CITY COUNCIL: Garbage In, Garbage Out

“At issue was one of Ottawa’s perennially troublesome gremlins: garbage pickup. The Trail Road landfill will likely be full in just over a dozen years, and the city needs to divert more organic and recyclable matter from being dumped there, in order to prolong use of the site while a more permanent solution is put in place.”

Ottawa Citizen editorial

Garbage is not a “perennially troublesome gremlin.”

One of the reasons municipalities were created was to dispose of garbage. Garbage collection retards disease, keeps vermin at bay and stifles stink.

In other words, garbage collection is vital to the community … an essential service. It’s one of the things that cities must get right unlike wasting taxpayer money for night mayors or Lansdowne Park or a luxury LRT that doesn’t work. It matters, unlike 90 per cent of the issues on Parliament Hill or at Ottawa city council.

The city must get garbage right. If not, major health problems.

The Immediate Danger To Media, Freedom and Democracy

The Trail Road Landfill is not full, unlike some of the so-called experts discussing it. Nor has the city estimated how long it will be before it is full. In fact, it rather artlessly dodged the issue (which it was asked to discover by council) in a report. Former councillor Gord Hunter recently said in The Bulldog that city politicians used to hear year-after-year that Trail Road would be full within 15 years. It was to the point that councillors chuckled once a year about the staff estimate. Decades passed. Trail Road still isn’t full. Fifteen years stretched into decades.

The staff report mentioned above was supposed to answer that question. Instead it avoided it. Useless this report, and arguably flying in the face of the needs of the community and council.

And now we have the formerly solid Ottawa Citizen enshrining the three-bag garbage pick-up limit as a great moment in collegiality, civilized discussion and an example to be enshrined in cooperation.

No it isn’t.

It’s a crass political compromise based on the number halfway between zero and six. A figure even the Citizen editorial board, once an organization of which the city and the newspaper could be proud, fell for in its naivety. The methods and results of this ‘collegial compromise’ stink of the Bismarkian realpolitik so practised by former mayor Jim Watson and adopted by the current holder of the post, Mark Sutcliffe.

Three bags means nothing. It is based on nothing because city staff could only produce a report saying nothing. And the whole issue was thrust upon the public without even a public-policy discussion. Nor a debate in a standing committee. Amateurish and cynical.

‘Collegial compromise,’ you say? Hardly, it was a bunch of scared pols and staffers who kicked a wasp nest of public anger and discovered that wasps live inside. This was city hall running from the sting of angry residents. They were collegially trying to save their collective posteriors. Thus a quick compromise based on no science and no plan. Yet praised by the Citizen editorial board.

What should have happened is that the experts at city hall should have produced a real plan based on research and intelligence. A comprehensive waste policy that would have dealt with the garbage issue rather than three-bags-full of compost. This is no solution or noble compromise. It’s pushing a controversial problem so far into the future that council will eventually, at that time, be forced to make a real decision … probably when it is too late. An emergency.

Collegiality? Hardly. This is a council whipped as hard as Watson’s Bobbleheads. These politicians dealt with this important public-policy issue based on what is best for them, not the welfare the community.

It is interesting that Sutcliffe, like Watson, is happy to create a night mayor, or a superfluous Lansdowne, or a library that is a monument to concrete rather than knowledge, but wants to cut back or make residents pay for basic services. Garbage, water, electricity, fire, police, ambulance, hospitals, social services, flat roads and snowplowing matter. Intelligent and interesting public-policy discussions should come from them.

Instead, pols and taxpayers are fixated on frills. Sexy fighter jets on Parliament Hill and finding money for billionaire sports franchise owners. Why? You can’t cut a ribbon on a well-plowed road.

Anyone who did the remotest bit of research (God forbid, to be read in The Bulldog) and had an ounce of political savvy would not have written this editorial barge of bilge.

Newsrooms Matter, The Bulldog Matters

When the Citizen closes, sooner rather than later, people could easily point to this editorial as a big part of the reason why. Diminished resources caught in a death-spiral of diminished quality. Maybe the issue will receive passing mention in the roller-skating rink that will replace the Citizen newsroom. If the new patrons need advice on skating around issues, perhaps the skaters could contact the previous proprietors.

We look to an editorial board for leadership in public policy in this community, not producing a bunch or words to fill a space.

Shame on so many levels.

Ken Gray

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