Why it's easy to hate Toronto

A short story about replacing a garbage bin in the city I love

This is our City of Toronto green bin, used to keep the neighbourhood’s ever-present racoons out of our food waste. As you can see, it is broken. It can no longer keep out the raccoons, which makes it useless. Not just to me, but to anyone—that part is important.

This is a story about how I tried to get it replaced, about how poorly the City of Toronto serves its citizens and how easily they could do things better, even without millions of dollars of investment.

After the long-suffering bin finally broke, I went on to the City of Toronto’s website, thinking I could order us a replacement. After all, I can do property taxes and utilities and important stuff there, surely you can get a new green bin online as well.

Nope! Unfortunately, the only way to get a new garbage receptacle of any kind from the city, is by calling their 311 line, which is used for … literally every issue you might have with the city. It was about 9 p.m. on a weekday at this point, but the good news is that this line is important enough to be open 24/7!

The bad news is that even at 9 p.m. on a weekday night, the service is “experiencing a high volume of calls right now and your call will be answered in sequence.”

After a 15-minute wait, a nice lady (seriously, none of what transpires is her fault, as you’ll see) comes on the line and asks how she can help. The following conversation is from memory, though man I wish I was recording it, because it was funnier than I can recreate, and peppered with exasperated laughter on both sides.

ME: Hello! Yes, I need to order a new green bin, mine has broken.

HER: No problem, I can get that started! First I need your address—(JHR recites address)—and next I need the serial number of your green bin.

ME: They…have serial numbers?

HER: Yes sir, on the front of them, could you read yours to me please?

ME: *goes outside in the dark and finds the serial number on the green bin and reads it to her*

HER: Sir, that’s not your green bin.

ME: It’s …. not?

HER: No sir, it belongs to (address of a neighbour five houses up).

ME: Well, I’ve been using it since we bought the place five years ago. It came with the house!

HER: I understand, but it doesn’t actually belong to you, so you can’t order a replacement for it.

ME: So… what am I supposed to do about this broken green bin?

HER: You need to go to your neighbour’s and exchange your green bin for theirs, and then let them know they can call us and order a replacement.

ME: Wait, you want me to knock on their door, tell them this broken bin is theirs, that I’m taking their non-broken bin because it’s actually mine, and now they need to call the city for a replacement?! That seems like a pretty mean thing for me to do to them!

HER: I understand, if you’re uncomfortable with that conversation, I can get someone from the city to come and handle that conversation and exchange the bins, but that will take up to 30 days.

ME: But … this green bin is broken, no matter whose it is, right? Why can’t we just replace it now, and then I’ll check with my neighbours so I am not stealing their bin. I can just give them the new one. And we’ll both have working bins!

HER: I’m sorry but only the address assigned to the green bin can order a replacement. Would you like me to get the city to handle it by speaking with them?

ME: How often do green bins get mixed up like ours seem to have?

HER: Oh, all the time.

ME: And is this what usually happens? Even when the bins are broken?!

HER: Yes, unless the bin is missing, which sometimes happens. Then we just send a replacement in a week.

ME: Oh! Well, as it happens I actually don’t know where my bin went now! It’s vanished!

HER: *deadpan* Sir … this call is being recorded.

ME: No, seriously, what I am going to do is give this bin back to my neighbours, because it belongs to them, right? And that means my own bin really is missing. So you can send me a replacement, right?

HER: Yes sir, if there’s no green bin at your address, we can send you that replacement.

ME: OK…. well, let’s do that. (she makes the booking.) And look, I know this isn’t your fault, but could you not have just suggested that in the first place?

HER: Unfortunately, I have to follow the protocol when someone calls about a damaged bin.

ME: And how often does it end up where we just got after several minutes?

HER: … Sometimes we get there.

ME: Doesn’t that frustrate you and the caller, especially when you know there IS a way to get around it?

HER: (laughs in exasperation) Well, I just have to follow the protocol for a damaged bin, sir.

ME: OK, well thank you for replacing my missing bin.

-FIN-

This is a story about a green bin, sure. But if you ask any Torontonian who has dealt with city services, the exasperation, frustration and dark humour found in attempting to get small things done quickly or simply is a shared experience.

The first time a dead raccoon lingered for days on the street, for instance, people made a memorial to it. Ten years later, the same thing happened with another poor critter on a street I walk down when I take the subway. And it just sat there for, like, a couple of weeks. No pickup. No memorial.

After my recent experience, I can only assume it was because someone had scooped it off the road and onto a nearby lawn, and at that point only the owner of the property is allowed to make a request for the city to clean up the carcass.

Sure, part of the problem with the green bins and the dead raccoons and the closed bathrooms in parks or the overflowing garbage cans or anything else we complain about is money and staffing. Those are hard things to solve.

But empowering your people to actively solve problems doesn’t cost anything, really, and it would go a long way. The person I spoke with knew exactly what needed to be done. She’d been gently coaxing callers around these dumb protocols for a while, clearly—but she was also keenly aware that she was being monitored while doing it.

She was resigned to the fact that her role was not so much to be a living, breathing representative of the municipal government, here to help its citizens, but instead to be a sort of human chatbot, employed to direct traffic down the maze-like hallways of rigid city policy, and that the best she could do was offer hints, like an enigmatic character you might meet on a video game side quest.

This was, obviously, not the best use of anyone’s time, and probably one of the reasons 311 had a 15-minute wait time at 9 p.m. on a weekday.

I understand it’ll take millions of dollars to “fix” some of the stuff that’s bad about Toronto. I’m even willing to do my part to pay for that. But it’s hard for so many people to trust where that new 6.9% property tax hike is going when many of their encounters with the city’s first line of engagement seem to end in frustration or resignation or—at best!—rueful chuckles about how it took 30-plus minutes to complete a three-minute task.

(The new green bin arrived a few days later. It’s beautiful and it works perfectly. Thank you for asking.)