Over the past few weeks, as I enjoyed a long break from work, I mostly unplugged from the news. The news is work. I can’t really feel like I’m on vacation if I’m still totally immersed in it. So I switched to what I joked was retro, 1980s-style news-consumer habits. In the morning, I would read the newspaper — online, of course — and in the evening I would put on the TV news for a couple of minutes. This was enough for me to find out what was happening in terms of road closures, transit disruptions, the weather, without getting totally immersed in whatever latest tire fire was sweeping humanity, which is normally how I experience the news.
You can see why I look forward to the break.
One day, late last week, I was in my car running some errands. Because I hadn’t had time that morning to read the news, I figured I would maintain the 1980s approach and simply catch some news on an AM-radio channel. I tuned into one of the options in the city and heard a headline that should not have made me laugh — but it did, dear reader. It did. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like this: the very serious news anchor informed the listeners that Toronto was “continuing its efforts to enhance outdoor washrooms in the city.”
Oh, boy.
Before we poke fun at this, let’s actually talk about what it was about. After years of pressure and public complaints, the city pledged to start doing a better job offering access to public washrooms on a year-round basis. Many of the city’s public-washroom facilities are located in city-owned buildings like rinks, community centres, and libraries, but there are also many standalone toilet facilities located in city parks. Most of those are not winterized and do not operate year-round. And as anyone who’s ever tried to use them has discovered, Toronto’s washrooms are notorious for being out of service for long periods. I’m sure many other parents in the city have had the same experience I’ve had: you sprint up to a washroom carrying a child who insists that they have to go at that exact moment, only to discover that the washroom is closed for maintenance. So you end up finding a bush somewhere discreetly out of sight, if you’re lucky.
This became more of an issue during the pandemic, when widespread closures of indoor recreational facilities pushed families out of doors and into Toronto’s parks. The city has been working on a plan to repair and winterize many of its existing washroom facilities, and acivic advocacy group has been monitoring their progress — that’s what the radio report I heard was about. Toronto has made some progress. But still. Even once we get every facility modernized and winterized, and even if we bring all of them up to a reasonably acceptable state of good repair, there still really aren’t that many. And we certainly need more in high-traffic areas of the city that see a lot of nightlife. The alleys smell the way they do for a reason, friends.
So, okay, there’s a plan and some signs of progress, but good Lord, that radio report was unintentionally damning. The anchor didn’t mean to sound forlorn. They were doing their best. And read the headline seriously and honestly. But the absurdity of it landed on me like a ton of bricks.
If you are a particularly online person, you might’ve noticed a viral trend a few months ago. It was mostly for laughs, but at least in my family, it had some truth to it. The trend was simply asking your loved ones how often they think about the Roman Empire. And the joke, which was no doubt exaggerated online for comic effect, was that men apparently think about the Romans a whole hell of a lot more than women do.
Guilty as charged, in my case. When my daughter saw the trend and asked my wife how often she thought about the Roman Empire, my wife looked at her like she was silly. When my daughter asked me how often I think about the Roman Empire, I seriously and honestly told her at least a handful of times every week, if not every day.
And do you want to know one of the big things I think about when I think about Ancient Rome? Public works. Infrastructure — particularly sanitation infrastructure. Our technology has obviously advanced in the past 2,000 years, but the Romans were figuring out sanitation in their cities as best they could, given their technological constraints, 2,000 years ago. Even to this day, you can see the remains of the aqueducts that transported potable water into Rome’s thirsty cities, as well as the remains of their sewer systems.
And here we are, our calendars having rolled over into 2024 — 2024 AD, to be clear — and Toronto is making progress on its plan to bring its outdoor-washroom infrastructure up to a state more closely resembling adequacy.
This is not the biggest problem the city has. But, in its way, it is a revealing one. I maintain my belief that competency does not scale up in line with urgency and priority. A government that is not good at getting the small things right is unlikely to be particularly gifted at getting the big things right simply because the big things are bigger. A city subjected to long and cold winters that does not winterize its public infrastructure and then allows what infrastructure it does have to crumble into a state of disrepair clearly has problems with the basics. There’s no reason to assume it will do any better with the more complicated stuff. Anyone living in Toronto can basically bear that out.
It’s good we’re fixing the washrooms. Hopefully, one day we’ll also add more of them and then take good care of the lot. But, in the meantime, if you’re looking for an example of diminished state capacity, this is a pretty good example. Stay out of those alleys, folks. You know why.
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