'It's a disgrace': Community wants huge, abandoned railcars removed from Bay of Fundy
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8 hours ago
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Montreal's move to biweekly trash pick up proving to be a slow process
MONTREAL — The garbage may be piling up and causing some disgruntlement on the sidewalks of a few Montreal streets, but municipal officials say it's all part of a plan to become a zero-waste city by the year 2030. And they say their plan is working. "People are making progress in their thinking, realizing that when they participate in the recycling collection, the organic waste collection, that there is not much waste left," Marie-Andrée Mauger said. As a member of the city's executive committee in charge of ecological transition in Mayor Valérie Plante's Projet Montréal party, Mauger is the point person overseeing a switch that has reduced the frequency of garbage collection in some neighbourhoods to a biweekly pickup. Three boroughs —St-Laurent, Verdun and Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve — have started implementing the plan, which is also a part of Plante's pledge to "make Montreal the greenest city in North America." But residents in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are not thrilled with the stench. Jonathan Haiun, a spokesman for Ligue 33, a community group in eastern Montreal that advocates for quality of life issues, said spacing out the collection hasn't had the desired effect since it was brought in late last year. "The problem seems to be some people who just aren't composting or at least not doing it properly, and then a lot of the stuff that we do find in the garbage is just a mix of everything," Haiun said. "What we have been asking for since the beginning is that they go back to collecting garbage every week because we don't feel that that's actually an ecological measure." According to most recent survey results conducted for the city and obtained by Ensemble Montreal, the opposition party at city hall, some 54 per cent of residents polled consider switching to trash pickup every two weeks 'unacceptable.' Meanwhile, other major Canadian cities have had biweekly pickup for years: Toronto since 2008, Halifax in 1999 and Vancouver in 2013. In each case, there were growing pains but all happened hand-in-hand with organic waste collection. Mauger said she expects once composting extends to 100 per cent of the city by the end of 2025, things will begin to shift. According to the Leger city survey, less than half of Montrealers use the so-called brown bin to dispose of organic waste and their knowledge of what goes in the bin has only risen by one per cent, to 41 per cent, since 2021. The survey results aren't surprising and transition rarely comes without complaint, said Karel Ménard, a Montreal environmentalist. "I think it's a shared responsibility between the citizens, and the municipality, which has an obligation to have a clean and healthy city," said Ménard, head of Front commun québécois pour une gestion écologique des déchets, an organization that promotes ecological waste management. "Also, I would even say, the producers, because what we often see in the alleys are short-lived, disposable items, so there's also a problem of overconsumption." Many municipalities in the Greater Montreal area and elsewhere in Quebec, have switched to biweekly pickup, if not every three weeks or monthly in some cases. But Greater Montreal is mainly suburbs with single-family homes, which isn't the case in the city's boroughs. "There are 900,000 doors in Montreal, plus 40,000 businesses, industries, and institutions that have municipal collection," Mauger said. 'We estimate that eighty per cent of the buildings in Montreal don't have their own driveway, so it's not really one size fits all." The zero waste plan places an emphasis on reducing food waste, more composting and recycling. The city has also prohibited the use of single-use plastic items, like cups, utensils and straws. Opposition Coun. Stephanie Valenzuela of Ensemble Montréal said the polling results suggest Projet Montréal has a lot of work to do. "The results really speak to the amount of energy and investment the city has been putting into informing residents on the goals that we're trying to achieve," Valenzuela said. Valenzuela said the public reaction also contrasts with how the administration has portrayed itself as being innovative and avant-garde when it comes to the environment. "We've seen that when it comes to their big promises, when it comes to the environment, they're actually missing the mark," Valenzuela said. But Mauger is confident the city will be able to extend biweekly pickup to all 19 Montreal boroughs by 2029. 'What we see in this poll, it's also that three-quarters of the population are aware of the problem of sending too much waste to the landfill that's filling up at a very high pace,' Mauger said. 'And they want to do more to be part of the solution … so that's really promising too.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2025. Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
18 hours ago
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'It's a disgrace': Community wants huge, abandoned railcars removed from Bay of Fundy
The community of Walton, N.S., is begging the provincial government to remove four huge, heavy, abandoned railcars from the Bay of Fundy. Heidi Petracek explains how the boxcars got there, why they're a safety hazard, and why there's not much time to clean up the industrial mess.
Yahoo
a day ago
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Pet abandonments in Quebec used to spike around Canada Day; now they're year-round
MONTREAL — Canada Day has traditionally been synonymous in Montreal with moving day: piles of junk on street corners, sweaty bodies carrying couches up and down the city's winding staircases — and a spike in abandoned animals at shelters. However, Montreal's SPCA is no longer seeing a big jump in animal surrenders around July 1, but that's not because people have stopped giving up their pets before moving homes. The shelter says that compared with years past, fewer residential leases terminate at the end of June; therefore, instead of abandoning their pets all at once, Montrealers area leaving their animals behind all year long. And the number of surrendered pets is increasing, a trend that Laurence Massé, executive director of the Montreal SPCA, blames on the high cost of living and on a lack of pet-friendly rentals. "We used to see a really, really huge increase, a huge discrepancy between the surrenders in July and all of the other months," Massé said in a recent interview. "We don't tend to see the same increase as previously because people move all year long now." In the first four months of 2025, the Montreal branch of the SPCA reported 1,212 animals surrendered, a 26 per cent increase over the same period in 2024. The SPCA received 3,000 surrendered pets in 2024. Ahead of July 1, the SPCA's Montreal facility was already hosting almost 200 animals: nearly 100 cats, 27 dogs, 39 small animals like rabbits, and 25 wild animals. Massé said her organization is already at 112 per cent capacity for cats and 118 per cent for dogs. "We're never going to leave an animal behind, so we're going to open our offices, we're going to find a foster family," Massé said. There had been concerns that animal shelters would see a major spike in abandoned pets after the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people had adopted pets during lockdowns. That anticipated wave of animal surrenders never came, but abandonments have been rising due to a complex combination of factors, Massé said. No-pet clauses in leases are a major problem, Massé said, noting that 52 per cent of Quebec families are pet owners, and 25 per cent of pets are dogs — but just 4.2 per cent of landlords permit dogs in their apartments. "So it's really, really hard to find a place. So that's one of the biggest factors of surrender." The SPCA has argued in favour of Civil Code changes to ban no-pet clauses. Opposition party Québec solidaire attempted to bring legislation on the issue in 2023 but failed. Martin Messier of the Quebec Landlords Association says his members would be more open to allowing pets if the Quebec government permitted landlords to collect deposits for potential pet-related damage. "I think that for a lot of landlords, the problem is never the pet, it's always the pet owner that does not take care properly of their pet." "We want to make sure that we have a building in good condition … that we have other tenants that are able to enjoy their unit as well," Messier said. In 2015 Quebec changed the legal status of animals to declare them sentient beings, not property; but legislators didn't change the rules around no-pet clauses, which remain legal. Lawyer John-Nicolas Morello, head of a non-profit committed to advocating for ethics and animal law, said the SPCA has launched a court challenge against Quebec's rules around no-pet clauses. That case, however, won't be heard for several years. Other jurisdictions have taken the lead on this issue: France and Ontario, for example, have invalidated no-pet clauses in residential leases. Morello said his organization supports the SPCA challenge, and in the meantime has created a manual to help guide tenants during lease negotiations so that landlords feel more comfortable with pets. "Until that (legal challenge) happens, we thought that it was important to try to develop a tool to allow an informed discussion between the landlord and the tenant," Morello said. But more and more, Massé noted, the consideration to give up a pet is a financial one. "In the last two years, we tend to see an increase in surrenders for economic reasons," Massé said. "We're living in an inflation context right now and unfortunately people have a hard time affording their own food. So, what about food for the animal?" The SPCA runs a program that offers food, litter and toys for pets whose owners are struggling financially. Aside from pet necessities, it's difficult for families trying to budget for potential veterinary care. "So behind every surrender, there's (often) a financial reason, unfortunately, and we're seeing more and more this year," Massé said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 1, 2025. Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press
