CITY COUNCIL
• Despite pleas, city moves to privatize trash pickup [The Star]
• Hume: A vote for Cusimano will be a vote for Ford [The Star]
• City moves ahead on trash privatization [National Post]
• Toronto committee votes in favour of privatizing garbage collection [Globe & Mail]
FEDERAL ELECTION
• Toronto key to majority for Harper’s Conservatives [The Sun]
• National Public Transit Strategy Still Missing from this Election [Torontoist]
STREETS
• Fiorito: A play torn from the pages of the street [The Star]
• The Fixer: Hey Rogers, bury that cable [The Star]
• Temporary street parking permits okayed [The Star]
• Kids’ pleas fail to lift street hockey ban [The Star]
• Boys descend on City Hall with plea for street hockey [National Post]
• City moves toward overnight street parking permits [National Post]
TRANSPORTATION
• Slight delays for motorists on Jarvis after bike lanes installed [The Star]
• Need to borrow a bicycle? Bixi launches in May [The Star]
• Newspaper lets GO riders exchange love notes and dating advice [National Post]
• BIXI begins installing bike-sharing stations across Toronto [National Post]
• BIXI Toronto station locations revealed [BlogTO]
OTHER NEWS
• City to probe safety of dilapidated Scarborough home [The Star]
• Pungent mystery ‘perfume’ wafts through downtown [The Star]
• Echo Beach to become Toronto’s newest concert venue [BlogTO]
• A visual history of Toronto taxicabs [BlogTO]
One comment
On May 17 and 18 City Council will decide whether or not to privatize recycling and garbage service… Even though we don’t have all the facts.
We don’t know yet if it is actually going to save any money
The Mayor says they will save money by privatizing waste collection. But they have no proof and their numbers don’t add up. In fact study after study from Ontario, Canada and around the world all say that at best privatization breaks even. In Toronto itself, City Council decided to go back to City service in East York and York after the cost of private waste collection skyrocketed.
Now the Mayor wants to sign private waste contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars without showing City Councillors or the public the details.
Toronto has a great recycling and green bin program.
Why risk it? Unless the City can prove that privatizing garbage collection will save money, City employees should continue doing the work
Garbage and recycling collection is difficult, dirty work.
The men and women who collect our garbage, recycling and green bins every week have a very difficult job. They work outdoors in the worst weather, through snow storms and heat waves and they deal with not just unpleasant but often dangerous items like chemicals. Because of the difficulty of the work, they have very high rates of injury. They deserve a decent wage and job security.
If the work is privatized we risk our garbage fees being used to help the private companies make a profit, rather than being used to pay people decently for doing this dangerous dirty job for us.
Private Companies are not as accountable as direct city service.
Do they treat their workers well? Will they push up the costs on us once we’ve sold off our trucks and other equipment? Will they charge us more when we add to the list of items that can be recycled or that can go in the green bin? Are we going to have an independent and fully transparent review of the cost difference between privatized service and in-house service?
Private contracts are secret, why risk the answers to these and many other questions
Why would City Council contract out any waste and recycling collection services when we know that tax dollars would not be protected and that service standards and working standards would not be safeguarded.
If you are concerned, Call 311 and ask to speak to your City Councillor. Ask them “Why take the risk?”