Social Mobilization in the City's Countryside: Rural Toronto Fights Waste Dump

摘要

Toronto's countryside is a special place, in part, because Toronto as the economic engine of Canada has transformed itself into a mixed productive-reproductive milieu early, and has become a power centre in its own right. The image of the rural idyllprevails, the affluent classes of Toronto have established themselves in a lovely low density eden of uplands, woods and humanly sized agricultural holdings. Boosterism has, at least partially, been quelled, the incipient alliance between the dispersed bourgeoisie and farmers was slowly consolidating. Then, the government of the Province of Ontario made the mistake of launching what has widely become recognized as an attack on the countryside through the siting of three waste disposal megadumps in the backyards of the new arrivals. Social mobilization and resistance coalesced and spread. Some of the response was predictable but the social mobilization has produced another of the nails in the coffin of the current provincial government. Given that the government of the day was formed by a social democratic party, the New Democrats, the issues of wider ideology could not help but overtly form part of the ambience of struggle. Issues of urban and rural have cleverly been put to the front by the local opposition to the waste dumps, while class, particularly property has been hidden, producing a united front of the propertied against the government and the urban core to the south. The class struggle continues.