June 9, 2005, Toronto Star
Getting to the heart of air pollution
Jim Coyle
By unofficial tally, they spoke four languages yesterday at the 6th annual Smog Summit at city hall. The first two, of course, were English and French. The other two were less widely known.
The first of these was an impenetrable tongue nicely described by federal Infrastructure Minister John Godfrey as the language of "Wonk," best illustrated, he said, by whoever wrote a report for him on "the clean-air decision-making matrix. This was not written by a poet," the minister observed.
As blessed counterpoint to the soporific cadences of Wonk, there was heard another language, a language of delightful clarity and bluntness, a language, alas, usually spoken only by the young.
On a video from the city's recent Fresh Air Fair shown to the summit, there was a little boy, maybe 5, who, better than any adult expounding on the environment yesterday, put the matter rather starkly in perspective.
"We need clean air so, like, we don't die," he said.
Welcome to the Smog Summit.
By now, after six such affairs and avalanches of research, the causes and costs of air pollution are well documented. Earlier this week, a Toronto Public Health study said foul air is killing 822 people a year in Greater Toronto. Auto emissions are the major source of contaminants.
No longer can poor air quality be written off as just a problem of big cities, Ontario Environment Minister Leona Dombrowsky told the summit. Though Toronto has already had 14 air-quality advisories this year, it was in communities all across southwestern Ontario that they were issued yesterday. There have even been air advisories, Dombrowsky said, in Algonquin Park.
In a roundtable yesterday of municipal councillors from around Greater Toronto, the discussion was conducted in language somewhere between mind-numbing Wonk and heart-stirring Child-speak.
Oh, there was the usual droning robo-talk about pilot projects and programs, "carrots and sticks," "co-operation and innovation," what must be urged on "our American friends" and what obstacles there are to all this "at the end of the day."
But in moments of frankness, the politicians put their fingers on the chief barriers to the actions everyone agrees are necessary: chiefly, a fully integrated regional transit system. The challenge, needless to say, is getting different political jurisdictions to work together, getting senior levels to pony up, and getting people out of cars.
Part of the problem is, of course, rooted in politics, part in human nature.
Oshawa Mayor John Gray said that in Durham there was "quite a fight" to establish the regional system that will start next year. York's Mario Ferri said the same thing happened there. There is always "turf protection," Gray said. There are "entrenched bureaucracies."
Asked if she agreed that trying to integrate the system across all of Greater Toronto would encounter the same turf and bureaucracy issues in spades, Halton's Janice Wright delivered an answer almost equal in force and clarity to that of the youngster on the video.
"You bet."
As to human nature, most people are well aware when it comes to air quality — as they are with smoking, with junk food — what's good and bad for them in the long run. But that knowledge doesn't always square with convenience or taste or short-term desires.
"We want everyone else to do it," said Halton's Wright of switching to public transit. "But we don't do it ourselves."
In order to leave the cars at home, potential commuters would have to see a transit system that's "safe, convenient, predictable and comfortable," said Richmond Hill Councillor Brenda Hogg.
In fact, she had an experience yesterday of the sort that sends tentative transit users scrambling back to their cars faster than you can say fill-'er-up.
She usually takes transit when coming to downtown Toronto, she said. Yesterday, fearing she might be late, she drove to Finch station and planned to take the subway from there. But she ended up in front of an unmanned parking gate that required payment in loonies and toonies.
She didn't have the right coins and "I threw up my hands in surrender" as the line of horn-honking traffic built behind her.
One summit observer, from a small engineering firm, managed to restrain his optimism about the general mutual congratulation and good intentions.
"All the heads go up and down. `Yes, yes, yes,' they say. `That's exactly what we're supposed to be doing' ... and then it ends."
Of course, as federal Environment Minister Stéphane Dion noted, that's not a course apt to cut it much longer.
Air pollution has been kept relatively stable in recent years, he said. But with 2 million people — and all their cars — expected to be added to the GTA population over the next 15 years, "it's not enough."
"Otherwise, the predictions that the deaths will go up and up are likely to be true."
Just like the little boy said.
