by Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, august 8, 2006
anyone interested in how Mayor David Miller, the "new broom" at Toronto city hall has done over the past three years would be wise to use the city's perennial garbage crisis as a benchmark. The city of Toronto has had a running garbage crisis for close to a decade, yet still no viable solutions are in sight.
Miller and his NDP caucus are taking a similar approach to the garbage crisis as Dalton McGuinty and the provincial Liberals are taking to solving the province's energy shortage. McGuinty's energy policy is that Ontarians should keep the air conditioning set at 26+ degrees and the lights off at night to conserve on the use of electricity. Miller's approach to garbage disposal is that Toronto residents should recycle and compost as much as possible to keep items from going into the Michigan landfills, which are in the process of becoming untenable as Michigan's state government is preparing legislation that would keep Toronto's garbage out.
Some years ago Toronto had an opportunity to turn the abandoned adams Mine in Kirkland Lake, Ontario into a landfill site, but that idea was shot down in flames by none other than, you guessed it, Jack Layton, Olivia Chow and the NDP, of which the current mayor is a proud member. Concerns cited were that the garbage might pose an environmental threat to the area.
So long as Toronto continues to grow at its current rate there will be a continuous increase in waste. The amount of garbage generated by Torontonians will continue to grow exponentially and the problems surrounding disposal of that waste certainly won't get smaller.
What's the city government doing about it? They are closing their eyes, holding hands and sprinkling generous quantities of whiffle dust in hopes that when they stop the problem will be gone. The most recent crisis involved a court challenge of the State of Michigan's refusal to accept tons of solidified human bio-waste at the Carleton Farms Landfill site in Michigan's Wayne County. The judge ruled that Michigan did not have to accept the bio-waste, as it was not specifically stated in the contract the landfill had with the city of Toronto.
The amount of scaremongering that took place before and during this trial is enough to make even Pinocchio blush. Toronto' lawyers claimed that unless the courts forced The Carleton Farms landfill site to accept the bio-waste, the city would be forced to dump it into Lake Ontario with grave environmental results. The lawyers claimed that Toronto had less than a week's worth of storage facilities before the stuff would have to be chucked into the Lake.
David Miller, ever the defender of the environment came to the Lake's rescue by saying there would never be any human waste dumped into Lake Ontario. No kidding, Dave. Since the Lake does not fall under municipal jurisdiction, I think the federal government might have something to say about what gets dumped into Lake Ontario, particularly, since half of it also belongs to the U.S.
Rather than posing and posturing, it might be politic of Miller and his NDPers to come up with a real solution to the garbage crisis, rather than attempt to shoot down any and all solutions that arise. For instance, in Europe, which has some of the world's most environmentally conscientious countries, incineration of garbage is accepted as not only being environmentally sound, but also economically rewarding. The garbage that is burned in the incinerators produces heat that Europeans use to warm up public buildings or to power generators. But for some reason Toronto socialists, even after spending huge amounts of taxpayer money on factfinding junkets to Europe, have decided that this method of garbage disposal was not orthodox in that it wasn't "clean" enough.
Well, guys, hate to disappoint you, neither is dumping human waste into Lake Ontario or shipping it by the truckload to another jurisdiction, which contributes to air pollution, traffic jams and represents a needless waste of fuel.
To listen to the pundits prognosticating about the coming municipal elections, Toronto will be sentenced to yet another four years of David Miller and the socialist spendthrift machine currently taking up space at Toronto city hall. But then, what do they know? These are the same people that predicted a Barbara Hall landslide three years ago at just about this same point.
If you're really interested in seriously solving some of the city's most pressing issues, including what to do with the city's garbage, Jane Pitfield couldn't possibly be worse than the current regime. at least she speaks her mind instead of talking trash.
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