Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
June 21, 1997

Discussion

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, a popular song, “Brother can you spare a dime?” helped explain why there wasn’t enough work to go around: “Once I built a railroad, made it run / Once I built a tower, now it’s done” conveyed the notion that much of the work that society had to do was done. John Maynard Keynes, this century’s most influential economist, expressed a similar sentiment: “The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges,” he wrote, decrying the absence of investment in job creating projects. “[T]wo masses for the dead are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.” Jeremy Rifkin’s recent best-seller, The End of Work, warns of automation and the information society, and calls for a shortened work week to spread the remaining jobs around.

Governments also believe that society’s job-creating potential has run out of steam. Where once they considered full employment attainable, they now retreat to a concept called the Natural Rate of Unemployment. According to this concept, the natural rate of unemployment can be high due to the structure of labor markets. And given that structure, the natural rate is optimal for keeping inflation in check and the economy humming. An unemployment rate below the natural rate, in fact, becomes dangerous to the greater good. In Canada, many consider this natural rate to be eight and even nine per cent, making an unemployment rate of 10 per cent only one or two per cent too high.

Because governments now believe full employment to be neither attainable nor desirable, they see their job as preventing unemployment rates from dropping below the natural rate of unemployment. Yet the actual level of the natural rate is a mystery: Even Milton Friedman, the economist who developed the concept, believes that there is no way to determine it.

THERE SHOULD BE NO MYSTERY over why countries such as Canada find themselves with unconscionably high unemployment. Study after study show that the ranks of the unemployed are dominated by low-skilled workers. And in countries such as Canada, government policy — through the minimum wage and other mechanisms — outlaws low-paying jobs.

Regulations, particularly those affecting low-income occupations, share the blame in creating mass unemployment. A study of the United States found that approximately 10 per cent of all jobs, many in low-skilled areas such as taxi driving, hairdressing, street vending, and trash hauling, require a licence. Although the regulations aren’t designed to raise unemployment, government-organized taxi monopolies effectively shut out immigrants and students from a traditional entry into the job market; municipal ordinances prevent low-tech entrepreneurs from hawking their jewelry and T-shirts on sidewalks; and zoning rules stop single mothers who’d like to climb out of welfare from running hair salons out of their homes. While the well educated or highly motivated generally have little trouble meeting the regulations or finding their way around them, others feel overwhelmed or intimidated in the face of government bureaucracy and throw in the towel.

In our kind, compassionate, Canadian way, governments are saying that single mothers, our youth, our disabled, and others are better off on welfare than in low-income occupations. They’re saying that those who lack experience in our society should be denied low-paid entry-level positions that can qualify them for better jobs down the road. And in so doing, they exclude them from the job market, give them a welfare cheque and leave them to the company of their unemployed peers.

The economic costs of unemployment, serious though they are, are dwarfed by its social cost, a cost seen in legions of alienated youths; in once proud breadwinners now humiliated; in excuses for racism, as some groups are blamed for taking the jobs of others; in family breakups, depression, and other mental health costs; in loss of hope and purpose. Nothing should take priority over providing meaningful work to everyone desiring it; nothing is more destructive to the soul than feeling cast off, unable to contribute to society. Yet governments that impose a minimum wage undermine the social needs of the poor through this well-meaning attempt to protect the poor’s economic needs. And governments then undermine the poor’s economic needs by imposing hefty taxes on minimum wage earners, leaving them with a take-home pay almost $2 below the minimum wage.

ALTHOUGH GOVERNMENTS ACT OTHERWISE, the natural rate of unemployment is not a law of nature. It varies from country to country, even region to region, as well as varying over time. The natural rate has two components: the small amount of unemployment that arises when people are between jobs; and the large amount that results from regulations and other government policies that have created dysfunctional labor markets.

While the U.S. hardly exemplifies a well-functioning labor market, over the last two decades its labor market has become more open while ours has become more closed. While the U.S. decreased its minimum wage dramatically (relative to inflation), we increased ours. While the U.S. opened up its economy through deregulation — not just in major sectors such as communications but also in small sectors such as local taxi markets — Canadian governments clung to controls. While the U.S. has succeeded in the especially difficult task of opening up its economy to the low-skilled worker, Canadians have been denigrating low-skilled job opportunities by dismissing them as McJobs. The United Kingdom, with no minimum wage, has an unemployment rate two-thirds — and a youth unemployment rate half — that of the countries of continental Europe.

When governments these days vow to fight high unemployment, they usually mean the small levels of unemployment above the natural rate. Instead of tinkering with programs designed to fine tune our extraordinarily high unemployment rate down to the presumed natural rate of eight or nine per cent, governments should eliminate the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market.

Taking the following steps would quickly slash the unemployment rate and provide opportunities for a new generation of workers.

• Abolish income taxes for low-income earners. With the federal and provincial government deficits about to be eliminated, many governments are considering tax cuts, particularly to those in high tax brackets to stimulate investment. But a greater social payoff would come from directing tax cuts to the poor, for whom income taxes can amount to thousands of dollars a year. Last year Canadians earning the minimum wage paid about $2,000. As John Maynard Keynes noted, workers know enough not to work when it doesn’t pay them to do so. Tax cuts to the poor are indispensable to transforming the welfare — and now workfare — culture that governments impose.
• Exempt low-income earners from payroll taxes, which have escalated dramatically to the detriment of the poor. People don’t pay into the national pension and unemployment plans while they’re on welfare, and the self-employed low-income earner does not pay any unemployment insurance premiums, yet governments require the salaried poor to do so as a condition of employment — a requirement that forces up their wages without increasing their take-home pay and puts them beyond the hiring capabilities of many struggling businesses. Payroll taxes for low-income earners can amount to one-seventh of their take-home pay; if a minimum wage earner got to keep these tax monies — which have been raided by politicians over the years and no longer serve their intended purposes — he would have another $1,500 a year in his bank account.

  To kickstart the unemployed’s entry, and re-entry, into the workforce, the government should give all low-income earners the right to opt out of unemployment insurance and CPP. Without the burden of payroll deductions, those earning the minimum wage would receive an effective pay increase of 30 per cent, helping low-income families make ends meet, encouraging entrepreneurship among the poor, revolutionizing attitudes to the work ethic, and encouraging meaningful reform of the pension system. Last year, the take of governments from a minimum wage earner was often an astounding $3,500.

• Once the various taxes on low-income earners are gone, abolish the minimum wage, or at least reduce it by the amount employees would now be saving in payroll deductions to ensure no person is worse off. About four per cent of the work force, most of them part-timers, earns the minimum wage, and of this four per cent, two-thirds are students. Of the balance, many are immigrants and other new entrants into the workforce who haven’t yet acquired the training and experience to command a higher wage. For the overwhelming proportion of permanent, full-time members of the workforce — approximately 99 per cent — minimum wage laws are irrelevant. Yet the very people who most need training and experience in permanent full-time jobs — those an employer would only hire at $1 or $2 an hour below the minimum wage — are shut out by virtue of it, preventing them from acquiring the skills and knowledge of an industry that would improve their prospects.

  THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is something vanishingly close to zero. In earlier times, when economies were based on the exploitation of finite resources, a plausible argument could be made that jobs based on those resources were finite. But in an age whose most valuable resource is information — a resource without limit — the notion of finite limits to work has become nonsensical.

  Jobs exist in limitless numbers, but as long as society places hurdles before the jobless — particularly legal bars to taking jobs — we’ll see books predicting the end of work. Remove the hurdles, and we’ll see book titles that read The End of Unemployment.

  Lawrence Solomon
  Editor

  Lawrence Solomon can be reached at: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

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  Discussion

  • Todd E. Speck
  • Dave Broad
  • Lawrence Solomon replies

  ,

  Kingston, responds: July 7, 1997

  ,

  Director, Social Policy Research Unit, University of Regina, Regina, responds: July 30, 1997

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  Todd E. Speck, Kingston, responds: July 7, 1997

  Thank you for the editorial on the end of unemployment.

  I am a 32-year old recent graduate of Queen’s in philosophy and political studies. I originally returned to school in response to unemployment and underemployment in a society that places tremendous emphasis upon a person’s credentials regardless of the applicability of these credentials to the vocation at hand (unfortunately for me, my current credentials are economically meaningless, but I do not regret the experience). Most of my contemporaries have suffered, along with me, from the increasingly rigid economic structure of this society, and I have been railing on for years about the topics that you discussed in your editorial.

  I would like to point out that the position which you take on the labor market would certainly have you branded as lacking compassion and also, most likely, as a “right-wing extremist” at institutions such as Queen’s (certainly in the philosophy and social science departments) as well as the mass media. Only recently, I had the displeasure of reading an article in the Citizen wherein the writer lamented the less-than-minimum-wage “exploitation” of women sewing at home for the Northern Reflections chain associated with Woolworths. Why comfortable middle-class girls and boys cannot understand that $4.50 earned (and retained) can be of tremendous benefit to both the individual and society, economically and socially, is a cultural mystery. We are, apparently, supposed to feel good about a “compassionate” society which forces the poor to clean up dog feces in public parks in order to receive bare subsistence funding (which workfare will amount to, no doubt), while we deny them the opportunity (among other denied opportunities) to flog apples, t-shirts, or trinkets on the street corner.

  At the moment, I can add little to your editorial, other than to note that not all the poor are “unskilled,” whatever that term is meant to imply, although most are certainly without advantageous social networks. I only wish to congratulate you upon a fine magazine and wish you all success.

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  Dave Broad, Director, Social Policy Research Unit, University of Regina, Regina, responds: July 30, 1997

  Lawrence Solomon invokes “our kind, compassionate Canadian way” and argues that “governments should be trying to all but eliminate unemployment by attacking the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market.” But he goes on to say that we should do things more the way they do in the United States — which has less government regulation, lower minimum wages and has, in recent years, thrown people off welfare and into prisons.

  Mr. Solomon also devotes much of his discussion to the pseudo-scientific notion of a “natural rate of unemployment.” But he does not mention that unemployment rates are poor measures of labor-market participation, not to mention work activity. We know, for one, that the low U.S. unemployment rate masks proportionately more low-wage, low-quality jobs than we find in Canada and Europe (outside Britain). We kind, compassionate Canadians, says Mr. Solomon, dismiss “low-skilled job opportunities” as “McJobs.” Unfortunately, much labor market research shows that this is the reality for too many workers, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that Mr. Solomon would like to unleash among the poor through low-wage opportunities is a mirage produced by the post 1970s new-conservative social policy climate.

  Mr. Solomon liberally quotes John Maynard Keynes, who believed that the way to “eliminate unemployment by attacking the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market” was to recognize that it was the capitalist character of that labor market that government needed to regulate, not liberate as neo-conservatives argue. Mr. Solomon also opens his piece with a quote from E.Y. (Yip) Harburg’s song, Brother Can You Spare a Dime?, but does not mention that Harburg was a socialist who would have advocated even more government intervention than Keynes. Now, I imagine both Harburg and Keynes would agree, for example, that we have a very inequitable tax structure, but I doubt either would approve of their writings being used as backdrop for Mr. Solomon’s promotion of neo-conservative ideas.

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  Lawrence Solomon replies

  Mr. Broad begins and ends with mischievous paragraphs — I did not suggest throwing people off welfare and into prison, and the political leanings of the composer of Brother Can You Spare a Dime? will help no reader understand either of our arguments. But his middle paragraph does raise relevant questions.

  Is someone better off in a low-paying job or on welfare? Mr. Broad, if I understand his criticism of McJobs, chooses welfare. Are the poor capable of starting at the bottom and working their way up? Mr. Broad calls my confidence in the capabilities of the poor a mirage.

  When Mr. Broad expressed his views, I found them paternalistic but plausible: Comprehensive Canadian studies of the movements of the minimum wage worker do not exist, making his speculation as good as anyone’s. But the raw data to prove or disprove Mr. Broad’s thesis did exist in Statistics Canada’s vaults, and I commissioned it to resolve the issue. Its results show Mr. Broad’s paternalism to be unwarranted.

  Statistics Canada found that very few members of the workforce — about one per cent — stay trapped in minimum wage work for as long as a year. The vast majority of minimum wage workers are either students (60 per cent) or the young (71 per cent), who quickly advance up the pay scale as they gain skill and experience. Immigrants – despite stereotypes of textile sweatshops and domestic drudgery – leave minimum wage status even sooner than others.

  Statistics Canada data aside, I am at a loss to understand Mr. Broad’s defence of the status quo and dislike for the thrust of my proposal — that the poor be exempt from the hefty income and payroll taxes that they now pay, allowing the minimum wage to be lowered without lowering the poor’s take-home pay. Todd Speck, on the other hand, seems to know exactly where Mr. Broad is coming from, even as he despairs at the cultural mystery that leads him and his soul mates into holding incomprehensible beliefs.

Bob Reguly
The Next City
June 21, 1997

“IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME” is the common lament of communities that adopted a few Canada geese in the 1960s to bring picturesque wildlife to their urban jungles.

The geese took on the task with such lust that their numbers have soared to the hundreds of thousands in southern Ontario, where the problem is most acute. Regina started with just one pair, Hiawatha and Queenie, and now has 30,000 nibbling to death all the greensward, including the flower beds at the Legislature. Vancouver imported a dozen from an Ontario wildlife refuge, and now 15,000 ravage the Fraser valley.

The motivation was noble. After all, the Branta canadensis maxima is a national symbol. What more stirring than the plaintive honk of a vee of geese winging north to signal the arrival of spring and, later, southward to remind us that winter is nigh?

“In retrospect, nobody foresaw the population explosion,” says Rick McKelvey, associate manager of the Pacific Wildlife Centre in Vancouver. In cities, geese numbers explode after 20 years, increasing at 30 per cent a year and becoming nuisances: Once settled, the birds won’t go away. For a while, the municipalities bestowed their surplus geese on unsuspecting towns, but now nobody, nowhere, wants them. The search is on for other solutions.

The timid bureaucrats of Canadian cities are watching with quiet approval the brave experiment in the twin Minnesota cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul: population 25,000 Canada geese. There, too, a few pairs in the early 1960s grew to 500 in 1968, and, had many not been exported to unsuspecting states, they would number 100,000 today. Last year, to general approval, the twin cities slaughtered some of their geese and donated the meat to food banks. The state Department of Natural Resources, surprised at the lack of public outcry, plans to corral and process another 1,800 geese this fall to trim the twin cities’ goose number further.

Minnesota found that the food banks’ demand vastly outstrips supply; on a 1-to-10 scale, consumers rated the product, averaging seven pounds dressed, a tasty seven with a 100 per cent approval rating for bringing more of them to the table. Goose consumption gets a clean bill of health. Geese don’t get stuffed with hormones or other chemicals, and analyses find no detectable residues of PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, or mercury. But the slaughterhouse program does cost — bird for bird, nearly double that of turkey — because it is illegal, both in the United States and Canada, to sell migratory game birds. So taxpayers must bear the cost of capturing the birds during their summer moulting period, clipping their wings to prevent airborne escape, fattening them in grassy enclosures, and slaughtering them in the fall.

Birth of a problem

THE CITY OF REGINA WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO FALL PREY TO the goose. A local naturalist beguiled city fathers into settling a pair in the 2,300-acre Waterfall Park in 1962. “People thought it would be nice for people to see the wildlife,” says park spokesperson Irene Pisula. Local farmers donated grain to feed their offspring during the winter. Now about 3,000 of the beggars overwinter, with some 30,000 lollygagging in the summers, and signs are posted to discourage people from feeding them.

For each of the last 15 years, Regina has rounded up 300 to 500 of the geese and trucked them 500 miles north to the remote Cumberland area. But still their numbers keep growing, in spite of a program of addling — shaking eggs vigorously to kill the fetus, then putting the eggs back in the nest to stop geese from laying more. “We’ve discussed having them processed by Hutterite colonies, who raise a lot of geese, but some people think eating Canada geese is too radical a solution,” says Pisula.

In Vancouver, the original Canada geese, airlifted from Kortright Waterfowl Park near Toronto for planting in three local park refuges, now number about 15,000 — half of them in the Greater Vancouver urban environment. “The Fraser valley has reached its carrying capacity for the birds,” says goose expert McKelvey. Some suggest relocating the birds up the valley where they can be shot by fall hunters. (Minnesota had encouraged the hunting of Canada geese by increasing the daily bag limit to five from the previous two.) The geese, however, are smart. As soon as the shooting starts, they hightail it back to the safety of the cities. Fraser valley communities have talked about slaughtering and eating the geese, but the expense and fear of animal rights groups have iced the idea for now.

Meanwhile, some people have taken it on their own to reduce the 1,500 Canada geese hanging around Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s downtown Stanley Park. “Recent immigrants are helping themselves to the protein,” McKelvey says of midnight raiders who have been sighted carrying off lumpy garbage bags whose contents honk in protest. Area municipalities now addle eggs, an ironic development. When officials first introduced the birds, they encouraged fecundity by removing new-laid eggs, tricking the parent birds into laying up to 30 eggs a year. Removed eggs were hatched in incubators.

The Vancouver goose population is still increasing, partly because Vancouver no longer exports up to 1,500 birds a year to the interior cities of Penticton, Kelowna, Vernon, and Kamloops. “There’s virtually no place in British Columbia you can put them where they don’t already have a problem with Canada geese,” McKelvey says.

Winnipeg, Regina, and Victoria are similarly astonished at the burgeoning of their introduced geese. The problem is just beginning in the Thousand Islands and in Quebec towns along the lower St. Lawrence river. One transatlantic goose export — to Buckingham Palace — met deep ingratitude. The Queen, it turned out, was not amused. Her groundskeepers reacted with alacrity to the befouling horde and simply wrung their necks, leaving a few alive as visible symbols of Commonwealth solidarity. Surprisingly, in a nation of protective societies for practically anything that flies, swims, or crawls, there was no outcry.

BACK IN 1968, BIOLOGISTS AT ONTARIO’S MINISTRY OF NATURAL RESOURCES also figured that the urbanized shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario needed some wildlife reminder of bygone days and also ignored the consequences of bringing the giant Canada goose — which had been hunted to virtual extinction by the 1920s — back from the brink.

The ministry plucked a few survivors from Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo, collected others from private aviculture hobbyists and “re-introduced” the geese — two dozen in all — to the Toronto region waterfront. Trouble was, the new domicile had never been the historic habitat of the big, plump bird with the nasty disposition. But the geese liked what they saw: plenty of park and golf club grass to feed on, few predators, and an abundance of nesting sites. As wild game birds, they were untouchable under the law. They decided to stay.

What with four to six eggs per couple — Canada geese are monogamous — those pioneering few grew to 100,000 in a decade, to 200,000 by 1987, and to 300,000 today along the shoreline from Sarnia to Oshawa. Depending on the local habitat, they now double in three to five years. Although most retreat in winter, taking a lazy, short flight just south of the Great Lakes, tens of thousands hang in year-round, are fed cereals and bread dispensed by kindly retirees and stale goods dumped by bakeries.

Canada geese have poor digestive systems, requiring them to eat almost constantly. They expel their undigested remains with metronomic regularity, about once every seven minutes while feeding, convincing many that the geese have worn out their welcome. “The main beef is that parks are ruined by their defecations, with parents complaining that kids can’t use the parks — aggressive geese protecting their nests take off after small kids — and farmers say that the geese raid their crops,” says Rick Pratt, Ontario region manager of habitat enforcement for the Canadian Wildlife Service, the government agency in overall charge of Canada geese under the Canada-U.S. Migratory Birds Convention Act. Geese convert lush public greensward to mud flats as they eat the grass down to the roots. A recent report for the Toronto-area Waterfront Regeneration Trust calls the bird “a significant wildlife nuisance” that pollutes shoreline waters with fecal coliforms, that is mainly responsible for the pollution of popular Grenadier Pond in Toronto’s west-end High Park, and that wreaks havoc on farm crops around Toronto. It blames Canada geese for 24 deaths and $200 million in aircraft damage in North America last year.

At one time, the agency annually rounded up the geese on the Toronto Islands, shipping them by chartered aircraft and truck to municipalities in Michigan, Minnesota, and New York state that had naively put in requests. The export program has ended — the last shipment, 750 birds, last year went to New Brunswick as hunting stock. But even it said, no more, thanks. With the collect-and-ship program ended, visitors to Toronto’s most popular outdoor recreation area can expect to emulate Fred Astaire in traversing the islands’ parklands.

THE GEESE REFUTE THE ADAGE THAT THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a free lunch. They know that a steady handout enables one to stay put. As wildlife technician Gordon MacPherson of the Metropolitan Toronto Region Conservation Authority puts it: “Canada geese are opportunistic. Why fly to James Bay where it’s cold, there are predators and the food’s not as good when you can hang out in the Toronto area? The winters are shorter, there’re no predators, and the people feed you.”

In contrast to the goose surplus down south, Indian settlements in the far north worry about a decline in their indigenous goose flocks, a different subspecies that migrates to the James Bay lowlands. These migrants use perilous flyways through predator-filled boreal forests that skirt Southern Ontario far to the east and west, whereas the Toronto geese fly in armadas north to James Bay in late May and early June through lowlands that offer long sight lines. The plentiful Toronto geese then take food from the mouths of the local, smaller species of Canada geese.

Crowding themselves out of Lake Ontario waterfront land, the Toronto welfare geese, when flying north to inland conservation areas, have become a traffic hazard at some of the highway interchanges. The geese are also a hazard off the road — when nesting, they chase dogs and attack people who sometimes fall and break a leg when running away. To curb the aggressive hordes, the conservation authority is taking some habitat-modifying steps. Since geese fear tall grass that may hide a fox or a coyote, the authority is planting shrubs and letting the grass grow high along the water’s edge to limit their grazing area.

Greater Toronto Area communities already spend $350,000 a year on goose management. In Mississauga, a trained sheep dog harasses the birds away from picnic spots, whereas other municipalities oil their olive-colored eggs: The geese try to hatch the suffocated offspring until it is too late to lay another clutch. But to start a population decline, at least 72 per cent of the eggs have to be destroyed. Performing vasectomies on geese is effective — the males don’t cheat on their mate — but too costly at $130 a bird.

The waterfront trust report recommends oiling eggs, plus modifying open spaces as deterrents, plus harassment of feeding geese (fireworks, non-toxic chemical repellents on grass), plus hefty fines on people who feed the geese, plus “harvesting” the geese for human consumption. Though the cost of donating geese to food banks is expensive — $25 to $30 a bird — it could pay in the long run, if a British report is at all applicable here: it pegs the damage Canada geese do to London parks at a hefty $85 per bird per year.

Across the country, the emerging goose consensus says, “eat the geese,” either through the slaughter-and-donate solution or by relaxing hunting restrictions. The Canadian Wildlife Service favors chasing the birds from the inner cities to the boonies, where they can be hunted, and increasing the bag limits.

As the Minnesota summary report of its slaughter program states: “Processing of geese for human consumption has proven to be an accepted and effective technique for nuisance goose control.” In less bureaucratic language: Bon appétit!

City folk are getting gulled, too

WHILE CANADA GEESE ARE A MAJOR HASSLE IN SOME PARTS of the country, the ring-billed gull is a bigger — and growing — problem from the prairies to the Maritimes. It, too, was once close to extinction because settlers ate their eggs and sought their plumage for bedding. To avoid its disappearance, the Canadian government protected it in 1916, and the gull increased in number at a desultory pace until the 1960s. Then, thanks to man’s greed, this yellow-footed gull with the black band around its bill became a pest everywhere.

The population explosion followed a seemingly unrelated chain of events. First, commercial overfishing and chemical pollution almost wiped out the Great Lakes’ trout and pickerel (the blue pickerel in Lake Erie became extinct), leading to a great increase in alewives and smelt, their prey. The gulls then fed on the alewives and smelt, producing offspring galore. But the feast would not last for long. Governments soon introduced hatchery salmon to please sport fishermen. These big Pacific fish, engorged to 40-pound trophies, muscled out the gulls, forcing them to look far afield for sustenance. They found it in the dinner leftovers tossed into landfill sites and fast-food dumpsters. Many gulls left the country for the city.

Omnivorous and opportunistic, gulls begat more chicks than the garbage dumps could support. So they began raiding farms, eating cherries off the trees and tomatoes ripening on the vine — their favorite farm foods — plus corn, peas, beans, and even onions. They learned to roost in trees, a first for the species. The Canadian Wildlife Service notes: “The diverse diet is the result of the ring-billed gull’s agility and adaptability: It can plunge dive for fish, hawk for insects in the air, follow the plow looking for earthworms and grubs, scrounge french fries at fast-food outlets, hunt for voles in the fields, and forage at garbage dumps amid dump trucks and bulldozers.” The ring bills are supremely adaptable, unlike their kin species, the herring gulls, whose numbers are declining because they stick to eating fish.

The ring bills also ate small songbirds, wiped out the piping plover at Long Point on Lake Erie by raiding their nests, and elbowed aside the long-settled colonies of common and Caspian terns. The ravishing hordes then spread northward past Sudbury and New Liskeard, to northwest Lake Nipigon at the beginning of the 1990s, then even farther west to Lake of the Woods, and downstream to Quebec and the gulf.

ONE CANADIAN WILDLIFE SERVICE REPORT STATES the gulls’ hazards to human health include histoplasmosis, caused by a fungus inhaled from the spores in fecal deposits, botulism, which is transmitted by contact with gull feces, and salmonellosis, caused by a bacteria spread by gulls feeding at garbage dumps and sewage disposal sites. Gulls can also cause swimmer’s itch. The gulls are natural carriers of schistosome trematodes, a parasite expelled in their excretions. After the parasite burrows into a human, it encysts and dies, leaving tiny, itchy red sores.

On occasion, offices in Oshawa and Nanticoke have closed for the day — fumes from gulls’ defecations, sucked into air intakes, caused workers to gag.

“In Ontario,” says the CWS report, “the gulls pose a threat to flight safety; cause ruinous damage to crops; are a potential health hazard to people, cattle and fowl; and are an unacceptable nuisance in many parks, marinas, beaches, playgrounds, and other public areas.”

In the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence river region down to New Brunswick, the gulls have exploded from an estimated 27,000 in 1960 to nearly 1.5 million today. In Toronto, the ring-billed gull soared from 20 nesting pairs in 1973 to 60,000 pairs today at Tommy Thompson Park. Aware that the problem can only get worse, federal, provincial, and municipal authorities have been meeting to discuss bird control solutions for the Greater Toronto Area, home to the nation’s most acute goose-gull problem. Like the goose, the ring bills are a protected species, and it is illegal to harm them.

AIRPORTS HIRE FALCONERS TO SCARE AWAY THE GULLS; factories mount sentinel plastic owls and erect near-invisible fishing monofilament grids to discourage alighting; farmers use banger, screamer, and whistler pyrotechnics to harass the birds, or just blow them away.

At Metropolitan Toronto’s huge Britannia dump, officials tried a tactic to deter the gulls, with some initial success. Officials captured and caged several gulls to frighten away others with their cries of distress. But the imprisoned gulls, discovering they liked the regular meals dished out by the dump staff, soon settled into contented silence. For a while, the custodians tried to replace the caged gulls with batches of fresh ones; then they gave up in a flurry.

At Toronto city hall, authorities tried fishing lines to deter the winged beggars from speckling its broad esplanade with their droppings and from hassling lunch-hour brown baggers. But the gulls soon learned to land outside and stroll in. Ontario Place, Toronto’s sprawling waterfront summer playground, has installed a monofilament grid, like a giant gill net, to dissuade the raucous, ever-hungry gulls.

At Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit, until recently home to the world’s second-biggest ring-billed gull colony after Big Sur, California, officials tried stuffed real owls, but they weren’t as effective as a pair of coyotes who have taken up residence there with obvious relish. Then conservation authority staff used falcons and pyrotechnics to herd the birds into ever-smaller areas. It succeeded for a while: the count dropped to below 50,000 pairs after hitting a high of 80,000 in the mid-1980s, but with government cutbacks, the number soared last year to about 60,000. In any event, harassing the gulls only succeeds in shunting them elsewhere. Some Leslie spit gulls muscled in on the docile mallards at the Toronto horticultural showplace, Edwards Gardens, to the distress of the society ladies who frequent the place.

Last year, the Canadian Wildlife Service, which administers the gull protection program on behalf of the federal minister of environment, granted 69 permits to kill gulls in southern Ontario, most to tomato growers, with 10 permits aimed at gulls nesting on office building or factory roofs where they’re safe from their natural predators — foxes, raccoons, coyotes, great horned owls, skunks which eat their eggs, and garter snakes that swallow newly-hatched young.

The wildlife service advocates gunning the gulls down, “Many wildlife organizations would probably agree to a [gun] control program if it were properly justified, biologically sound, reasonably humane, and efficiently run,” its report states. More realistically, it notes that “It would be impossible to run a gun control program without criticism from some animal rights movements.”

Elizabeth Brubaker
The Next City
June 21, 1997

Britain did. We should take the plunge, too<!–Discussion

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“WHEN FUTURE GENERATIONS SEE THIS SPLENDID DEVELOPMENT and enjoy its privileges, they must declare that the men who conceived it had vision,” Toronto Mayor Alfred Maguire predicted upon opening Sunnyside Beach and Pavilion on June 28, 1922.

His pride was well founded. The new city beach offered lifeguards, swimming instructors, water slides, diving platforms, swimming and diving competitions, and, for evening swimmers, floodlit sands and waters. Sterilized bathing suits catered to the large numbers who, after sweltering in the afternoon sun, headed for the shore, storing their clothes in one of the pavilion’s 7,700 lockers. After the swim, they could rent beach chairs or return to the pavilion for a hot shower. Visitors preferring to be on, rather than in, the water could hire canoes and other boats. For landlubbers, Sunnyside offered daily afternoon and evening concerts, dances, softball games, and an amusement park where young and old alike would try their hands at games of skill and chance and ride the Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, or roller-coaster. No child lacked the means to get to the beach: Kids carrying bathing suits travelled the streetcars free on the six routes that provided a special bathing-car service.

Along with other urban beaches, Toronto’s had long been centres of social life, with these summer playgrounds surpassing all other entertainment amenities. When the city’s sandy peninsula broke off from the mainland in an 1858 storm, determined citizens crossed the harbor to the newly formed islands, first by horse-powered paddleboat and later by steamer, to swim in the clean waters and enjoy the cool breezes. By the turn of the century, the islands boasted boardwalks and parks, resort hotels, a baseball stadium, dog and pony circuses, diving horses, and other entertainment.

Beaches sprang up everywhere to meet an appreciative citizenry’s needs. The Scarborough Beach Park offered 250 bathers shallow waters, and the opening of Beaches Park drew 60,000 Torontonians for a giant bonfire.

Back in 1922, Mayor Maguire had reason to be proud of his legacy to future generations. He had made Sunnyside a priceless asset, a lakefront property open to working class families who couldn’t afford summer camps or the gentry’s cottage-country estates. Sunnyside had become a parcel of real estate that provided a clean summer sport for city kids, a centre of recreation that promoted fitness in an era that didn’t need high-tech exercise machines to keep muscles toned.

But the mayor’s legacy didn’t last long. Swimmers no longer plunge, carefree, into Sunnyside’s waters. Because children get coughs or earaches after playing in the waves, many parents forbid them to go to the beach. Even those brave — or ignorant — enough to swim, all too often have no choice: Sunnyside, like so many other urban beaches across Canada, is often closed. The city shore conjures up visions no longer of playlands, but of wastelands. We have come to think of a day at the beach as an event that demands a two-hour drive to the country.

PUBLIC HEALTH AUTHORITIES CLOSE — OR “POST” — BEACHES when high levels of bacteria contaminate bordering waters, scaring off swimmers with signs typically reading: “Warning. Unsafe for bathing. High levels of bacteria in these waters may pose a risk to your health.”

Last summer, Toronto’s Department of Public Health posted beaches on the city’s westside some three-quarters of the time. Some years, it warns swimmers away for virtually the entire summer. So, too, do health departments in other communities along the Great Lakes’ shoreline, from Thunder Bay to the St. Lawrence river, among them Hamilton, Ajax, Oshawa, Belleville, and Kingston. Gananoque simply gave up on its beach: After repeated pollution-related closings in the 1980s, the town’s recreation director told the Kingston Whig-Standard that “it just proved to be not worth it any longer.”

In the nation’s capital, the Ottawa Citizen described Ottawa’s Britannia Beach as a giant toilet that doesn’t always flush. Britannia is often closed by late summer; in some years, the water becomes contaminated as early as May.

Even coastal cities — where ocean temperatures, tidal and wave action, and the sheer volume of water might be expected to moderate pollution — aren’t spared. Bacterial contamination periodically prevents swimming at Halifax’s beaches and even causes the cancellation of windsurfing competitions in the city’s harbor. On the West Coast, authorities post, among others, four Richmond beaches year round. Temporary postings, far more common, have closed beaches in New Westminster, White Rock, Nanaimo, and other B.C. communities.

YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE PRIMARY POLLUTER of our cities’ beaches every morning when you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Although animal wastes d storm sewers are sometimes the chief culprits, most of the problem comes from our own toilets. Government regulators know of — and permit — the sewage pollution. We can’t blame some wicked industry that, driven by lust for profit, discharges effluent in the middle of the night. We can only blame ourselves, our publicly owned sewage works, and our government regulators, who allow the desecration of our beaches to continue unchecked.

Sewage pollution has transformed city beaches into sources of sickness, and not just of skin, eye, ear, nose, and throat infections. Salmonella and Shigella, bacteria common in sewage, cause diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems. Giardia, a parasite, causes beaver fever. Bacteria in sewage can also cause more serious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid fever, while viruses can cause hepatitis, meningitis, polio, and a host of other illnesses.

While sewage treatment and the monitoring of beaches have prevented the sewage pathogens from causing epidemics, they do not prevent individual infections. A 1980 study of typical Ontario beaches found that 69 of every 1,000 swimmers had become ill within 10 days of swimming, compared with 29 of every 1,000 nonswimmers. Even relatively clean beaches sicken swimmers. The Natural Resources Defense Council warns that Great Lakes waters that meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards will cause eight illnesses per 1,000 swimmers. In other words, if 100 people swim on 10 occasions at a “passed” beach, say each Saturday and Sunday in August, eight will fall ill. Environment Canada assumes a higher rate of illness in people who swim in waters that meet its own looser standards: It predicts that between 10 and 20 of every 1,000 swimmers will get sick. Children are especially at risk, in part because they tend to swallow water. Those between 6 and 11, having lost their inherited immunity without yet acquiring their own, face the greatest risks.

Because of the expense of testing for all of the different contaminants — especially viruses, which are difficult to detect — health officials generally take a short cut, testing just for fecal coliforms, bacteria found in the feces of warm-blooded animals, or more specifically for E. coli, a particular species of fecal coliform. When a litre of beach water contains more than 2,000 fecal coliform colonies, the federal government and most provincial governments consider it time to close a beach. In Ontario, where guidelines are more stringent, a count of 1000 rates as too much.

Testing only for fecal coliforms can be misleading: Sewage treatment that knocks out fecal coliform bacteria might leave dangerous doses of the hardier viruses in place for weeks or months. And once sewage, whether treated or untreated, reaches a lake, river, or ocean, the bacteria in it are inactivated more rapidly than the viruses. The absence of fecal coliforms guarantees nothing. Waters that pass the health department’s fecal coliform tests, especially recently contaminated waters, will often make you sick. If the water quality changes regularly, says Dr. Pierre Payment, professor of virology at the University of Quebec’s Armand Frappier Institute, the risk of becoming ill doubles.

Testing procedures present additional problems. Health officials generally sample only the water itself. But the sediment under the water and the spray above it may contain higher concentrations of contaminants. The University of Toronto’s Dr. Patricia Seyfried, who found levels of some micro-organisms to be at least 10 times higher in sediment than in surface water, warns that swimmers may stir up bacteria, increasing their exposure as they play. American research found that aerosols in ocean spray can concentrate viruses 200-fold.

If all this makes you think twice about swimming in urban waters, you’re not alone. In a study prepared for Canada’s Minister of Health and Welfare, Dr. Payment concluded: “Surface waters contaminated by non-disinfected treated or untreated wastewater would not normally be suitable at any level for recreational activities involving immersion.” The professor is telling us not to swim in sewage — even, in most cases, treated sewage.

THE BACTERIA, PARASITES, AND VIRUSES FOUND IN human sewage have an easy time making their way to our beaches. Maritimers flush their toilets directly into their harbors: Over 600,000 people in Atlantic Canada discharge an annual 100 million cubic metres of untreated sewage, more than a quarter of the region’s domestic and commercial wastewater. Halifax and Dartmouth produce more than half of this pollution, discharging almost 55 million cubic metres of untreated sewage into Halifax harbor. Were this sewage spread over the City of Halifax, residents would be thigh-deep in the stuff. Under a similar scenario, those living in St. John’s, which dumps over 38 million cubic metres a year of raw sewage into its harbor, would find themselves knee-deep.

On the West Coast, 13 municipalities merely screen or chop up their wastes before sending them seaward. While most of these polluting communities are small, the group does include, to the disgust of neighboring Washington state, the City of Victoria, which argues that quick dispersal in the ocean renders its wastes harmless.

Even inland Quebec, which doesn’t have ocean currents to justify dirty habits, discharges raw sewage. Though Quebec has come a long way since 1978, when it treated only two per cent of its sewage, a million and a half people living in 376 communities still flush their sewage directly into the province’s lakes and rivers.

Not that sewage treatment plants necessarily make all that much of a difference. Inadequate sewer systems often prevent sewage from reaching the treatment plants. Combined sewers, which carry both sanitary sewage and stormwater to sewage treatment plants, are especially dicey. During a rainstorm, the water volume overwhelms them: The sewers either back up into people’s basements, or, more commonly, allow their contents — raw sewage and all — to overflow through emergency outfalls into nearby waters.

The combined sewers that service much of Vancouver and New Westminster, along with a portion of Burnaby, often discharge some 200 times a year, flushing 62 million cubic metres of untreated sewage into the Fraser river and Burrard inlet — a volume equivalent to, as the Sierra Legal Defence Fund points out, 1,489 Exxon Valdez oil spills, or four spills each day of the year. Combined sewers in Victoria, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Brandon, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City, Montreal, and Charlottetown also overflow.

Even sewage that makes it to treatment plants may soon spoil local waters. Many plants provide only “primary” treatment: They hold the wastes in large tanks, skimming off the scum and allowing the solids to settle before releasing the liquids. In his Health and Welfare study, Dr. Payment concludes that primary treatment has little effect on the bacterial or viral content of wastewater. Yet 2.2 million Quebeckers, 1.6 million British Columbians, 1.3 million Ontarians, and 165,000 Atlantic Canadians rely on nothing more.

The more common “secondary” treatment, in which micro-organisms break down and consume the organic matter in the wastewater, fails to remove many of the parasites and viruses that threaten public health. This partial treatment, Dr. Payment warns, “constitutes a major public health risk if the receiving waters are to be used for recreational activities.” Only a disinfecting “tertiary” treatment — preferably using ozone or ultraviolet light — protects swimmers.

Many plants are too small to handle the sewage they receive; others are simply ill maintained or badly operated. From sea to slimy sea, the effluents of hundreds of such plants regularly fail to comply with provincial standards. The problem threatens to worsen in coming years as populations grow, overburdening many of the treatment plants that are already working close to their capacity.

The Ontario government’s reports on discharges from sewage treatment plants tell a grim story. In 1993, the last year for which it published figures, 72 facilities exceeded their approved discharge limits. The reasons given for the unacceptable discharges varied: Inadequate levels of treatment, insufficient capacity, construction errors, equipment breakdowns, improper handling, incorrect operating procedures, inadequate sampling and testing, unusual influent and weather all show up in the list of excuses. The operators’ determination to correct the problems also varied: While some addressed their plants’ problems shortly after the polluting incidents occurred, others allowed the problems to continue unabated for years. The fact that almost a third of 1993’s scofflaw facilities had also been out of compliance in the previous year indicates the government’s lax enforcement. And the fact that data on sewage pollution occurring in 1994, 1995, or 1996 still isn’t available increases suspicions that pollution control does not top the government’s list of concerns.

Regulators in other provinces are hardly more attentive to pollution from sewage treatment plants. The Nova Scotia Department of the Environment’s M.T. Grant assumes most of the province’s plants to be delinquent. In the absence of sufficient manpower and good monitoring, she adds, it is very hard to know what is going on. “The enforcement you would expect is not there.”

Nor is the enforcement there in Quebec. Every year, Quebec’s Ministry of Environment grades the province’s sewage treatment plants. In 1993, the last year for which information is available, 69 plants received unacceptable grades. Another 57 plants were not evaluated; 16 poor performers among them likely failed to comply.

Non-complying plants are also the norm in British Columbia. More than half of the province’s sewage treatment plants either are known to be out of compliance with provincial water quality regulations or, having failed to submit required monitoring data, are deemed by provincial regulators to be out of compliance. One chronic offender, Vancouver’s Annacis Island plant, has appeared in 13 of the province’s last 14 semi-annual non-compliance reports.

OUR SEWAGE SYSTEM’S OWNERS AND OPERATORS SHRUG OFF their shameless record. No one gets fired, or even reprimanded, not because provinces lack tough laws, of which they have several, but because laws are rarely enforced. Government regulators also disregard the federal Fisheries Act, which provides for fines of up to $1 million a day and jail terms of up to three years for those who deposit “a deleterious substance of any type in water frequented by fish,” and which should, in theory, guard against virtually all sewage pollution. Those in charge of enforcing our laws behave as if those very laws simply didn’t exist. Neither Nova Scotia nor Quebec has ever prosecuted a polluting sewage plant. And in Ontario or British Columbia, you could count the prosecutions on one hand.

Our governments’ reluctance to curb sewage pollution is hardly surprising. After all, they would have to fund many of the required improvements. Some provinces, such as Ontario, own or operate many sewage treatment plants. Other provinces have assumed financial responsibility for the construction and repair of municipally owned plants. Quebec finances between 85 and 94 per cent of the construction cost. In Newfoundland, financial assistance ranges from 30 to 80 per cent. In British Columbia, from 25 to 75 per cent. In Nova Scotia, the figure is 50 per cent.

If governments enforced tough laws against sewage pollution, they would face enormous bills. A study by Ontario’s Ministry of Environment and Energy estimates it would cost $100 million merely for the province’s secondary treatment plants to comply with existing guidelines. Ontario’s Halton region expects its new water and sewage system to cost between $400 million and $500 million. The Remedial Action Plan office, set up under the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, has calculated that Metropolitan Toronto’s combined sewers and inadequate sewage treatment plants could require an investment of $885 million. A report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy estimated that, over the next 20 years, Canada will need to invest between $38 billion and $49 billion just to maintain its existing water and sewage infrastructure. On top of that, the round table predicts, we will need to invest $41 billion in new stock. Tighter standards would mean even higher costs.

Governments — federal, provincial, and municipal alike — are increasingly reluctant to foot the bill for sewage system repairs or upgrades. Lacking the money — and, more important, the political will — to meet even current standards, they are extremely unlikely, on their own, to eliminate combined sewer overflows or to upgrade plants to provide full treatment with disinfection. Governments are going to need help. And the help is going to have to come from the private sector.

GOVERNMENTS ACROSS CANADA ARE ALREADY TURNING to the private sector for help. A debate about privatization has engaged Quebec for several years. As early as 1993, the then Treasury Board president Daniel Johnson suggested that the private sector should administer water treatment facilities. “Every time public services can be offered based on the market forces of competition and efficiency,” he explained, “they cost less for the taxpayer.” Such words have delighted the Montreal government, a strong advocate of privatization, while frightening the city’s unions, which increasingly resist the prospect. Nova Scotia, too, hopes for private sector assistance with sewage pollution problems — such as those in Halifax harbor — that are just too big for the government to solve on its own. In 1994, Ross Bragg, Nova Scotia’s former Economic Development minister, explained his uncomplicated position to the Globe and Mail: “I see a big, big role for the private sector. Government can’t go out and finance all these things themselves. Why not let the private sector do some of these sewer and water projects?” Ontario is also talking of selling the Crown corporation that operates many of the province’s sewage treatment plants. A number of Ontario cities have begun experimenting with private sector involvement. Since Hamilton-Wentworth first contracted out the operations of its water and sewage works in 1995, the list of communities eyeing some degree of privatization has grown to include Ottawa-Carlton and the regions of York, Halton, and Waterloo.

This growing interest in the privatization of water and sewage services distresses many Canadian journalists. Toronto’s newspapers overflow with warnings of skyrocketing prices and plummeting services, should water and sewage be privatized. The doomsayers inevitably base their case on Britain’s recent experience with privatization. The Toronto Sun‘s Christina Blizzard, calling Britain’s “lousy experiment” a “nightmare,” fears “water torture” for Ontarians if politicians proceed with privatization. James Laxer, writing in the Toronto Star, urges Ontarians to pay heed to the results in England and Wales, where privatization has engendered “popular loathing.” In the Globe and Mail, David Wallen refers to “accusations of blatant profiteering” on the part of Britain’s private water and sewer companies. Likewise, on television, the fifth estate‘s Linden MacIntyre recounts “a cautionary tale” from Britain.

Not surprisingly, labor also warns of higher prices and poorer quality — not to mention fewer unionized jobs — under a privatized system. Labor organizations have formed a coalition with environmental groups, who seem equally certain that, based on Britain’s experience, privatization will spell doom for Canadians: Toronto’s Safe Sewage Committee refers to Britain’s “gross mismanagement of water resources,” while the Canadian Environmental Law Association calls the British experience “an important caution.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN BRITAIN? THE PRIVATIZATION, IN 1989, of the companies responsible for water supply and sewage treatment in England and Wales has, for some, been a nightmare. Average water and sewerage prices doubled between 1989 and 1996, creating hardship for the thousands of poor who have been disconnected for not paying their bills. Even well-off customers resent the fact that they can’t keep their bills down by using less water. Only eight per cent of the households in England and Wales have water meters, without which consumers are powerless to control their costs. It’s not just water prices that critics complain of. Some complain that their bills support fat salaries for company executives. Others object that the new companies aren’t moving fast enough to fix water mains that have been leaking for decades. Still others point to lingering regulatory problems, including the low fines resulting from prosecutions for pollution.

But before you write off privatization, consider this: In both England and Wales, privatization has benefited the environment enormously. Even its harshest critics agree that privatization has made coastal beaches swimmable. Britain’s beaches, polluted by raw sewage, had long been a national disgrace. Back in 1975, when the European Community issued a directive giving member countries 10 years to bring their “bathing waters” up to uniform standards, the British government went into denial, claiming the country had but 27 beaches — in the government’s opinion, even the sandy stretches at the famous Brighton and Blackpool resorts didn’t qualify. Not until 1987 did the government come clean and admit that hundreds of beaches encircled its island. By the following year, only 241 of 364 designated beaches met European bathing water standards. After privatization, both designation and compliance steadily increased. By last year, Britain boasted 433 beaches, of which 386 complied with European standards. In short, the country’s 10 new water and sewage companies have “created” 69 beaches, and cleaned up 145 beaches.

More surprising than the number of private water companies meeting European standards (after all, they don’t really have a choice), is the number exceeding the standards. Four companies have agreed to install full treatment plus disinfection — unheard of under the former public regime — at some or all of their sewage treatment plants. Welsh Water was the first to adopt a bold treatment policy, promising in 1993 to fully treat and disinfect the effluent at all 230 of its coastal outfalls. The company has already completed several new schemes that include either ultraviolet light or membrane disinfection; several more will be completed this year. By the year 2000, the company intends all but three of its plants to meet guidelines that are 20 times stricter than are current European standards.

Wessex Water is also committed to improving coastal discharges beyond the legal minimum requirement. For 11 of its outfalls now releasing raw sewage, Wessex has promised upgrades to provide at least secondary treatment plus disinfection by 2005 — and in some cases, much sooner. South West Water has also announced that it will be providing full treatment with ultraviolet disinfection at several resorts, earning high praise from a prominent environmental group. In the words of Chris Hines, director of Surfers Against Sewage, “Instead of trying to get away with the bare legal minimum, they have grasped the nettle and gone for the best option for all.” Early this year, Yorkshire Water joined the fray, announcing that by the year 2000, it would provide full treatment with ultraviolet disinfection at four locations — locations for which it had initially planned only primary treatment.

Privatization has also reversed the deterioration that plagued English and Welsh rivers and canals throughout the 1980s. Regulators test some 40,000 kilometres of inland waters. Between 1990 and 1995, while the quality of about 225 kilometres of inland waters deteriorated significantly, the quality of more than 3,000 kilometres improved significantly. In 1990, less than 48 per cent of the rivers and canals tested were classified as very good or good. By 1995, 60 per cent were so classified. During the same period, the percentage of rivers classified as poor or bad declined from 15 to 9. Improvements in river quality can be attributed in part to more sewage treatment plants meeting the standards that govern their discharges: The percentage of plants complying with their discharge permits increased from 87 to 96 in the first five years following privatization.

WHAT EXPLAINS THIS STRIKING TURNAROUND? Public pressure has certainly influenced the water and sewage companies. The members of Surfers Against Sewage, driven, they say, by the experience of tasting raw sewage on their lips, have led the fight for cleaner beaches. SAS, which describes itself as Britain’s coolest environmental group, definitely makes an impression: Companies and regulators alike find it hard to ignore wetsuit-clad lobbyists carrying surfboards and inflatable feces. Formed in 1990, SAS initially targeted South West Water, demonstrating at its public appearances and attending its annual general meeting as shareholders. It soon expanded its arsenal to include legal actions against polluters. Public complaints are another favorite tool. Page after page of SAS’s newsletter carries admonishments in bold or capital letters to report every trace of pollution to the authorities. Phone and keep phoning, it exhorts its readers, printing telephone numbers to facilitate the reporting. Not surprisingly, public complaints have skyrocketed. SAS’s relentless “pressurizing” has yielded impressive results. Although it would like more companies to go further and faster, it acknowledges that “increasingly, the industry seems to be moving in the right direction.”

At the other end of the consumer protection spectrum is the Tidy Britain Group, which takes a more measured approach, giving Blue Flag awards to beaches that surpass current standards. The group’s director general Graham Ashworth explains that “the awards have established a set of national beach management standards towards which all beach authorities can work.” The Marine Conservation Society similarly rates beaches. In conjunction with Reader’s Digest, it publishes an annual Good Beach Guide providing information on water quality and other factors at more than 900 beaches. Although the guide still condemns many beaches as “highly unsuitable for bathing,” “very badly polluted,” or even “appalling,” it praises increasing numbers.

Environmental groups, likewise, vigilantly monitor inland sewage pollution. Friends of the Earth’s River Pollution: A Sleuth’s Guide instructs readers on how to spot pollution, trace it to its source, determine if it exceeds allowed limits, and, if so, report it to the authorities. FOE urges its readers to become “part of a national network of pollution sleuths” that serve as “the eyes, ears, and noses” of the environmental regulator.

FOE’s ability to teach concerned citizens how to use information published by Britain’s environmental regulator reflects the extent to which times have changed. For decades, the British government kept its sewage pollution a well-guarded secret. Even when the government introduced a pollution permit system in 1951, it concealed the permits’ contents from the public and made the publication of information regarding compliance, with few exceptions, illegal. The public couldn’t know of — let alone complain about — scofflaw plants. Although Parliament voted in 1974 to establish public registers of permits and compliance, ministers — Labour and Conservative in turn — delayed implementing the change for another 11 years.

Not until 1985 could a concerned citizen learn what poisons a sewage plant spewed into local waters. But even then, the information was hardly accessible: The government had changed the nature of discharge permits to hide violations. Former water authority executive, government advisor, and environmental regulator David Kinnersley calls the change an “environmental betrayal” whose “only effect was to make the illegal operation of sewage work discharges less obvious and thereby less embarrassing to the Department of the Environment.” “Illegality,” he explains, “was to be veiled in statistical obscurity.”

Mr. Kinnersley describes overcoming this “potent culture of government concealment” as one of the primary challenges facing the regulators of newly privatized water and sewage companies. He praises the openness achieved in the first years of privatization. Discharge records are now available to the public. Citizens know more than ever before. As a result, they are involved as never before.

ENGLAND’S AND WALES’S NEW WATER AND SEWAGE COMPANIES have responded to public and government demands with unprecedented levels of investment. The need for massive capital expenditure had been a primary force driving privatization. During the 1970s and 1980s, cash-short Labour and Conservative governments stemmed the flow of spending on water and sewage infrastructure, allowing the system to deteriorate. By the late 1980s, the government estimated it would require almost $54 billion within 10 years to meet new European standards. But it recoiled from the borrowing, and price increases needed to finance the improvements. “No votes in shit” is how SAS explains successive governments’ reluctance to invest public funds. Although David Kinnersley is more delicate in describing “the financial harness of Whitehall,” his conclusion is the same: Governments worry that increased water bills will cost them votes.

In 1986, when the Secretary of State for the Environment first presented the idea of privatization to the British Parliament, he argued that the new water and sewage companies wouldn’t suffer “from the constraints on financing which public ownership imposes.” Indeed, free from such constraints, the companies have invested a whopping $19 billion in sewage collection and treatment. They have repaired sewers, reduced overflows, modernized plants, and constructed treatment facilities where none existed before. But even these billions have been insufficient to undo the damage caused by decades of government neglect: The new companies plan to invest another $33 billion in improving their sewage systems over the next eight years. As one official from the Department of the Environment noted, “You just couldn’t contemplate that kind of expenditure in the absence of privatization.”

The figures for individual companies are staggering. South West Water has invested $1.5 billion in its Clean Sweep program to clean up the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Until privatization, the region discharged almost 40 per cent of its sewage, with little or no treatment, into tidal waters; as a result, fewer than two-thirds of the region’s beaches met water quality standards. Within six years, South West Water had completed 20 of 33 planned treatment schemes, providing sewage treatment to over 200,000 new customers and bringing 95 per cent of the region’s beaches to standard.

North West Water is spending $1.1 billion on its Sea Change program, which, by financing 12 new or upgraded sewage treatment works, will enable the company to clean up more than 600 kilometres of coastline. Southern Water, in Operation Seaclean, is devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to new treatment works and stormwater retention tunnels. And through Project Clearwater, Anglian Water is investing almost $600 million in improving bathing waters.

WHEN ENGLAND’S AND WALES’S NEW WATER AND SEWAGE COMPANIES drag their feet, a tough environmental regulator is there to prod them. The Environment Agency monitors sewage treatment and disposal and enforces the laws and regulations limiting sewage pollution. Prosecutions for environmental offences, rare under the former public regime, are now the norm: Recent years have seen over 200 successful prosecutions of water and sewage companies.

Before privatization, conflicts of interest prevented effective enforcement of environmental laws. As the chairman of the environmental regulatory agency that was established upon privatization noted, Britain’s old pollution permit system had been “designed with a view to avoiding an embarrassing number of failures and an excessive number of prosecutions of public organisations. . . . [M]ore weight was given to the need to protect the water authorities against unfair prosecution than to the need to protect the environment and river users.”

An image introduced in 1987 by Secretary of State for the Environment Nicholas Ridley illustrated the tensions inherent in public ownership. In a publicly owned system, Ridley explained, the government acts as both “poacher” and “gamekeeper.” Ridley expressed his government’s increasing understanding that a major discharger in its own right should not be responsible for controlling discharges. As commentators picked up on Ridley’s distinction between polluter and regulator, the notion that the environment would benefit from a privatization that freed regulators to regulate became almost commonplace.

Sadly, Britain’s environmental regulator hasn’t been completely free from pressures to keep bathing waters dirty. The government remains concerned that it will suffer politically if water and sewerage prices continue to rise. British delegations lobby their European partners for laxer standards. At home, Britain’s economic regulator warns the environmental regulator about the costs of cleaner waters.

But the environmental regulator has shown that it can withstand such pressure. In 1995, it insisted that waters at two coastal resorts be cleaned up immediately, despite the government’s assertion that improvements were not needed for several years. The regulator, oblivious to the government’s desire to ease water bills in key constituencies, noted its statutory obligation to do everything in its power to ensure that beaches met European standards. Environmental Data Services, a private company of environmental journalists whose reports are dubbed The Bible, called the incident “a lesson to ministers that the law does not always permit political interference with environmental standards” and an important reminder to ministers that “the law imposes checks on their ability to move environmental goalposts on a whim.”

David Kinnersley, acknowledging lingering regulatory problems, nonetheless calls the operators’ and regulators’ new clarity of purpose the most significant gain from privatization. He describes the formation of clearly defined business units, supported by adequate financial investment and monitored by independent agencies as “a framework in which water utility privatization comes to be seen as sustainable.” If the water companies continue in the direction in which they have headed since 1989, and if regulators continue to resist pressure to keep water and sewerage prices down, privatization will be more than sustainable: It will be a godsend in exceeding official water standards and rehabilitating beaches and other public resources such as rivers and lakes.

EXPERIENCE IN BRITAIN DEMONSTRATES THAT PRIVATIZATION — if done right — can check sewage pollution, returning beaches to the watergoers who love them. Our challenge here in Canada, then, is to get it right. An understanding of Britain’s mistakes and achievements alike can help us do that.

Britain’s experience demonstrates the need to ensure that the poor don’t go without water or sewage treatment. This does not mean that we must work to artificially lower water prices. Low prices encourage us — poor and rich alike — to waste water and to overburden sewage treatment plants. Cheap water and sewage services don’t just strain the environment. Ironically, low prices may actually end up straining our pocketbooks, since wasteful use may lead to the construction of an otherwise unnecessary treatment and delivery infrastructure.

Canadians pay less for water and sewage treatment than do citizens in any other industrialized country. Our prices don’t even begin to cover the costs of our services, let alone the costs of the environmental damage wrought by inadequate sewage treatment plants. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy estimates that tax dollars subsidized our water and sewer use to the tune of $5.3 billion in 1994. As users begin to pick up the tab for their own services, tax bills should decrease proportionately, but should be skewed to especially benefit the poor and ensure they’re not made worse off while others benefit. The poorest should receive tax credits. As users begin to pay for desperately needed repairs and upgrades, our beaches will become, for everyone, places of delight rather than disease.

Privatization in Britain also teaches us the value of an independent environmental regulator. For privatization to succeed in Canada, we must establish tough, arm’s length regulators who can be sued by the public should they fail to do their duty, and who can make accountable those treating and disposing of our sewage. Perhaps most important, we must ensure that privatization does not enshrine the de facto pollution rights now enjoyed by our publicly owned water and sewage companies: The profits of the newly private companies must not rest on their ability to pollute with impunity. We will need to spell out our environmental expectations before opening any bidding processes, and spell them out again in our contracts with new private companies — contracts requiring the companies to meet tough environmental standards and specifying that they are shielded neither from public scrutiny nor from liability for the harm they cause others.

As has been true in Britain, the public will help both the regulators and the companies along. We will expect great things from our new private water and sewage companies, holding them to far higher standards than we did their public predecessors. By harboring the notion that public pollution — our pollution — is somehow for the common good, while private pollution is merely for the good of a few profiteers, we are now more forgiving of our local sewage plant than we are of that nasty factory up the river. Privatization will change that. We will begin to see our sewage systems as the polluters that they are. And we will begin to insist that they be repaired or upgraded in order to reopen our beaches and make our waters swimmable once again.

To comment, write to ElizabethBrubaker@nextcity.com