Toronto’s ravine advocates ask city for cleanup funding

Thestar.com
January 24, 2020
Francine Kopun

Toronto’s ravines need help and they need it now, residents told the city’s executive committee on Thursday.

More than two dozen people from different walks of life and corners of the city showed up to urge the committee to approve ridding the city’s ravines of litter and invasive species as soon as possible.

Executive committee listened, unanimously approving a motion by Mayor John Tory to jump-start the cleanup initiatives this year instead of in 2021.

Financing the plan in 2020 needs to be approved by the city’s budget committee, which meets Tuesday to wrap up discussion of the city’s $13.53-billion operating budget for the year. The ravine strategy will be considered by city council on Jan. 29.

The committee is asking the budget committee to put $657,000 towards the ravine litter pickup program this year, and $600,000 towards enhanced invasive species management and ecological restoration.

“This was the most widely engaged deputation list that I’ve seen in a long time,” Tory said after a morning spent listening to volunteers, students, researchers and residents tell the committee they want to get to work as soon as possible, pulling up Japanese knotweed and dog-strangling vine.

Dog-strangling vine, which is taking over milkweed in Toronto’s ravines, can be confusing to monarch butterflies, which swing through the city as part of their migration to Mexico each year. They sometimes mistakenly lay their eggs in the vines instead of on the milkweed that provides hatchlings with all the nutrients they need to grow. Caterpillars that hatch on dog-strangling vines die.

More importantly, invasive species grow rapaciously, crowding out native plants like trilliums and maple trees.

Volunteers complained that while they are eager to help, the city doesn’t make it easy.

Irene Vandertop, one of the founders of Don’t Mess with the Don, said her group helped bring together 1,000 volunteers to pick up trash on a recent Clean Toronto Together Day.

The city made her group pay $600 for a permit and $300 for insurance and told them they had to source porta-potties themselves.

“Although there were individuals within the city who were extremely helpful, the -- city was just a beast to deal with. It was very obstructionist,” Vandertop told the committee.

“I would like the city to take a look at how they support these groups, and how they deal with the obstacles.”

She estimates she and her volunteers have saved the city $120,000 over the past two years in cleanup costs.

The committee heard from the Toronto Botanical Garden, residents from Bloor St. E. to High Park and representatives of the Midtown Ravines Group, who pointed out that with so much of the ravine in private hands, the city needs to do a better job of encouraging homeowners to rid their properties of invasive plants.

The committee heard from university students studying the ravine, including Jonas Hamberg, a PhD candidate from the University of Waterloo, who uses thermal cameras to calculate temperatures in natural areas, and who told the committee that the ravines act like air conditioners in the summer, cooling hot air.

If the city’s ravine strategy moves forward, staff have been asked to develop a student internship program to engage youth in restoring the ravines and to help develop a recruitment strategy focusing on Neighbourhood Improvement Areas.

Seventeen per cent of Toronto is made up of ravines and 40 per cent are on private lands, according to the city’s ravine report. It calls for an additional $2.05 million annually for invasive species management, phased in over four years, and an additional investment of $657,000 a year for ravine litter pickup, in addition to the $950,000 currently spent each year on watercourse clearing in ravines.