This Is What You Call Solid Waste

05/04/2023

If you get an opportunity to read the mind-numbing Solid Waste Master Plan Component Project Update, don’t.

Most of it is a bunch of garbage (with jokes like this, now you know why The Bulldog is free).

“Never in the field of human words were so many wasted by so few to so few,” Winston Churchill (kinda).

You know there are a finite number of words out there and one of these days the world will run out of them. We have a verbosity emergency. And when that happens, I’m blaming the Solid Waste Master Plan Component Project Update. A waste in so many ways.

Don’t expect this report to appear on Book Bub except as one of those free ones as an enticement. Enticement? This would send normally considered readers screaming into the woods.

So much for literature. This is an update for the mayor, councillors and the public. I’m thinking, for the most part, that those folks are busy. So this is an update on plans to do something. There are episodes of Seinfeld with more content. And our tax money is being wasted by people writing this and people reading this. A rare double.

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Here’s an idea. Write something when something needs input or actual actions are reported. If you’re a busy executive in, yes, the private sector, you don’t have time for this. Tell us when input is needed from council and the public. Tell us when something is about to happen or, in a fit of wild optimism, something happened.

The report points us to the catchy other report entitled (ACS2019-PWE-SWS-0001). There’s a Stephen King title for sure … a page-turner.

And, if that’s not enough adrenaline for a day, it also references the Phase 2 Solid Waste Master Plan report. Your agent, with a streak of masochism a kilometre long, did that. Back to Stephen King … scary.

You can’t make this up. The report says, as I vaguely remember through a caffeine overdose, “Phase 1 (Where We Are): to provide Council with a baseline of information for discussion in future phases, as well as to inform Council of what tools are available to influence the City’s waste management system and programs.”

So nothing, right?

“Phase 2 (Where We Are Going): to begin discussions with stakeholders on the vision statement, guiding principles and goals that will provide a framework for the Waste Plan. This phase also identifies future waste management needs, the long list of options to be considered to meet future waste management needs, the
evaluation methodology to evaluate each option and will generate the recommended short list of options for consultation and consideration.”

Sorry, you’re holding discussions with the stakeholders on a vision statement? Couldn’t that just be get rid of garbage real good? As your agent remembers from his time in newspapers, our vision statement was that we’ve got to go like hell to get tomorrow’s paper out and then do it again the next day. You’re building a framework for a plan?

Thank goodness 911 doesn’t work that way. “Yes madame, I know you’re on fire but we haven’t finished the stakeholder discussion for the vision statement nor completed the framework for this emergency call. Hey, would you stop screaming? We should be working as a team on this call. Let me pass you on to the media relations department so they can send you an email concerning our continuing progress.”

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And then we get to Phase 3: “Phase 3 (How We Are Going To Get There): to outline the recommended options and short-term (five-year) implementation plan and targets for the final Waste Plan. Where appropriate, input on the draft Waste Plan will be incorporated into the final Waste Plan, which will be presented to Committee and Council for consideration in early 2023.”

So the short-term implementation plan is five years? We gerbils here at Bulldog World Headquarters operate on a five-minute plan and god help the person who runs on to six minutes. Thumb screws.

A five-year plan. Never use that term in government. It is so, how shall we say, Soviet. And you know how those five-year grain plans worked out. “You not meet quota, comrade? What are few dead bodies to welfare of great proletariat? Georgy … take him outside.” Somewhere Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale are smiling.

But there is a little mushroom of news in this compost heap of an update. Something called Mixed Waste Processing and Mass Burn Incineration. So taxpayers in this climate emergency are spending $2.2 billion on light-rail that doesn’t work, $4.2 billion on more light rail that might work and about $1 billion on battery-driven buses that won’t work as well as the Confederation Line (not to mention say a half-billion on incentives for construction and development profits at Lansdowne … not that that has much to do with the environment but I hate to miss an opportunity to mention it).

So we’re spending all these mega-dollars on the climate emergencies and we’re considering burning garbage?

The mind wobbles.

So below is the report with the usual proviso that you should not operate heavy equipment while reading it. Make sure that the Shopper’s has few supply-chain problems with No-Doze or even better, just free-base caffeine. That’s what works for your agent.

Good luck.

Ken Gray

Solid Waste Master Plan timeline update_EN

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