Toronto's Trash Under Millerist Socialism

Toronto, a city in decay. Well, perhaps that's a little strong but there is no denying that the city seems to be on a decline. The roads are falling apart, historic buildings in the downtown look dilapidated and are now towered over by high rise condos, violent crime is on the rise across the city, the water front looks like a garbage dump, businesses and people are leaving, services are being cut, the city's finances are bleeding red ink, and taxes have increased dramatically. All this going on yet Toronto's mayor and his inner circle of NDP oligarchs seems to be totally unaware of it. When David Miller was elected mayor of the city in 2003, he promised, broom in hand, to clean up city hall. So far, this has not happened. In fact, things have gotten much worse at Nathan Phillips Square. It seems that each week, we hear of yet another corruption allegation or ludicrous program announced. Most recently, a memo regarding garbage collection problems was only set to councillors who were the Mayor's allies. This isn't the first time that the city has misled or deliberately withheld information. In fact, this sort of activity seems to be business as usual. That's how the city of Toronto operates under Millerist socialism.

I'd like to focus this discussion on Toronto's most recent boondoggle: its new garbage collection scheme. David Miller is another bandwagon environmentalist who wants to make Toronto the "greenest" city in North America. Miller has run into a great deal of "unforeseen" problems with this initiative, which he has been working on since day one. One of his first accomplishments after being elected mayor was getting the city sued for breech of contract after shutting down construction on a bridge to the Island Airport. Since then, we've seen a whole host of ludicrous green plans such as banning pesticides. Unfortunately, the pesticide bans are putting allergy sufferers through a living hell and have marked a resurgence in blood sucking bed bugs within the city. The chemical used to kill these dangerous insects is banned under the program. Since then, we've seen tree cutting on your own property banned, a proposal to introduce recycling police, another proposal to ban plastic grocery bags, and a failed attempt to force Tim Hortons to stop using paper cups and plastic lids.

The new garbage program has to be the icing on the cake though. The plan, which was forced through council, was developed to divert waste from landfills in order to fulfill Miller's green initiative. The idea was to turn Toronto into a city that recycles the most. Well, that's what Toronto residents were told. The real reason behind the plan involves money as usual. Currently, the City of Toronto has no local landfill to dump its garbage. It is working on opening a small facility in St Thomas ON in the near future. However, most of the garbage is currently trucked across border to Michigan. As one would expect, this costs a bundle. Trucking companies charge per ton so reducing garbage makes financial sense. The waste diversion initiative covers for the fact that the city was too lazy and incompetent to find any long term local solution to its garbage problem. Instead, Miller decided that it was simply easier to punish Toronto's citizens by finding a new revenue source for the cash strapped city, made that way principally due to mismanagement. The city now charges individual residences an annual fee for garbage collection on top of their property taxes. The fee depends on whether people want a small, medium, or large bin. (I don't have the exact cost figures in front of me, but I believe it is over $150 for the smallest bin. Please correct me if I'm wrong) If you want to put out garbage, you have to buy the bin. As if getting your property tax funded garbage collection service taken away was bad enough, the implementation of the new program has been less than smooth. 40,000 Toronto households are still without their bins. The city claims this is due to a backlog at the factory that makes them. Instead, the city has handed out pink tags for people without bins to put on their garbage bags to ensure collection. No pink tag, no collection. People have complained that the tagging system is confusing. Reportedly, Toronto marked bins have shown up in Florida. Additionally, there are reports of bins actually getting stolen. Illegal dumping is also on the rise. It's not as if these were unforeseen problems. At the vary least, there wouldn't have been had the city taken their time to plan it out properly. Instead, they made a knee jerk reaction to a problem that should have been dealt with years ago before it got this bad.

Then there was the now infamous email incident I mentioned above. When pressed on it, Miller lashed out at a Sun reporter and denied he knew anything about it. Others involved denied any knowledge of the email or why it was only sent to Miller's allies. So much for cleaning up city hall. More denial, more cover ups. Lastman had the MFP scandal, Miller has countless under his belt. Miller's scandals aren't as delightfully juicy though. In fact, they're downright scary at times. If Toronto isn't the most mismanaged city in Canada, I would certainly be frightened to see the one that is.