Toronto is having a Newfoundland summer.
Now I don’t mean, even though it would be a wonderful idea, that there are bake-apple festivals at Bloor and Yonge. Or that the Bay Street stockbrokers are out jigging codfish on “food fish” weekends. Though that, too, would be an encouraging, even edifying, spectacle.
No, what I mean is that, for most of July, temperatures in the Ontario capital and beyond are in that sweet temperate zone of the low 20s, and there seem to be as many grey and rainy days as sunny ones. With a great heave of homesickness, I’ve even seen fog obscuring the shoreline of Lake Ontario and the nether parts of the metropolis itself. I know it’s odd, but when I see the Royal York hotel clouded by mist, I immediately think of Twillingate.
For Toronto, a Newfoundland summer in 2009 is a godsend. Because as all of Canada and a good portion of the world knows, this city is caught in the turmoil of a garbage strike. Its citizens are doing the best they can with the ever-growing heaps of garbage, but it’s been a hard go.
For a city that so much prides itself on its environmental credentials – Toronto professes to be green with evangelical fervour – it really hurts to be seen as a giant litter box. Nightly news shots of rats making a buffet of the mountains of mess are a blow to civic pride, as well as a health hazard. And the smell: As Maclean’s magazine put it so delicately on its recent cover, Toronto Stinks.
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Montreal used the Army in for snow removal; can Toronto do the same for garbage collection?
Why aren’t the enviro-mentals demanding that City Hall issue rat-food composters to the population?
I used to live on Ward’s Island in Toronto Harbour and many the night, back in (what I remember of) the sixties, I would look at Toronto, lit up across the bay and think that if you stripped away the buildings, the people would look just like rats as they scampered around. Never did like big cities then and still don’t. Looks like that’s what’s happening, only with real rats. Wonder how long this goes on before it starts to kill people in wholesale lots from some hideous disease spawned from the trash and spread from the critters that live in it?
A not neat place to be for sure.
Some are saying that southern Ontario has two seasons, winter & July.