resolution procedures for contested tax assessments.
All taxes collected under the new power must be allocated by the municipality for the purpose of furthering access to affordable housing.
The power is added both to the province-wide Municipal Government Act and, separately, to the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter (parallel provisions).
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Definition list updated to include vacant-residence tax
This amendment inserts the phrase 'vacant residential unit or land tax' into the list of taxes in the Municipal Government Act’s definitional provisions. Practically, this is housekeeping: it ensures the new tax is recognized within the Act’s structure (so other statutory references to 'tax' can encompass the vacancy tax). It does not itself create the tax power—later sections do that—but it integrates the new levy into the statutory taxonomy.
Enables councils to adopt a vacancy tax and prescribes mandatory by-law content
Section 75B is the substantive grant of authority. It lets a municipal council, by by-law, impose an additional tax on the assessed value of vacant residential units or residentially zoned land and expressly limits the tax’s purpose to encouraging development within serviced municipal boundaries and increasing affordable housing funding. The section does not mandate adoption; it requires only that if a council enacts such a by-law, the by-law must include the rate, a definition of vacancy, relevant conditions and exemptions, audit/inspection powers, and dispute resolution procedures. The obligation to specify these elements constrains drafting form but leaves the substantive choices—how long a property must be vacant to qualify, what exemptions exist, and how audits work—to local decision-making.
Parallel amendment to the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter
Section 4 mirrors the housekeeping change from Section 2 for the Halifax Regional Municipality Charter, adding the new tax phrase into that Charter’s tax definitions. This preserves consistency so Halifax’s legal framework treats the vacancy tax the same way taxable categories are treated elsewhere in provincial municipal law.
Halifax’s substantive power to enact a vacancy tax (mirror of Section 75B)
Section 97A gives Halifax’s Council the same discretionary power and imposes identical by-law content requirements as the Municipal Government Act’s new section. It also requires that revenue from any such tax be allocated to furthering access to affordable housing. By duplicating the structure in Halifax’s Charter, the bill prevents a legal gap where the regional municipality might otherwise lack the same tool available to other municipalities under the Municipal Government Act.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on this topic across all five countries.
Explore this topic in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Municipal councils — gain an explicit, locally controlled fiscal tool to discourage land-banking and generate dedicated revenue for housing programs without waiting for provincial transfers.
- Low-income renters and affordable-housing providers — stand to benefit if municipalities adopt the tax and direct proceeds to housing initiatives, subsidies, or development supports.
- Municipal planning and housing departments — receive a lever to convert vacant stock into development opportunities and a predictable revenue source for program design.
- Communities with underutilized serviced land — may see accelerated development if the tax changes owners’ holding-cost calculus, unlocking stalled projects.
Who Bears the Cost
- Owners of vacant residential units and land zoned for residential use — face higher carrying costs where local councils adopt the tax, especially speculators and owners holding land for future appreciation.
- Municipal administrations — must build or expand assessment, audit, inspection and dispute-resolution capacity to implement and enforce the tax, incurring administration costs.
- Small landlords and seasonal-property owners — could be disproportionately affected depending on how vacancy and exemption rules are drafted at the municipal level.
- Local courts and adjudicative bodies — may see increased appeals and legal challenges over vacancy definitions, valuation methods, inspection powers, and exemptions.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The core tension is between local empowerment and legal/administrative risk: the bill gives municipalities a targeted fiscal tool to discourage vacancy and fund affordable housing, but by leaving key definitions, rates and enforcement rules to local by-laws it risks inconsistent treatment, enforcement burdens, fairness problems tied to assessment practices, and legal challenges over inspections and property rights.
The Act delegates nearly all substantive design choices to municipalities while prescribing only a short checklist of by-law elements. That approach maximizes local flexibility but creates three implementation challenges.
First, variability across municipalities (rates, vacancy definitions, exemption rules) will produce a patchwork of rules that can shift development incentives unpredictably across neighbouring jurisdictions. Second, using assessed value as the tax base ties the levy to municipal assessment systems that may lag market conditions or value land and unfinished units inconsistently, raising fairness and practical enforcement issues.
Third, the statute grants audit and inspection powers without detailing limits, which may trigger pushback on privacy and property-rights grounds and produce litigation over scope and process.
The mandatory allocation of revenue to 'furthering access to affordable housing' narrows fiscal discretion but leaves open what counts as allowable spending. Municipalities could direct funds to capital projects, operating subsidies, non-profit partnerships, or down-payments—each choice has different political and legal consequences.
Finally, the Act’s reference to 'serviced municipal boundaries' as a location-based objective invites interpretation disputes: do municipalities limit the tax to parcels connected to water/sewer, to lands inside official serviced areas, or more broadly? That ambiguity matters because it determines which vacant lots or units are subject to the policy incentive the law is meant to create.
There's more to this law than the bill.
Codify Laws traces every connection across the legislative lifecycle.