The Art of Not Knowing
If You Tweet It, He Will Come
Edgewater Hotel Sign Comes Down
Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
The Daily Photoist: November 20, 2009
Well, that didn't take long: with the municipal workers' strike barely a day old, garbage is already piling up across the city, including in local parks. The above photo, taken early yesterday afternoon, shows a heap of refuse at Christie Pits; trash cans across Toronto are also starting to overflow, despite efforts by city workers to seal many bin openings with plastic wrap and signs imploring residents not to litter.
While the National Post described the mound of waste at Christie Pits as an "impromptu drop-off point," Ward 19 Councillor and Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone told Torontoist that the pile was in fact the result of a single gathering at the park and was cleaned up this morning. "The garbage was left by a Church group that used the Park and did not meet their obligations for cleaning up," Pantalone said today via email. "The City removed it and billed the group for its removal."
But although Pantalone declared that "Christie Pits will not be used as a garbage dump," legal ways for residents to jettison their trash are hard to come by. Even for those able to drive their waste to one of the seven transfer stations scattered across the city (the closest option for west-enders is near Keele Street and Lawrence Avenue West, more than eight kilometres from Christie Pits), there are reports of cars being blocked at station entrances by picketing workers, with a $380 fine slapped on those who leave their bags outside the gates. The city's advice: hold on to your trash for this week, as more drop-off points will be opened if the strike drags on.
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As I was heading to the streetcar today I already noticed a big pile of garbage at Spadina & Cecil sitting beside the public garbage. Pisses me off that people decide to stink up the streets like that, especially in Chinatown where it's already smelly enough. I can't imagine how gross that will smell at the end of this 27 degree day.
I lived downtown on Yonge Street during the 2002 garbage strike, and the most embarrassing thing was listening to tourists every day, who were appalled at the state of the city they were visiting and weren't aware of the garbage strike—just the overbearing smell and hideous sight. On my way to work this morning, I heard two tourists ask why the bins were wrapped up.
However, downtown, most of the bins I saw this morning had been unwrapped and garbage stuffed back into them.
As for things like gum wrappers and coffee cups...I don't see how it's so difficult to carry them with you until you get home or something?
These were plastic bags filled with garbage sitting beside the public bin, so I'm assuming they came from residents on/around Spadina, who surely could've kept it inside their own bins for at least more than a day.
As for the coffee cups and gum, I agree.
Thank you TTC for making the 506 a more viable option than the 505 at exactly the same time Chinatown gets uber-stanky.
I can understand that the union picketers want to make sure that things don't move along too smoothly without their services, but why make life this miserable for individual citizens? Stopping people from using the washrooms at City Hall? -- come on.
I wonder if you could challenge the legality of an "Illegal Dumping" ticket if the City was shown not be taking all possible legal action in enforcing public access to the facilities listed in their own strike plan.
And how galling is it to see them be so proactive in rooting through dumped garbage outside the transfer stations to find addresses or evidence of the dumpers when they have no other reasonable option? I can see going after those who dump in parks, but not there.
It's to the point that you can't even watch the news about this story without being angry at everyone.
2009: The Summer of Rage.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable option to keep your garbage in your garbage can at your home or business rather than dumping it anywhere. If people can't go without garbage pickup for one day, they seriously need to rethink their lifestyles. Keeping an ever-growing pile of trash at home for a couple of weeks would be a good way to start.
Except, of course, that with the weekly garbage collection, some people have already have a week's worth collected -- those troublesome of that garbage being all of that within the environmentally wonderful green bins.
And again, if someone is living so close to the edge that missing a single collection day forces them to unload their garbage on the road or in a park because they can't stand the smell of their own festering trash, it's time for them to pause for a moment and take a look at how much garbage they're generating.
Another way of looking at it is that if garbage pickup is so essential that an otherwise civil society descends into chaos after one day (or one week) without it, then we should be paying a very handsome wage to the people who sweep it all away for us.
FWIW, I missed our last garbage day, which means that as of tomorrow, we'll have a month's worth of garbage (and two weeks of organics) sitting in our bins. And it can continue to stay there for another couple of weeks. It's just not so big a problem that I feel the need to get it out of my sight by putting it into everyone else's. The fact that it smells will just encourage us to reduce our own garbage output. Maybe I'll even set up a backyard composter this weekend instead of just complaining that my shit stinks and no one's doing anything about it.
Given that we pay for garbage service, it is the city's responsibility to make sure there is a way for us to dispose of it, strike or no strike. Either that or allow me to opt out of the public garbage system and go private. It's not a matter of whether I could keep piles of garbage in my house, it's a question of whether I want to.
Is there a place where people can protest the strikers?
Of course not, mrs. That would imply you had rights as a taxpayer, silly. No, we exist to serve the union.
I wonder as well, friend68, about the chances of challenging a ticket in court if you left it a the gates of the blocked transfer station. Seems a bit unfair, doesn't it? Everything about this mess is unfair to we citizens. These union jackals already have a sweet deal and they continue to characterize this as some sort of moral fight. You would think they were asked to donate body parts.
We must stand firm! The city only wants to bring these workers in line with everywhere else in the universe we know of. Banking sick days? Did you know they can use 6 of those 18 days to take paid time off if their spouse gets sick? And I am not talking only serious illness either. Who else has that?
Yeah, go to the transfer stations where they're striking with some friends and launch a protest to lower morale. Slogans on posters like "don't be greedy" are simple yet effective.
Or a nice sign that says, "I can afford the time to picket because I was laid off. What's your excuse?"
It's time to start thinking seriously about life in the perpetuity of a strike. It's better to operate in a prepared capacity of assuming that it will not end anytime soon than to assume it'll end in the next day or two.
If the Chinatown area ultimately becomes a dumping ground by whomever, it's going to take a hit on their business. The same more or less is applicable for every other part of town, whether business or residential. At a point when money isn't being spent and proprietors start hurting, they might be inclined to assume ownership over the area with regimes to cull and clean up the piling waste through other means — whether savoury or not. At the very least, being aware of what one tosses (and how) is now more relevant than ever. Tossing food into garbage and not into a green bin matters now more than ever. The raccoons will see to that.
I do feel the worst part about this, speaking as an urban designer, is the sense that few people in this city understand, much less embrace the concept of participatory citizenship — a major part of this being self-driven proprietorship over one's immediate locality. It is de rigeur in this city to sit back, let someone else do it, and then throw a hissy fit when that mechanism falters. Such participatory citizenship can manifest in an endless number of ways, but what most share are an imperative to go ahead with initiatives — whether or not the city gives its bureaucratic nod — and to improve the open nature of the city to all citizens, rather than draw everything off into insular, exclusive enclaves and ghettoes. Jane Jacobs' "eyes upon the street", defensible space, and surveillance was an idea that Toronto earnestly adopted. But Jacobs was only step 1. Participatory citizenship is step 2.
One of my favourite (And easiest) ideas for participatory citizenship would be to dig up excess concrete between sidewalks and curbside on areas of public space to engage in "guerrilla" gardening. I am certain a myriad of other ideas can be borne from this discussion.
It turns out that the union hates participatory citizenship, and goes out of its way to demonize those who practice it.
In Windsor, striking municipal employees have picketed against local citizens mowing public parks, calling them "scabs" (their 10-week strike has left knee-high weeds), and even going so far as to stand in front of mowers. There's also a famous video on YouTube in which an alleged CUPE member confronts a man and his granddaughter, who are collecting litter -- the striker takes the garbage bag from them and dumps the contents on the ground.
I'll have to part differences here: participatory citizenship in this city is perhaps the most tremendous sticking point that keeps a very good city from being a great city. Participatory citizenship is knowing your neighbours and welcoming new people actively. It's also looking each other in the eye on the sidewalk and either smiling, saying hello, and even just acknowledging the other person. Participatory citizenship is taking self-driven initiative over getting things done at the local level — without expectation of remuneration or reward — and not just sitting back, voting in a councillor for the ward, complaining about those people in city hall, and not let BIAs privately do their thing without having to work side-by-side with the citizens who live in that locality.
Now, as far as salt use and excess concrete goes, this raises other street design issues (and one of my favourite research areas, along with others like zebra neighbourhood design, light pollution remediation, brownfield remediation, and community gardening). The Jarvis vote was, from an urban design and usability perspective, problematic — not because it advocated the inclusion of bicycle traffic on the 5-lane thruway, but because it repeated the same, novice design mistake plaguing every other street-oriented bike lane in this city: separated bike lanes and arbitrarily maintaining the construct of a symmetrical street design without a qualitative rationale for doing so.
No street-grade bike lane in Toronto keeps cyclists together in their own two-way parallel arterial, offset to one side of the whole street. We have symmetric arterials here, where the two-way centre line is always in the centre (an arbitrary holdover to when horses and buggies carried people on mud roads). By going asymmetric and having two-way bicycle traffic to one side (protected by a berm), car traffic in the middle, and protected right-of-way for streetcars and bus transit on the opposing side (with zoning requirements for new structures mandating underground street parking space for every major intersection), we curtail the need for road salt on at least one side of the street, if not both (where only streetcars operate). Meanwhile, by tying conventional road salt with ecological (and economic) damage and restricting its use, and by increasing the use of liquid, beet-based de-icers (which Toronto already uses for colder days), the ecological damage is reduced substantially.
It comes down to this: impervious coverage (e.g., concrete) is a triple-negative for the city's health: it aggravates flash flooding; it retains solar heat well into the whole night and prevents transpiration where plants are prevented from growing; and it has no filtering ability to prevent bacteria, toxins, and other pollutants from emptying directly into the lake every time we have a rainshower (thus closing our beaches for a few days). One way to reduce this is to either eliminate punitive measures for participatory citizenship in the form of taking ownership over one's local public spaces or encourage participatory citizenship as municipal policy. Getting people outside to work on the guerrilla gardens mentioned earlier invites neighbours and people in the locality to get to know one another better, to ask questions, to learn from one another, and to function more cohesively as a locality where people can look one another in the eye, can say hello, and can smile at strangers without feeling like it's a threat or socially off-putting.
| So too with gas prices, the new Jarvis bike lanes, electricity, etc. I am always
| amazed by the number of angry people and the complexity of the mental gymnastics
| they will perform to avoid acknowledging their own roles in these issues and their
| utter dependence on sophisticated services of which they are entirely unconscious.
It's largely true. Even though said mental gymnastics are more complicated and take more energy to complete than just sucking it up and getting out there, it's better the devil people know than the one they do not.
| Rather make the excess concrete the sidewalk, and dig up the original sidewalk
| instead. The reason many curbside areas are paved over is that heavy salting of our
| major roads in the winter poisons roadside soil, making it very difficult to grow
| even hardy grasses.
This is also true, and changed street design from the previously mentioned symmetrical to asymmetrical design would go a long way to curtailing this. Such a transition would be most practical during ordinary capital project cycles, so re-fitting a city might take twenty or thirty years to complete.
By having car traffic in the middle of a road design, there are several ways to redirect runoff from those lanes into a filtration scheme separate from the storm sewer system. The only (and probably biggest) difficulty with using the curbside concrete areas as rights-of-way for pedestrians and removing existing sidewalk for other permeable uses (like gardening and greening) are issues of hydrant and streetlight placement. Another hazard to consider are putting pedestrians closer to faster, mechanized traffic (be it bicycles, streetcars, or even private vehicles): if it's not a sidewalk you could trust your child or grandparent to walk along, then it's not a safe design implementation. The same rubric applies for our existing bike lanes: would you trust your child or grandparent to ride alone on the bike lanes we now have? If no, then these are not safe places for the rest of commuters and riders to use.
Thugs. Public sector unions are a joke - on us.
The union negotiating in this case, even though their attempt at rationalizing their demands is ridiculous, can't be painted as the only scapegoat as they are only playing their part.
How can David Miller be taken seriously when he says that the City has no money for them when councilors kept their own raises and when the City is still hiring? How can they say they have no money when they didn't apply for stimulus funding for any project other than Miller's game of chicken with streetcar funding?
Sure, some of their benefits are absolutely ridiculous and should never had been given in the first place. (Someone should track down who agree to them then).
Clearly, Etobicoke had this all figured out. No wonder they are so afraid of privatization and contracting out -- it would be immediately evident that this union labour is the worst deal out there.
Sure, unions just do what they do - their #1 job is to ensure the continued existence and growth of the union.
I've seen a bit of union culture at my last job. The feelings of guilt and worthlessness of working with people so out of touch with the real world made me want to quit. So I did.
don't worry, gang!
Mayor David Miller will solve this problem by hiding and cancelling any event that would require a city councillor's presence.
right, gang?....
let's just hope he doesn't capitulate to the union's insanity.
and another reminder: the city saves $$ for every day the strike lingers. so the city has little incentive to resolve this quickly. expect a strike to linger into July.
And the province is hardly going to end the strike with legislation when they've let the strike in Windsor go on this long.
The city saves money? If cleaning up a trashed city and losing tourists equals savings, then yes.
What about those of us without cars? It's not like cabs or zipcar will let you take garbage on board.
Still, even though I disagree with this particular union - they're making life difficult for everyone, including themselves - I hate that people turn this into an argument against ALL unions.
Sure, there are jerks in unions, and a some of them get greedy. But the union system is still necessary, especially in a recession, when employers are looking to cut costs on the backs of employees (and employees are more likely to take it).
People shouldn't use real-world examples to support an argument? I guess vague assertions and platitudes are good enough for leftists.
It sure is hard to get all this cotton picked nowadays. "Progress" my foot!
You're saying the public sector workers are dying on cotton fields and in coal mines? Children working 15 hour days? That kind of thing? Or that the union is the only thing keeping that at bay? Give me a break.
Again, not supporting this particular union's actions. Just saying that overall, unions are part of the checks and balances that keep corporations from doing whatever the hell they want.
I've worked in both union and non-union jobs. In the former, it's a relief to know that I have proper recourse if my employer wants me to work 16 hours in a row -- or worse, in dangerous conditions.
Banking 18 sick days, though, is a whole other story.
That's interesting, because both situations that you cite (excessive hours and unsafe work) are already covered by existing labor law. No need for union protection.
Employment Standards Act, 2000
17. ... no employer shall require or permit an employee to work more than,
(a) eight hours in a day or, if the employer establishes a regular work day of more than eight hours for the employee, the number of hours in his or her regular work day; and
(b) 48 hours in a work week. 2004, c. 21, s. 4.
(There are exceptions but they generally require agreement from the employee or approval from the government.)
Occupational Health and Safety Act, RSO 1990, Chapter 0.1
43.(3) A worker may refuse to work or do particular work where he or she has reason to believe that,
(a) any equipment, machine, device or thing the worker is to use or operate is likely to endanger himself, herself or another worker;
(b) the physical condition of the workplace or the part thereof in which he or she works or is to work is likely to endanger himself or herself ...
Oh, wonderful!
And since unions had nothing to do with making such standards the norm prior to 1990, and the law is rigorous and complete and contains no loopholes that employers could use to exploit employees, unionization is nothing but raw evil, or at least useless!
That's a fair assessment.
I've just spent time in my old hometown of Windsor, which has seen its city workers on strike for 10 weeks. Things look relatively fine there. The long (naturalized) grass in city parks is actually pretty becoming.
So WTF Toronto? It's DAY ONE of the strike. How can garbage be piling up already? How pathetic is that? It's not like we weren't given a bit of notice that this was coming. Holy fuck people, deal.
That's the spirit, just lube up! It's not so bad!
As someone who puts out one bag a month, I'm not too worried about this as far as my own garbage goes, but the sidewalks are going to be awful by the end of the week.
I was walking home from the gym last night and I saw a lot of (what looked like) store garbage bagged and sitting on the sidewalks all along Bloor. I hope they were picked up by a private service and not just left there by store managers unaware of the strike.
For our household, the normal garbage and recycling materials aren't going to be an issue to store or deal with for a while, but even a normal week of summer on our green bin generates a good stink, not to mention the ever-more inventive raccoons finding their way in.
Whether or not I can hold the garbage in my house for a little while is hardly the issue. Perhaps I am simply not interested in suffering and holding smelly waste all for a cause I don't support. I pay to have garbage collection. Since the city can't provide that reliably, I should have the choice to opt out and pay a private garbage collector. I am sick of being at the mercy of unions.
Perhaps the garbage that we are being prevented from depositing at transfer stations should be dropped off at CUPE 416 headquarters, so that the leadership there can directly experience the impact they are having on Torontonians.
I agree with Gee's article in the globe -- this is Miller's chance to break the union stranglehold, and ensure electoral success. Otherwise, welcome back John Tory.
I think an equally good dumping place might be David Miller's magical garbage garage -- he seems to think it's the solution for garbage storage during the strike.