Participatory Democracy At City Hall

If you believe that then we have some land in Florida we would like sell you. I am as concerned as the next person about getting rid of garbage, especially those at city hall, but I digress. Miller opposed Adam's mine, Miller opposes incineration, Miller opposes everything his friends the environuts oppose.

EDITORIAL: Miller's deal is garbage

Somewhere, Mel Lastman is laughing.

Laughing as his old nemeses, Mayor David Miller and his media cheerleaders, try to put a happy face on a secret, backroom deal to buy a garbage dump they would have gone berserk over had Lastman ever pulled such a stunt as mayor.

The deal? To spend $220.3 million (official confirmation of the price to come only after November's municipal election) buying a dump near London, Ont., orchestrated by the mayor and approved 26-12 by council this week.

Miller is buying his way out of the pickle he was in with the election looming because (a) the city's so-called goal of diverting 100% of our waste stream by 2010 is a pipe dream (b) Miller refused to consider incineration for disposing our garbage and (c) the closure of Michigan's border to Toronto's garbage was just four short years away.

The affected folks in southwestern Ontario, who just learned about this deal along with everyone else (surprise!), are rightly furious and now have another good reason to hate Toronto.

But Miller and his campaign team (headed by old Tory and Liberal backroom boys) don't give a flying you-know-what about that, because people living in southwestern Ontario don't get to vote for Toronto's mayor.

Instead, Miller is banking on the belief that Toronto voters won't care that we're making our garbage somebody else's problem, again, only now in Ontario instead of Michigan.

This is cynical, manipulative politics at its worst, the kind of stuff Miller used to rail against when he was a real reformer.

Consigning this garbage deal to the level of farce is that on the last council, Miller was one of the leaders of the so-called "environmental" movement which scuttled Lastman's proposal to ship Toronto's garbage by rail to the abandoned Adams Mine near Kirkland Lake.

That deal ran into so much hysterical, fear-mongering opposition that it finally collapsed under its own weight.

But it was a study in participatory democracy compared to what Miller and Co. have just done, which amounts to trading one hole in the ground to take Toronto's garbage for another.

That's Miller's "environmental" policy.

What a joke.