Toronto stinks

The apocalypse, as advertised on morning radio, hadn’t come to pass. Traffic moved well along Toronto’s Lakeshore Boulevard last weekend as pickets allowed people to drop off their garbage at three giant parking lots fenced off for the purpose. Union leaders had warned that striking municipal workers would be delaying residents up to an hour at these specially designated dump sites before letting them off-load—a gambit that would have transformed the area into a knot of snarled traffic and snarling drivers. But instead of chaos, motorists were greeted on Saturday by two men wearing strike placards and morose expressions. One held back drivers for all of two minutes, before letting them roll ahead to the drop zone. Most drivers passed through without hearing a gripe.

Maybe the workers figured Toronto’s municipal employees strike was nearing its bitter end. But if they thought they were getting the upper hand they were wrong. For more than three weeks, mounds of plastic bags had been stretching toward the far reaches of the lakeshore lots, as 24,000 inside and outside workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees walked the picket lines, and residents grimly took up the task of transporting their own trash for disposal. The resulting spectacle is at once impressive and revolting: in a few short days, the piles at the lakeshore—one of 21 such sites through the city—rose and spread to cover several acres behind translucent snow fences, attracting squadrons of seagulls and emitting an odour whose foul complexity was hard to describe (rotting food and soiled diapers were just the beginning). On Sunday, city managers had obtained their second court injunction allowing pest control workers to spray the burgeoning piles, while the zones themselves were nearing capacity. Yet somehow Torontonians were struggling through.

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It’s true. The city that once called in the army for a snowstorm is sucking it up. And while one hesitates to use mountains of reeking trash as metaphors for anything, these ones have come to symbolize a new-found sense of resolve. For years, councillors and citizens alike have put off this sort of reckoning with the unions; the city piled generous contract upon generous contract, seeking to buy labour peace amid the myriad challenges of running a mega-metropolis. The cumulative cost of those agreements has been taking its toll: in the past five years, the city’s annual operating expenditures have ballooned from $6.6 billion to $8.7 billion, easily outpacing inflation and sending council into a yearly crisis as it attempts to balance its budget. Something had to give.

For the city’s left-leaning mayor, David Miller, it was more than an arithmetical problem. Since he came to office at the end of 2003, the 50-year-old former New Democrat has talked up the importance of cities as social and political units, borrowing heavily from the teachings of urban renewal gurus like Richard Florida. In the future, he said, Canadians will live and work in urban centres where clusters of creative activity would increasingly drive the economy. To improve the quality of those peoples’ lives and to make those communities operate more smoothly, he said, we needed to spend money on them. “If Canada’s going to succeed as a country,” he has said, “we must invest in cities.”

But if the four-week-old strike illustrates anything, it’s the disconnect between this promise and what taxpayers can see before their eyes. Yes, bohemian enclaves and twee shopping strips have popped up throughout the city. But so too have taxes, making the city an increasingly difficult place to call home: the average household’s property tax bill has gone up 12 per cent since 2005 to $3,314 with no discernible enhancement in services. Some of that increase stems from the rise in market value of homes throughout the city, notes Enid Slack, an expert in municipal finance at the University of Toronto. But that’s small comfort to anyone who isn’t planning to sell his home. Meanwhile, almost all of the windfall has vanished into the maw of rising labour costs: between 2003 and 2008, salaries and benefits to city employees have climbed some 32 per cent; this year they’re expected to top $4 billion. That Miller’s solution to these pressures has been still more taxes—a 1.5-percent land transfer levy, and a $60 annual fee for car owners—hasn’t helped. At what point, residents have asked, will the mayor get his hand out of their pockets?

Business people are similarly exasperated. Many small companies that were supposed to be part of Miller’s live-and-work urban vision have fled the city and its tax-and-spend ways, says Judith Andrew, president of legislative affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, turning Toronto into “a bedroom community for the 905 region.” In 2005, the city released a report acknowledging that some 100,000 jobs had disappeared from Toronto since 1989, while the surrounding region gained 700,000. The exodus continues apace, says Andrew, because Miller and his supporters ignore the very basic demands of business owners. “They don’t want to deal with water and roads and sewers and all those mundane things,” says Andrew. “They want to do exciting things like eliminate plastic shopping bags, and [mandate] rooftop gardens. Their level of intervention in these areas keeps growing and it all costs money.”

To many residents, the city’s 1,100 trash collectors personify the city’s current state of dysfunction. The workers’ $25-an-hour average wage and six weeks’ vacation for senior employees stood out enough during a declining economy; more glaring still was a provision in their collective agreement allowing them to bank up to 18 sick days a year, and to cash in up to six months’ worth upon retirement. The result has been a liability on the city books that already stands between $140 million and $160 million, depending on who’s doing the counting. Worried that the benefit will hobble its finances in the future, the city has insisted that it come to an end.

These so-called “featherbed” provisions might be easier for ratepayers to take were the cost of garbage removal not already going up. In its survey of Canadian cities (featured on pages 14-20 of this week’s issue), the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies pegged the price in Toronto at $317 per dwelling between 2005 and 2007, fully 65 per cent higher than the average of 30 other cities monitored during the same period. Much of that cost, says Bobby O’Keefe, the institute’s research director, was due to the rollout of an elaborate program aimed at diverting compostable and recyclable materials from its landfills. But that program has merely added to the sense that the garbagemen now do less for more. Not only must residents sort the garbage into three separate waste streams—recyclables, garbage and compost—they are required to place the material in unwieldy, wheeled bins that the city supplied at homeowners’ expense.

All this was done to ease the burden on trash collectors. Worried by escalating compensation and disability claims, the city has invested in a fleet of trucks equipped with hydraulic arms which literally do the heavy lifting for the collectors. On some streets, employees wheel the bins to the back of the truck, where they place them on mechanical lift; on others, the truck simply drives alongside, reaching out for the bins with a hydraulic arm equipped with a grapple. The driver rarely has to get out of the cab.