Mayor Rob Ford kicked off this week's vote on privatized garbage collection with a prediction. During the debate, he said, the city councillors who oppose privatization would reveal themselves as "tax-and-spend socialists" who "support high taxes, big spending, out-of-control union contracts."
Left-leaning councillors rolled their eyes. Yet as the debate unfolded over the afternoon and into Tuesday evening, those same councillors managed to do something extraordinary. They exceeded the mayor's expectations.
In a scaremongering performance that would have make the editors of the Socialist Worker proud, they denounced the city's modest plan to contract out garbage pickup west of Yonge Street as a dastardly scheme that would line the pockets of corporate bosses, throw workers on the rubbish heap, invite the Mob into the garbage business and - the ultimate horror - imperil the city's recycling program.
Former budget chief Shelley Carroll of Ward 33, Don Valley East, suggested that a Toronto with privatized trash pickup could become as mobbed-up as it has been in some American cities. Quoting liberally from The New York Times - "not a tabloid, mind you" - she said the garbage industry had acquired "a reputation for being racketeering-infested, given to violence and murder."
In a similar vein, Kristyn Wong-Tam of Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale, said that private operators "can be prone to corruption, grafting, bribery" (though she may have meant graft). She did not stop there. Unlike the caring public sector, she said, private companies are concerned only with the bottom line, and "we know what the bottom line is about - it's about profits."
Pam McConnell, of Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale, said that by embarking on privatization, Toronto risked becoming a polarized city of rich and poor. While current garbage workers might survive contracting out, "their kids and our kids and other kids and kids of new immigrants who come in and want to get into the work force - there will be a closed door for them. There'll be no benefits, there'll be no future as seniors, there'll be no houses that they can buy."
Not only that, she said, privatization might jeopardize the right of women to work in the garbage trade. "If women want to put garbage in the back of trucks," she said, "they have every right to do it, and these contracts don't allow them."
Mike Layton of Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina, depicted a post-privatization world right out of Dickens. Contracting out garbage, he said, could endanger the public, "because the way that management gives incentives in fact encourages drivers to be reckless." It would endanger workers, too. Under private contracting, "sick and injured workers will be required to get on the back of that truck, health be damned." In effect, contractors would be "working them to grave because they don't have pensions."
As for the city's aim of getting more people to recycle their trash, "There is clear evidence that private firms might not meet the diversion rates and goals set by our city. That's clear."
It's not clear, of course. In Etobicoke, where garbage collection has been in private hands for years, people put out their recycling bins like everyone else in the city. Garbage men pick it up. Tony Soprano has yet to seen driving an Escalade down the Queensway. Garbage truck drivers don't mow down pedestrians in their haste. Lame and sickly garbage men don't appear, coughing consumptively, on Etobicoke sidewalks.
By painting a lurid picture of privatized garbage service, councillors of the left did not just live up to the mayor's crude stereotype. They rubbished their credibility.
Marcus Gee