18 hours ago
Save wildlife, contractors from winter salt woes: Councillor
Dianne Saxe has a request for Toronto: Go easy on the salt.
This week, Saxe's colleagues on city council will consider a proposal from City Hall's infrastructure and environment committee that urges the province to legislate 'best management practices for snow and ice' and to limit liability in slip-and-fall lawsuits.
The proposal also calls on City Hall 'to continue to minimize the use of road salt as much as possible while maintaining safety on roads, parking lots and sidewalks.'
It comes mere months after councillors debated the sorry state of snow removal in Toronto. In February, Mayor Olivia Chow said the state of removal operations after a long weekend snowstorm had been 'just totally unacceptable.'
Saxe's work was instrumental to the item on council's agenda. Saxe, now the councillor for University-Rosedale ward, had previously urged the province to take the salt pollution issue seriously as Ontario's environment commissioner.
Saxe told the Toronto Sun this proposal isn't about the road salt that keeps people safe – it's about 'clear waste,' the 'heaps of salt' that hit Toronto's streets each winter.
'This isn't about people not being able to get around,' Saxe said. 'This is about someone slips and falls, they sue everybody, whether or not the contractor behaved reasonably.'
The City of Toronto already has a salt management plan and a web page with a list of tips to minimize use in winter. City hall recommends Torontonians 'shovel first' before applying salt, and consider using sand as a traction aid. The federal government, meanwhile, has a set of practices for the use of road salt, finalized in 2004.
Saxe said despite those guidelines, there is a need for more. The municipal plan only applies to City Hall's own operations, and solving the liability issue is 'the province's job,' she said.
It's understandable that the companies err on the side of not getting sued – they're often family businesses that are too small to survive a lawsuit, Saxe said.
'Once somebody gets sued, it doesn't matter whether they were right or not, it's going to cost them an awful lot of money, and lawyers are eye-wateringly expensive,' she said.
Saxe said despite Torontonians' broad concerns about road and sidewalk safety in winter, she expects council to pass the proposal without any fuss. She noted a letter to council from the trade association Landscape Ontario as evidence that what she's proposing is necessary — and not controversial.
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The contractors 'want to be doing a good job, they know what they're doing is very harmful and they're asking for a standard and protection if they follow it,' Saxe said.
The item before council says salt pollution causes 'irreversible' damage to the environment and accelerates the decay of Toronto's infrastructure. Saxe emphasized the harm to fish in Toronto's waterways, and warned it's only getting worse because the effects of salt pollution are 'cumulative.'
The snow may melt away, but all that salt has to go somewhere – and much of it becomes part of the environment.
Another letter to council from an advocacy group, the Ontario Salt Pollution Coalition, says 12 municipalities in the province have passed similar motions this year, including Cambridge, Sudbury, Waterloo and the District of Muskoka.
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