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. Continue…