4 - Sunday, August 2, 1992 - North Shore News High summer in hogtown AS A measure of the existing cultural, spiritual and intel- lectual climate, now that Sunday shopping has been allow- ed, the major political issue in Toronto this year is gar- bage. Literally. The provincial NDP’s strong- willed environment minister, Ruth Grier, decided upon getting into office a couple of years ago that she would force the wasteful con- sumers of Canada’s banking Mec- ca into learning how to recycie by making sure that their garbage pot dumped right under their noses — “where they can all see it.’” This evangelical stance has led to some strange twists and turns. The environment minister spurned an offer from the northern Ontario community of Kirkiand Lake, which just hap- pened to have an abandoned mineshaft where most of the resi- dents said they’d be happy to dump Toronto's garbage fora fec, after it had been carted up there by train. The rail guys loved the idea. So did the unemptoyed ex-miners of Kirkland Lake, who sniffed not fumes by jobs. So did everyone else who didn’t want a mountainous landfill towering over their back yard, with 500 dump trucks rumbling and clanking past every day. No way, said Grier. If garbage stays out of sight and out of mind, how will the waste-making urban hordes ever be reprogram- med so that they turn into vir- tuous recycling, composting, ex- cessive packaging-rejecting con- servers? Instead, Grier set up — are you ready? — a Crown corporation called the Interim Waste Authori- ty, to find three sites for major new 400-acre superdumps, some- where within what is known as the Greater Toronto Area. A total of 57 potential sites have been identified, almost every one of them on prime agricultural soil, as it turns out. In order to make sure that her Crown juggernaut could not be deflected from its quest for iand to turn into wasteland, the steely, silver-haired cabinet minister got another bill rammed through the provincial legislature, courtesy of the NDP majority: Bill 143, which short-circuited the normal cumbersome environmental assessment process, neatly block- ing of f the only recourse farmers and landowners had that offered any hope of protecting themselves from expropriation. _ Neediess to say, every single person living in the affected areas is enraged. ( &LISTEL WHISTLER HOTEL Bob Hunter The three NDP legislative members who happened to have gotten elected on campaigns op- posing the previous Liberal gov- ernment’s plans to establish just one such dumpsite within the Metro area are understandably evasive on the issue, but everyone else is noisily apopicctic. They have been marching on Queen’s Park, blocking roads, Staging rallies and parades, almost overturning Ruth Grier’s car, set- ting cows loose, flying balloons, shouting through loudhailers, for- cing the beleaguered environment minister at one point to sneak out the back door of the legislature, where the TV cameras were waiting to record her ignominious departure. Image-wise, the NDP has managed, despite its normally grassroots appeal, to become Go- liath, hammering on the poor little farmers, who have metamorphos- ed into defenders of ecology. Otherwise, on the political front, an odd but pervasive paral- ysis seems to have set in. There is much wheel-spinning at every level of government, but since nobody (except Marcel Masse, the federal defence minister and crypto-sovereignist) appears to have any money to spend (and that’s strictly for helicopters, mainly to be built in Quebec), budget cuts are the order of the day. The best anybody seems to be able to do is to lead by standing still. Which, of course, is what one does the most in Toronto these days, what with the traffic being the way it is. As soon as the snow melts — or the salt washes away from the streets, as the case may be — road construction begins, you see. Entire sections of freeway are closed down simultaneously to gouge and repair, even though, until then, they had seemed perfectly OK to me and a million other drivers. Side streets are closed off, sometimes for weeks at a time, for largely cosmetic-looking asphalt spray jobs. The bitter joke is, ‘‘It must be summer, construction has started.” 1 sometimes suspect that the top municipal and provincial bureau- crats who really run this huge ur- ban gestalt are engaged in the secret testing of chaos theory. After having turned the streets themselves into a labyrinth of blocked-off dead-ends and wrongway one-ways, they then throw in events like the Molson’s lady and Caribana, the big annual black cultural festival, which totally lock up the downtown core for days at a time. No new subways, streetcar lines or expressways have been built for 20 years. When completed back then, mighty Highway 401 passed over the top of Toronto, with only dis- tant suburbs to the south, and nothing but farmland to the north. Today, it is surrounded on both sides by ‘burbs and manufacturing plants and offices as far as the eye can see. In that time the population has doubled, leading to both traffic congestion and an over-abun- dance of garbage. What this means basically is that everything is twice as crowd- ed, many times as polluted, four or five times as expensive, several times as dangerous, and you can only move at half the speed. The closest Toronto came to good news this summer was the fact that it has been raining nearly every weekend. Good news? Well, as a tactless senior federal climatologist argued, the cloud cover means thet the iucky denizens of Hagicwn aren't get- ting as much ultraviolet radiation as they would be otherwise. EEA 8 “SUPER AUCTION . co SUNDAY. ‘ AUGUST 2nd: “at Apm = * 5§7S Marine dD: West Varicou ey. eae Dining out with family = Wy, ¢, should be fun, not oe == / sy expensive, so when | i ™ you order any lunch or dinner entree at the Coach House Inn, the f} kids can enjoy any 7 © Max. two children per adult, age 12 and under only * Meal times are special, Let’s keep them tha [ RESTAURANT PATIO NOW OPER | the coach house a ee B 700 LILLOOET RD ” fr292 985-3111 GOURLAY SPENCER & SLADE Barristers ® Solicitors Tina C. 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