By now, most of you know that Toronto's municipal workers have gone on strike. I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say both sides have dug in their heels and it's anybody's guess as to how the impasse will be resolved.
How will this affect the Don? In the short term there is one impact that I know about. The city's stewardship program has been suspended. In the Don Valley there are about six sites where volunteer stewardship will be curtailed until after the strike, including the new Goulding Wetland where I lead a team. During the last strike in June 2002, I was leading a team at the Don Valley Brick Works. I recall that we still went out but we brought our own equipment since we didn't want to 'break the strike' by using city equipment. Times have changed since then. The program is bigger and more formalized so performing stewardship now is more problematic. While I am concerned about the sites the impact should be minimal in terms of the overall length of the current labour dispute.
Another area that may affect the Don is illegal dumping. Since there is no regular garbage pickup there is the potential for people to dump their garbage. Some isolated areas of the Don (and other city ravines) are prime locations for this activity. Hopefully the strike will not be long enough for this to be a big problem. If you do see any dumping in the Don I'd be interested in finding out about it so please leave me a comment or send me an email at donwatcher (at) gmail.com.
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Oh good grief. THAT hadn't even occurred to me. (The stewardship issue -- the garbage dumping had.) Well, everyone is welcome to come over to Beechwood for a little guerrilla stewardship!
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