Regent Park is spotless. We pass the new playing field in Toronto’s most dynamic new, old neighbourhood, the metamorphoses from rundown social housing to the number one downtown address. Mixed incomes. Community services. Recreational amenities. Cultural diversity. A Tim Hortons outlet that’s as tidy a one as I’ve ever seen.

This is the new Regent Park.  I survey the sports field, and note the Don’t Litter handmade sign on a can near the fence.  A fence line without a trace of debris, one is hard pressed to find a single cigarette butt among the flowers in the concrete planters.  The community’s extraordinary manager tells us the scene is the result of three weeks of work by residents.  By the time Toronto’s scantily publicized clean up rolled around, Regent Park was already looking good.

We toured the garbage rooms, the best and the worst.  These new buildings win green certification for their efforts at waste handling.  The biggest problem there is convincing the city to haul away all the organic waste they collect, an issue not covered in the housing company’s agreement with its private hauler, Miller Waste. 

Organics, for now, are being dumped. What a waste of Regent Park’s state-of-the-art, three-stream sorting system.  Residents separate food waste and other organics at source only to have them mingled with garbage and buried at the end of the process.

In the garbage rooms yet to be renovated, a floor is baited with rat traps. Three big rats present themselves to us and scurry up red water pipes and into the darkness. A sign reminds workers to pick up the rat traps before hosing down the floor.

When he first arrived on the job, our host says, the pipe fittings resembled a rat conveyer belt as streams of the rodents ran around them for fifteen minutes straight as he stood there.

Yes, let’s deal with those organics, get them composted and back into the beds of Regent Park’s community and rooftop gardens.  The City of Toronto was to cover off all its high-rise residential buildings with an organics program, but there are 4,000 buildings and thousands still to sign on.  Regent Park will be empowered to reach its full sustainability goals once the city catches up as it should.

Footnote: The head of Toronto’s solid waste division, Jim Harnum, left unexpectedly for a new job in Peel Region in April, creating a vacancy and a vacuum of leadership at the head of that department.

Would you give up your drive-thru cup of coffee to avoid another ice storm or flood? Mayor Hazel McCallion is right on the bean with her suggestion that car idling bylaws start being enforced at drive-thru restaurant lanes.

In her parting year, the 93-year-old mayor of Mississauga, Ontario wanted to stir things up and have folks wake up and smell the coffee. If you must order from your driver’s seat, do it in three minutes, or turn off the ignition while you wait beyond the legal limit for idling. 

All this mass run-on at drive-throughs, not to mention at banks and driving schools, is a bad olive in the atmospheric cocktail. Our fumes fuel climate change, simple as that. We contribute more than enough exhaust in traffic jams and general travel. Why can’t people change in even a small way and give the drive-through a bypass? Some people exit their car but leave it running for extended periods on a smog day so a passenger can have air conditioning - I’ve seen that happen in my bank parking lot.

Hazel has hit on an important issue. Canada could ban drive-throughs outright and I would be happy. Unfortunately politicians come up against the wall of behavioral intransigence - a public unwilling to change its behavior, a public that believes the drive-through culture is normal and cherishes it like a human right. Never mind that there’s an obesity epidemic. A walk to the counter, we could all use the exercise.

The US report this week painted climate change as a clear and present danger. We are beings who would choke out our oxygen and propel climate disasters all for a hot coffee in a non-recyclable cup.

Clean air and climate stability, or a double-double to go? I think the choice is clear.

Hazel was right to zero in on bourgeois idling. She hinted at dishing out a $150 fine to idling drivers at drive-through line-ups. Too bad she was only joking.

Now, idling drivers, regarding those littered coffee cups and take-out bags . . .