Toronto stinks

And Ottawa might get the two-headed babies. Some marvelous hyperbole from the Globe's Margaret Wente (full text not online):
...
Toronto has a very curious attitude about trash. It's harmless when it's piling up on people's porches or spilling out of public bins and blowing around the park. But once it's collected, it becomes so hazardous that we've got to take it far away....everybody knows that pregnant women living within 500 miles of a landfill will probably give birth to babies with two heads.

Some people once proposed that we could dump our garbage down a disused mineshaft several hundred miles away, where it would be entombed in the Canadian Shield a mile below the surface of the earth. They were shouted down. That might be good enough for nuclear waste, but with toxic stuff like used diapers, potato peels and dryer lint, you can never be too careful.

Now Michigan doesn't want our garbage any more. The crisis is so great that some people have even proposed that we burn it. No one likes that idea, either, because breathing garbage fumes will give your children cancer. The Mayor is against incineration, too. It may be good enough for Swedes, but what do they know?

Here in Ottawa we're terrified that Dalton McGuinty will cave in to pressure from Toronto and permit their garbage to be trucked here to expand the ever-growing Carp Mountain. And pregnant women are living rather closer to our monster dump than 500 miles:

The Carp Rd. landfill is 1,000 metres away from its closest residential development...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at May 16, 2006 11:54 AM