Toronto's Garbage Nightmare

I see a public health nightmare for Toronto.

The capital of Ontario, Canada, has taken a turn down a path that I fear will lead to extinction. Toronto has decided, with much self-righteous huffing and puffing, that garbage is a moral issue. That's very progressive. It must make all Toronto's environmentalists feel very good about themselves. But it is wrong, dangerously wrong.

Truth is that garbage is not a moral issue. It is a public health issue. And it seems that societies that forget that truth tend to suffer plague and disease. They become ugly, inbred and nasty. Evenually, they perish.

Right now, Toronto is a wonderful city. Sure, it's less clean and safe than it was in its prime, but it's still a pleasant enough place to live and visit. It still has a lively downtown, attractive streets, a jiggy nightlife, pretty neighbourhoods, good restaurants and a few great theatres.

But it's no secret hereabouts that Toronto's leaders are obsessed with garbage. They don't have anywhere to put it, so they've been trucking it down the highway to a site in Michigan. The Americans aren't all happy with the arrangement. We had a few anxious moments last fall when presidential candidate John Kerry yakked about stopping the flow of Canadian garbage over the border but he lost, thank goodness. Now the city has won some sort of a certificate for the purity of its garbage, so the heat's off for the moment. But no one thinks the Michigan solution will last.

Oh, yeah, there was a glimmer of hope the other day when a poor rural township north of the city thought it could make some bucks off a landfill site. Hope was dashed when the local and professional environmentalists were able to intimidate the rural politicians out of their idea. No one can stand up to the naysayers of the environmental brigade.

So Toronto is toying with a plan to charge people money to dispose of their "surplus" garbage. Punishing them, in effect, for having more than two bags a week. What is essentially a political and economic challenge has been dolled up as a medieval morality play. Good people recycle and compost all their garbage. Bad people put out more than two bags of garbage every two weeks.

It's all so simple for these simple-minded folk, and it's all so sadly predictable.

The fundamental job of a city is to keep its streets and alleys clean and free of garbage. In the final analysis, there is nothing more important it can do. In fact, to fail at that task is to invite an apocalypse of vermin, typhoid, diphtheria, consumption and plague.

Toronto has lost its way in its obsession with garbage. It demands that its harried citizens spend hours sorting and processing their garbage. It witholds garbage collection (at some monetary saving to the city, I might add) to encourage offially sanctioned consumption, sorting and composting. It punishes poor souls who can't toe the garbage line. It has reached the abysmal point where it employs people to sort through trash bags so that it might identify, from discarded envelopes or bills, the miscreants who have failed to comply with the garbage rules.

Poor sad Toronto is already overrun with raccoons. God knows how many rats are pigging out on leaky backyard compost piles and illegal dumps in the alleys. And this is just the beginning.

Can there be anything but disaster ahead? I don't think so, but maybe I'm too pessimistic. Maybe it will all work out. Maybe Toronto will succeed in creating a new Ontario man and woman who eat their own garbage for breakfast. Maybe Toronto will have better luck than the Soviets. Wanna bet?