Over the summer, my child and I — and everyone on our street — got an impromptu lesson in the extended cycle of life, death, and the decomposition of contemporary urban examples of the Procyanidae family. In normie English, a raccoon was made roadkill on our street, and we watched (and smelled) for weeks as the body putrefied in the summer heat until eventually it was nothing but a stain and some leftover tufts of fur on the asphalt. The walk to summer camp in the morning was educational in a way I’d never anticipated or wanted.
As viscerally unpleasant as that experience was, it was made more so by the impression that doing one’s civic duty of reporting an animal carcass to the city’s 311 service line seemed to be utterly futile, as reports appeared to disappear into a black hole. That’s in contrast to how roadkill was handled in previous years: even if it took a day or two, the carcass was eventually collected.
That said, my impression isn’t data, and I wasn’t about to put the city on blast for a single, albeit gross, incident. So it was gratifying to see a motion on the next Toronto city-council agenda, from councillors Brad Bradford and Jennifer McKelvie, that suggested I wasn’t crazy: things actually have gotten worse. In March of this year, the city lowered its service standard for cadaver collections from 48 hours to five days, and, in some cases (as I can personally attest), the level of service is quite a bit worse than that.
According to the motion, the standard was lowered to better reflect reality, and there’s some merit to the idea that government should conform with the real world instead of closing its eyes and ears and shouting “na na na I can’t hear you” when inconvenient, disruptive facts intrude. Bradford and McKelvie are asking staff to analyze the financial impact of returning to the previous service standard — the cost would be more than zero, but it’d likely be a manageable sum in the context of the overall city budget, if that’s a priority. And as animal carcasses are the motivation for many calls to the 311 line, there’s a pretty strong argument that this should be a real priority.
But would restoring the service standard make a difference in the real world? That’s a fair question, given the topic of another city report, this one from the city’s auditor general (not to be confused with the province’s auditor general, an older office). The municipal auditor finds that the city’s parks, forestry, and recreation workers charged with maintaining the city’s public green spaces are substantially overstating the time they spend on the job, versus what’s reported by the GPS devices on city-owned trucks. Indeed, workers are spending substantial chunks of their day at “retail establishments (e.g., groceries), eateries, industrial areas, residential addresses, and places of worship,” in excess of the 60 minutes allowed each day. It’s hypothetically possible that there was important parks and forestry work to be done at a mall with a Dollarama and a Food Basics, but it seems unlikely. Notably, not every parks truck has a GPS device onboard, so it’s possible these findings understate the problem.
The city faces two distinct problems, and neither speaks well of our leaders at the municipal level. The decay, both literal and figurative, involved in roadkill removal is the kind of thing I can explain as, at least in part, the result of more than a decade of austerity in the city. Although Mayor Olivia Chow has raised taxes to something closer to a more sustainable level for Toronto’s needs, city staff clearly still have a tendency to penny-pinch and do less with less instead of arguing for more resources put towards necessary work. The city’s apparent inability to track the work — or lack thereof — done by parks crews speaks to basic administrative laziness.
I’ve made the argument in this space many times that Ontario’s cities generally need more help from the province, and I spent much of John Tory’s tenure in the mayor’s office arguing that Toronto, in particular, also needed to raise its own property taxes and stop crying poor when it was actually simply living with the consequences of its political choices. I still think both of those arguments were and continue to be correct, but it’s hard to argue that the city should raise and spend more money on its basic services when it doesn’t put sufficient effort into seeing that it’s spent well.
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