Christopher Hume on Toronto's parks

This recent column:

Ravine dumping is no way to treat a city - Christopher Hume - Dec 21 2006

has a somewhat misleading title. The column is mostly about the extra money Toronto is spending on maintaining parks. A good chunk of this is to compensate for the discontinuation of the use of herbicides to control weeds. Hume quotes a few bureaucrats:

"It's like a park renaissance," says the general manager of Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation, Brenda Librecz. "We now have a strategy of reinvestment."

Well - with the state of the pesticide free parks at many times, this is more that a small exageration. Many parks are complete weed runs. After a few days without mowing, much of Woodbine Beach and Woodbine Park start to resemble The Leslie Street Spit - which is supposed to be a wild space!

Only at the end of the column is there any mention of the ravines. Yes - there is a good deal of trash dumped in those hidden spaces. However, dumping is becoming a porblem everywhere. This past September, someone left to five-gallon pails of cooking oil (or transmission fluid) in front of a tree at the front of my property. I bundled up the tubs and stored it in my waste biox for 6 weeks until the city could come around and pick them up.

If you make it too expensive for people to get rid of waste legally - this is what you get!