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Editorial

Stinking in Toronto


July 15, 2002

Anybody notice the eerie silence from our usually loquacious city councillors during the recent civic workers’ strike?

The same politicians who have banned the leafblower, slapped silly and confusing colour codes on plate glass windows of restaurants whose biggest health infraction has been loudly humming refrigerators, decreed through their oh-so-politically-correct top health bureaucrat that they wouldn’t interfere unless Toronto’s mounting garbage became a health hazard.

Aside from rats the size of alley cats and the unimaginable bacteria that must swarm in swill, the stench can’t be all that bad for your health.

While the elected yahoos at city hall summered at their cottages in the fresher air of northern communities, city managers laid more than 80 charges of illegal dumping and issued more than 800 warnings to apartments and businesses to clean up garbage around their dumpsters and on their property.

These were only bureaucratic responses to the infinitely patient, as a lot of people we know can never find a live body but only voice mail when they dial Toronto City Hall. One resident at Davisville and Mount Pleasant, concerned about the rats on his patio because of the dumping of garbage at a construction site next door, was told by staff in his local councillor’s office to move into a hotel for a few days.

This recent summer strike has seen the debut of the drive-by dumper. Many people used the strike to dump hazardous or illegal materials for which they would usually have to pay a fee to dump.

According to newspaper reports, illegal dumping was so bad along Ingram Drive that entrances and parking areas to Central Plumbing and two other businesses were blocked off, discouraging customers and delaying product deliveries to job sites. But our politicking councillors, more interested in lobbying to get the Kyoto accord signed by the prime minister, long ago lost touch with business and aren’t overly bright in the necessity of luring tourists to their well-touted world class city.

There’s a worrisome aftermath now that the strike has ended. Independent pest control experts say that we’re going to need a pied piper now that the 25,000 striking workers are back on the job. After the clean-up, the rat population will be headed for new places to forage, including local homes, offices, parks and in the city’s already beleaguered bars and restaurants.

Let’s hope that at least some of them high tail it to city hall where the two-legged rodents needed the provincial government to call the strike to a halt.

So why this eerie silence from your local councillor?

Local 416 of the outside workers’ union.

Leftwing councillors run this city. Stink, stench or hazards to your health notwithstanding, you’ll never hear them speak out against any strike. Not when there’s any union involved.


Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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