June 29, 2009 | Weird News
Plug your nostrils everyone. We just passed Week 1 of the city-wide garbage strike (well, city-wide except for one borough that has private pick-up), smack dab in the middle of one of the city’s biggest tourist draws—Gay Pride.
Here is Christie Pits park, in Toronto’s Korea Town / Annex West Neighborhood. It’s one of the temporary landfill sites that the city has set up, much to the chagrin of everyone in the ‘hood and one of the authors, who lives a few blocks away.
In another few weeks, this outdoor rink [above and below left] will be filled to the brim with stinking trash, which is already smellable a kilometer away. If this keeps up, we might have to compare New York City Versus Toronto garbage strikes.
As you can see below, trash bins have been wrapped up with cellophane and are ‘temporarily out of order’.
In Windsor, across the border from Detroit, their strike has dragged on for more than 10 weeks. We hope to get photos of that soon. Luckily, the moronic government monopoly that holds our hand when we go to buy liquor, averted their strike [please see our LCBO Strike post] so we avoided the perfect shit storm. We’ll be back with more shortly, if we aren’t overcome by the fumes.
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Please do tell – how was the LCBO strike averted? What concession did the populace achieve? Inquiring minds need to know before we visit Ontario again.
I understand that there will be a protest to take our garbage to the footsteps of city hall. I would suggest that we promote another target as well.. the steps of the union offices(halls) or wherever would effect them the most.
Raise for the council and the city workers?? two wrongs don’t make a right. I would rather fight to revoke the first raise and keep all status quo.
Hit the union halls with all your garbage!
Just a thought … If Toronto residents are really fed up being held hostage under mounds of garbage, why not simply dump your garbage off in front of those picket lines of striking civil servants? Similarly, why not dump your garbage off at municipal offices, police stations, the mayor’s residence, the residence’s of City councilors, etc.? Wouldn’t that make cleanup easier once the strike is over? (Always think ahead!).
If anything, once opposing sides in this dispute are directly exposed to the rotting refuse they so flagrantly inflict on local citizenry, the smell alone might help remind them that their primary commitment is to the taxpayer!
Personally, and as a rural resident, I have no great love for the hopelessly gridlocked, multi-confused ‘Big Smoke’ or whatever misery its residents so willfully endure. It could be argued that the smell of rotting garbage is a noticeable improvement. It’s all part of the “Manhattanization” experiment you sewer rats were all so fond of.
Give me the rationale…union employees pick up all kinds of waste from Toronto residents,… yard waste, green bins, garbage bins and recylables… but during their strike, the public can not take recylables to the temporary dump sites… Isn’t this a part of the same job and why isn’t this included? Is it a part of optics…there would be triple the amount of mess and our mayor certainly doesn’t want this image. Miller’s message is “keep it in your own back yard.”
this is what you get having unionized workers doing a no brainer job like picking up garbage. They deserve only minimum wage.