City Prefers Toys Over Basic Garbage Service

According to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, these are the basic services local governments in Ontario must provide:

• Airports
• Ambulance
• Animal Control and By-law Enforcement
• Arts and Culture
• Child Care
• Economic Development
• Fire Services
• Garbage Collection and Recycling
• Electric Utilities
• Library Services
• Long Term Care and Senior Housing
• Maintenance of Local Road Network
• Parks and Recreation
• Public Transit
• Planning New Community Developments and Enhancing Existing Neighbourhoods
• Police Services
• Property Assessment
• Provincial Offences Administration
• Public Health
• Side Walks
• Snow Removal
• Social Services
• Social Housing
• Storm Sewers
• Tax Collection
• Water and Sewage

Strangely, missing from this list is subsidizing to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars developers at Lansdowne.

Not on this group of responsibilities is the community going into private business to derive profits from, say, Lansdowne, where the city was fiscally hosed before and is likely to be hosed again. Memo to City of Ottawa: if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.

Nowhere on this list does it address subsidizing NHL hockey teams and their new arenas.

LANSDOWNE: Elevator, Elevator, We Got The Shaft

However among these responsibilities is providing transit. Our transit system is broken at a cost of $6.4 billion. And it will be further broken by purchasing $1 billion of buses with no public debate, have not been adequately tested and which won’t work in cold weather.

And then there is sewage. During our recent ice storm which knocked out the Confederation Line, the $232 million Combined Sewage Storage Tunnel appeared not to work. ‘Appeared’ because given the amount of bullfeathers, lies, omissions and fudging that constitute city communications, residents cannot be sure that what they are being told is true. The biggest shortage on Laurier Avenue is trust and no amount of money can purchase that.

Nowhere on the list is the responsibility of providing grants to Porsche dealerships.

Water rates have skyrocketed because the city isn’t making enough revenue to cover costs which, given the city’s propensity for lying, might or might not be true.

Of the basic services above, one could easily say that at least 13 of them are not being adequately addressed  by the City of Ottawa. The most important function of the City of Ottawa is to provide basic services but it is not doing that.

The city is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an unnecessary library as a monument to architecture, but not to learning. Learning today is about the internet and the Ottawa Public Library should be concentrating on getting access to the web for underprivileged Ottawa. It’s not about building bricks-and-mortar monuments to vanity but about education and giving people such as new Canadians an even break.

And what are we calling this new civic monument? The King James I memorial to ego and excess?

Which brings us to tag-a-bag garbage.

The city in its edict for this program says it is considering a $3-a-bag fee for garbage above 55 units. The edict says that it would cost $450 million and 15 years (and a heated fight with voters) to get a new landfill working. The city is unprepared to do that.

This Is What You Call Solid Waste

Well that all sounds well and good as effective propaganda should. Except that is small beer compared to the hideous amount of money squandered by the city in recent years on toys.

Garbage pickup is a basic service, one of the most basic of services that include flat roads and snow removal. The city should be spending $450 million on a new landfill because that’s what cities are mandated to do. That’s one of the prime reasons cities were created. And yet, basic services are where the city does its worst job, preferring votes and toys to things such as proper garbage collection. Good garbage pickup cuts down on vermin, makes for a pleasant non-littered community and reduces disease.

Disease you say? Try asthma, birth defects, cancer, cardiovascular disease, contaminated water, childhood cancer, infectious diseases, low birth weight, and pre-term delivery. Oh yes, and contaminated water provides us with cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever. What’s old is new again.

Former Osgoode councillor Doug Thompson says when his former township tried tag-a-bag, people stole the tags from other peoples’ garbage. They threw garbage into ditches to avoid paying for tags. Town garbage cans were stuffed far beyond capacity. Litter increased markedly.

So while this community throws away billions on toys, basic services are ignored or cut back. And now it wants the community to pay considerable taxes and in addition fork out cash for basic services such as refuse pickup. That service is one of the primary reasons municipalities were created. Not to be charmed out of cash by Hollywood movie stars and smart hockey commissioners.

The hockey people are promising to put Ottawa “on the map.” Well, we are already on the map. We’re the capital of Canada. We are famous around the world for lousy light rail and through botching the Freedom Convoy. And soon we will ridiculed for legislating fun through our Entertainment Inaction Plan (Ottawans will be allowed 63 per cent of their quota of fun on Friday nights and 71 per cent on Saturdays. For each percentage point of fun that is exceeded on those two nights, funsters will be charged $3 to help support the basic service of entertainment inaction. Just thought you might want to know the details of the plan).

So let’s get back to what cities are supposed to do … like collect garbage. No, Ottawans should not be offended by paying $450 million for a new landfill. They should be offended by paying for $450 million of pure Lansdowne.

And $3 a bag for garbage is an outrage and a false economy. Is it cheaper to pick up garbage by the bag, or roaming the community fetching it out of ditches, parks and the Rideau River?

Ken Gray

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