The Garden City Refugee

Garbage Supervision

April 27, 2026

In a development that will shock no one, the City of St. Catharines is not exactly run like a well-oiled machine. If only we paid our CAO more. More than the premier, in fact. Oh right, we already did that. Maybe if we paid his deputy almost as much. Gave her a $100,000 raise too. Oh right, we already did that. You get the idea.

I saw no finer example of this inefficiency at Lakeside Park this morning. Two City workers, one a big burly guy in his 40s, the other a woman of about the same age, were backing a motorized cart with a flatbed trailer up to a dumpster at the edge of the parking lot. The guy got out, climbed on top of the trailer, picked up the garbage bin and emptied the contents into the dumpster while his female colleague got out and supervised this most difficult and complex task.

Following this, they both got back in the cart and drove off to collect the next bin. There, the woman tried her hand at collecting the bin, but was obviously struggling mightily just to get it to the curb. Not surprisingly, her male colleague had to step in and get the bin up onto the trailer. Can you say DEI hire? Because it’s apparently discriminatory these days to not hire someone physically incapable of performing the job. Next, you’ll see a blind man claiming to be a victim of discrimination because he wasn’t hired as a bus driver. But I digress.

With both of them back in the cart, they drove it back to the dumpster and went through the same routine.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

While watching this spectacle, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the last budget meeting I attended when our wildly overpaid deputy CAO suggested that City staff work to find “efficiencies.”

Not having a token hire on the payroll to supervise garbage disposal might make a good start.

In addition to rolling back that $100,000 raise.