You know, I think having strikes and demanding more money in the middle of a recession is pretty selfish.

I believe that city jobs are pretty cushy to begin with, with nice fringe benefits and awesome retirement plans. I don't know every reason as to why they are striking, but I know one of the reasons is because they want to cash in sick days and their contract doesn't allow them to. Striking in the middle of tourist season, leaving our city smelly and increasing the chances of disease spread via rats and roaches because you're refusing to collect garbage, composting, and recycling is pretty stupid. And as a citizen of Toronto, I'm pretty sick of being held hostage when city workers go wah wah wah wah wah all the way to the picket lines because boo hoo they don't get what they want. I'm not a pawn in your game of chess. If you want public sympathy, don't do things to piss off the public.

And now the LCBO (our liquor stores) are set to strike perhaps Wednesday. They have, however, promised to keep a few liquor stores open but I was watching CP24 this morning at the gym and they prediction a huge sum of revenue lost for the province of Ontario per day if they do indeed strike. Which, during a recession, isn't what we need either.

In 2002 the provincial government actually got together and ordered back to work legislation for city workers after two weeks with no garbage pickup, social workers (like public housing/city run shelter workers) and daycares... but I'm pretty sure a motivator in that was that the Pope was coming to town for World Youth Day. This time, we have no Pope or World Youth Day. We have Pride this weekend though - I'm going to be interested to see what Yonge Street looks like after the parade. At the same time, Torontonians are cool and it wouldn't surprise me if groups of people got together to stage a mass cleanup of the downtown core.

A similar strike on Windsor has been going on since April - I believe they've had no garbage pickup for about 60 or 90 days now?

Even today while walking to the gym I could already smell the rankness coming from back alleys and the sidewalk. Keep in mind I live in Greektown, with a shitonne of restaurants and cafes and stuff - its gonna get even more gross.

Toronto has designated certain dumping stations for people to DRIVE TO and put their garbage in, however, I do not have a car, so I don't see how this helps the many people who live in Toronto without cars. Apparently at some stations, picketers are not even allowing residents to dump their garbage, or not letting them through. People just leave their garbage outside the gates, and apparently there are city officials sifting through other people's trash looking for names, and addresses, so they can fine people $380 for illegal dumping. That's fucking ridiculous. We can't put our trash over the fence because you're blocking us from doing that... and then we get fined for it? Oh, fuck you.

I do hope it gets figured out soon. We only get two or three beautiful months of summer per year. It will be a shame to have to enjoy them with minimal liquor and to share them with the rats and roaches.