You Get to Pay for your Garbage Bin Next Year
Remember when I wrote about City Council’s latest brainwave on how to increase recycling in this city? Remember that most of us thought the Mayor Miller hordes were just tossing the idea around to see if it would stick? Well, according to a story on CTV, it’s about to become real.
Next month, Toronto City Council will vote on further regulating trash day. No more will you have a choice of whether to put out your garbage in bags or bins. Now you have to put it out in their bin and pay more for the privilege too.
The city will graciously give you a choice of four bins: 75l, 120l, 240l, and 360l. Your current bin is probably 120 litres. You will pay a different amount for each bin, and in return the city will rebate you the cost of the cheapest, smallest bin, which is $209. A tax grab and big brother flexing his muscles all in one stroke. Try not to choke. And oh BTW, no bin bigger than 120l will fit on your property if you live in older or less expensive parts of town.
Notice that the only ones affected by this new big brother move are homeowners. Not condo owners. Not apartment tenants or landlords. Just those who live in a house. What did we do to deserve this property tax raise and uglifying of our frontages?
If you don’t like this idea, you’d better start letting your Councillor know loud and clear. Or if you’re in the pilot project area this summer — downtown or Scarborough — practice a little civil disobedience by simply ignoring their bins. Or as a last ditch effort — like this will ever work — just start en masse refusing to put out the garbage in all its regulated bins and using bags, and only bags until the city finally brings sanity back to our garbage disposal and stop trying to raise our property taxes in this surreptitious manner.
Again sanity is building a mechanical sorting plant to sort far better than any human can our garbage — whether from homes, apartments, or condos — into recyclables, compostables, and garbage, then convert the garbage into electricity.
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This is going to lead to more dumping in York Region, isn’t it?
Nope. Toronto bought a landfill near London and aboriginal lands. They plan on dumping it there, being so environmental and green and all. And BTW they’re doing diddly sqat about the garbage from the apartments and condos. Toronto homeowners have two choices: move out of Toronto or move into a condo/apartment.
I think the best thing we can do is vote in John Tory and have him review the Toronto Act, put a kibosh on Toronto’s garbage policies, and get real about making all of us truly green without increasing taxes (it’s a fallacy that we have to pay more) and putting onerous requirements that hit the poor, the ill, the disabled, the elderly the hardest.
Just heard: this new bin policy is a 2.8% property tax increase for homeowners — on top of the already declared tax increase of 3.8%.
Back in 2005 Toronto city council passed a “waste reduction levy” to tax all high rise condo and apartments if they don’t recycle as much as the city wants them too.
A tenant group which gets all its funding from the city of course endorsed the idea and said all tenants support it.
Of course if you got almost $1/2 MILLION a year from the city you too would probably say whatever they wanted you to say even if it is a lie!
How much does the city want them to? And how do they do get recyclables to the recycling place if the city doesn’t have the same kind of pick-ups (or do they?) as for homeowners? Do they contract with private firms?
LOL@your last sentence! So true!!