Sometimes you just gotta love these lefties like Toronto mayor David Miller. Last Friday was Earth Day and a beaming Miller was posing for the cameras. Miller was in a park with a group of fresh faced kids, standing in the pouring rain and picking up the garbage. This was part of the annual Earth Day ritual where citizens are encouraged to spend 20 minutes picking up litter from public places, unionized workers be damned. after the symbolic few minutes, it’s back to business as usual.
The reality is that Miller does not care a lot about litter. Toronto is a city that once prided itself as clean, especially compared to major population centres south of the border. Now, Toronto the Good has become Toronto the Dirty and cleaning up the streets and other public areas is simply not a priority to the left wing-dominated city council.
To say that David Miller doesn’t care about litter is perhaps a little unfair to His Beggarness. He cares more about litter than he does about the violent crime that seems to be plaguing the city. While the mayor waxes eloquently about trash in the parks he remained silent, as he usually does, when seven people were shot in a North York nightclub including a young mother of four who died from her wounds. Miller, however, probably did his own private grieving, lamenting the fact that other levels of government aren’t giving him enough money to prevent crime by building more basketball courts.
The mayor also cares more about litter than he does about the homeless. He’s perfectly content to have people living on the streets and in public squares until those other levels of government fork over enough money to build more "affordable housing". Toronto has a relatively high apartment vacancy rate where some of the homeless could go, provided the city gives them money to supplement their rent. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t fit in to Miller’s socialist agenda. and that’s what’s important.
The bottom line is that although Miller is not overly interested in making Toronto a cleaner city, he nonetheless is more concerned about Tim Horton coffee cups lying around than he is about people, living or dead, lying prone on the streets and in the parks.
Miller is not concerned enough about our garbage strewn parks and streets to hire students at less than union wages to pick up the trash. The unions wouldn’t like that and Miller can’t afford to do anything that would anger his union buddies. Perhaps the highlight to the Earth Day 20 minute bonanza was the group of students who cleaned up their schoolyard despite being told not to. You see, the schools’ janitors (they preferred to be called sanitation engineers or something equally misleading) are on a work to rule campaign that includes not picking up garbage. But the kids sensibly ignored both the union and their school and picked up litter anyway. It seems they didn’t want to go to a dirty school. It’s too bad the politicians can’t look at the problem the same way.
after his photo op, Miller was quoted as saying, "Look at these kids. They’re having fun, they’re learning about the importance of the neighbourhood being clean and it sends a lesson about stopping litter."
Rubbish--pardon the pun. Taking a part in an Earth Day stunt teaches them nothing, other than perhaps that if you litter, someone else will eventually come along and clean it up. What kids have to be taught is that littering is wrong aND that there are consequences to dumping garbage on public or private property. The Toronto Star quotes Councillor Jane Pittfield as saying, like drinking and driving, people have to be educated that it is not socially acceptable to litter. While the comparison to drunk driving might be a little over the top, she’s on the right track. Even the Star’s Royson James, someone who’s not unsympathetic to Miller’s type of touchy-feely policies wrote than enforcement needs to be stepped up.
It won’t be though; not under this present council. They would rather do photo ops where they can show how much they care about the environment than to actually take measures to make Toronto a clean city. They would rather blame corporations like Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s who sell the products that end up littering the streets than the pigs who throw the garbage anywhere they want to.
Unfortunately, under the current civic government, Toronto will remain what it is--a real mess.
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