Mayor Tory not concerned after waste collector caught allegedly cheating
The same private waste collection company that fired a worker in Milton provides services in Toronto.

newstalk1010.com
March 9, 2016

Mayor John Tory says he is not concerned about private waste collection in Toronto after a video surfaced showing an allegedly cheating worker in Milton.

The video shows a collector shovelling snow into his truck. The allegation is that he was trying to weigh the vehicle down since the company gets paid "per tonne."

He has since been fired by his employer, Miller Waste. The same company provides services across the GTA, including Etobicoke.

"I don't have any concerns based on the information available to me," mayor Tory says. "We have inspectors regularly out looking for any kind of bad habits or misconduct."

Deputy mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong admits the system is not perfect. "It's impossible to check every single load," Minnan-Wong says.

He adds, though, that while an individual might be able to get away with cheating, the city's checks and balances would catch any systemic misconduct.

"If one of these large companies wants to systemically and deliberately break the rules...I think that there's a probability that they're going to get caught."

City staff say the checks and balances include daily monitoring on the road and at the transfer stations, including at the weigh scales.Minnan-Wong adds the city checks weight loads week over week to make sure there is no variance.

"The city is quite aware of the numbers and is very good at record-keeping," says Etobicoke councillor Stephen Holyday. "If an anomaly is detected with weights, that would be a red flag."

Staff say paying a contractor "per tonne" is a standard industry practice. Other municipalities, though, have a different system.

For example, Vaughan pays its contractors "per stop," or per household. Rob Orpin, with Toronto's solid waste management department, says it makes sense to pay per tonne because the total weight of garbage and recycling being disposed of is going down year over year."

Look at newspapers over the last five years, they're getting smaller and smaller," Orpin says. "Plastic water bottles...are about half the weight than what they were five years ago."

With total tonnage going down, Orpin says the city is "not paying for a service it doesn't need."