Why is this city like one large dump? From the harbour to the sidewalks, to the sides of the roads….this city has become a BIG festering sore on the face of Nova Scotia. No one seems to give a shit save for what goes unfiltered into the harbour. Every where you look there are plastic containers, or TH’s coffee cups, bits and pieces of plactic, plastic bags (that clog the trees), metal, everything that should be recycled, could be reclycled, BUT is not being recycled. Mother nature is not a giant vacuum cleaner that magically takes our waste away. But hey I rant….everyone is on this sinking, stinking ship together…..so why give a fuck????
—wgaf
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.
I like the new tag, Tim. OP, I understand your frustration. However, don’t you recall Peter Kelly’s message to all Haligonians a few months ago? If you want to improve the city, help improve it yourself? Yes it looks weird picking up trash, but it’s better than doing nothing.
Dino, don’t forget about the person who cleaned up someone elses trash & was going to be fined , because once you pick up the trash it is now yours & you are responsible for its removal & or any other inane BS the cities trash by-laws might wish to do to you.
No it’s easier & safer to just step on or over it, besides the more garbage that rattles around the city the less room your taking up in your newest landfill ! !
Someone must’ve read this rant, I was on SGR for my lunchtime walk and there were 3 of those student hires with brooms and dustpans hard at it. Next stop city hall, lots of wasted space and butt ends idling there.
SGR smelled gross around Mexicali Rosa’s/Club Caliente and the Credit Union. Maybe it was the panhandler nearby but I don’t think one bum can create a stench like that.
NGF…you just haven’t smelled the right bum, trust me, they CAN create a stench like that! The worst is when you are stuck on a bus with them (not so much an issue here but in Vancouver they ride the buses) and you don’t want to breathe with your nose but if you breathe with your mouth then all their little smelly particles are in your mouth and you can taste them….ugh…think I’m gonna puke on my keyboard just remembering it….
Attn. owners of the Gordon Isnor building on Corwallis! The cheap-ass kindergarten piece of crap frosty the snowman ornament nailed to the tree in front of your building makes the entire rest of this city look ugly.
The fact that this piece of crap has been hanging since god-knows-when (i’m guessing several decades) despite it being nowhere near Xmas is FUCKED!!
And then, I guess the super noticed that ‘hey, its May and our Xmas ornament is STILL hanging…’ and did something about it. COVERED IT WITH A GREEN GARBAGE BAG INSTEAD OF TAKING IT DOWN AND THROWING IT AWAY LIKE ANY RATIONAL PERSON WOULD HAVE DONE!!!
I think I might go postal if I have to walk past this gawd-awful embarrassment one more time. I think I’ll go down there right now and deal with this situation myself. There you go OP, a fellow Haligonian helping rid the city of trash one snowman at a time….
The hole city was built on top of garbage…
Just sayin..
Halifax was a gorgeous place when it was merely known as Chebucto in the 17th C.
I like that they have the crews on SGR to clean stuff up. There are a couple of places in HRM I’d love to see them come to as garbage does not belong in ditches. I’m amazed the homeowners who are next to said ditches don’t notice and/or care about it.
My dad told me when he used to work down by the harbour he used to see floating turds and tampons and condoms….and this was 20-25 years ago….no one seemed to complain then, and no one seems to make that much of a stink (lol) about it now, which is disgusting. I watched a news story about how Boston cleaned up its harbour which is roughly the same size as halifax harbour (it was a while ago so I may be wrong in my recollection) so if they can do it why the hell can’t halifax.
The fact that they dump shit (literally) into the harbour bugs the fuck out of me. It’s like cleaning your room and shoving everything under the bed or sweeping dirt under a rug. FUCK.
What about all the convicts lounging around with 3 hots and a cot on the taxpayers nickel. You know there are alot of things I hate about the USA but the states that still use the chain gangs for this sort of work have the right idea. Lets get all those punks and wannabe gansters in jail some bright orange coveralls and some garbage bags, and get them putting back into society for a freaking change. But I suspect all the bleeding hearts would say that is cruel and unsual. Fuck em, bring on the chain gang, and while we’re at it, lets instate a “work fare” instead of Welfare program for those who are physically able to work and just not sucking the government’s tit!! I would guess this concepet is far too utopian.
Right on Hardtail!
Hardtail, thanks for revisiting my post from long ago. They can scrub up off grafitti while they are at it ;~)
Perhaps if outside pressure were brought to the limelight? I am originaly from Victoria, and it was notorious for the exact same issue. People would rant and howl about the condoms and raw sewage being dumped by the ciy into inner harbour and elsewhere. Finally a travel writer from the states, visiting from Seattle, took offence, and vowed to give the city a very negative rating and review. Well the city told him to go pound salt, so he published the intent of inaction, and clear distain of tourists (the main source of income) and the cash cow began to snub ol’ vic. NOW city council decided it may be time to do something about it..all about money eh? Well the story still ain’t over, as it turns out the city thought by sticking on another length of pipe, and running the sewage offshore anothe km , no one would be the wiser. Well, the American writer had pretty much fixated on the city that had been very rude to him, and blew the whistle again. That was about 5 years ago, and I haven’t kept up with the story (I no longer care what happens on the left coast) but it sure sounds familiar.
This why I am often amused at some of the “Halifax sucks!” posts, as I hear that in every city (and there have been lots) I have lived in..especially Victoria LOL! Seems to be an echo in this country ;~)
student hires?
I thought they were hoodlums forced to put in community service?
oh wait… they’d rather give them a slap and “house arrest”.
Get out the chain gang and clean this place up.
I’d love to take a dump on the sidewalk just to watch some of these little fuckers have to clean that shit up.
@ Flyingbrick, I knew my idea was too good to be the only one to think of it…..”great minds”…as they say…..
;~)
But its proven to work…drive some of the highways in florida or texas…they are immaculate and you see the gangs out there everyday……wake up everyone, lets start making our criminals worth something, itstead of watching tv and learning how to be better fucking criminals
Too right Hardtail. They also use them in B.C. and Alberta, not sure about other provinces. Maybe they could work out a compromise with the prisoners union?…say, upgrade their 50″ plasmas to 60″ and put lobster and filet mignon on the menu more than once a week?..in exchange for a little comunity service?
Funny: aside from the sewage, I was just thinking how clean this city looked. I’m on Cool Hand Luke’s side, not the creepy prison warden’s. Hardtail, do you wear those mirrored aviator sunglasses, spit a lot and torture small animals?What a nice little breeding ground of sadists we have on this liberal bleeding heart website.
To be fair, there are a lot of people picking up garbage in this city. I’ve seen teams of city workers around our municipal park and the rose bushes on Dunbrack and dozens of other places multiple times. There is far more garbage pick up going on than people are seeing. (No, I don’t work for the city.) But, there are a lot of people dumping garbage, so it’s hard to keep up! The men who come pick up the garbage in the bins in our park always stop to pick up the stuff around the can that has blown out or overflowed. I always appreciate their work.
We can pat ourselves on the back for having curbside pickup for recyclables and compost. Last city I lived in didn’t do any of that. Unless people drove their cans, plastic bags, and paper to a grocery store parking lot, 100% of it went into the landfill. (Nevermind compost, wider range of plastics, tetrapacks, etc.) They had a less than 1% compliance rate.
Halifax can be proud of many things and it certainly is not one large dump. (I have to wonder if the OP has ever lived in another Canadian city?) Of course, it can always do better, but I don’t think great exaggeration or negativity will get us there any quicker.
I work early, and often see the young people out cleaning up with their grabbers and bins, even just getting cigarette butts. I’ve thought that while it’s nice to get it done early to make things look nicer for the masses, it might be better to have them out in the middle of the day so that the average joe can see that we have people making a dent in the garbage that gets left behind. But perhaps that would just encourage people not to clean up after themselves, since they’d assume someone was being paid to be their maid.
“Canada’s Ocean Playground” should be changed to “Canada’s Atlantic Dumpster”. A lot of the trash you see along the roadways is what blows off the garbage trucks on route to the dump.