Parks Canada removes trash cans along Lachine Canal to inspire civic responsibility

On warm days, Montreal’s Racine Canal can attract thousands of picnickers, cyclists and pedestrians.

But since Parks Canada recently removed about 30 trash cans from the trail along the historic waterway, Ariana Ranjbar said she started noticing a popular lawn a new phenomenon.

“I started noticing a lot of poop bags building up,” Ranjbar, 26, said Wednesday along the canal in Montreal’s Griffintown neighborhood. She was holding a plastic bag filled with her dog’s feces. A few steps away, four of these bags were on the ground, and a fifth hung from a nearby tree.

“I don’t like it when people don’t pick up trash or litter,” she said. She added that the decision to throw away the bins could be a way to accumulate trash and/or deter people from leaving the area.

Parks Canada said in a message posted on Facebook on Friday that the goal of removing the bins is to encourage citizens to take responsibility for managing waste destined for landfills.

Langibal was one of several Lachine Canal visitors interviewed who said they were surprised by the move and worried it would have a negative impact on a recreational area known for its convivial atmosphere.

If they want people to be outside and enjoy being outside, and they know that, especially in the summer, people are often going on picnics with friends, family and dogs, I don’t quite get it, Langibal lamented.

The Lachine Canal National Historic Site is a 14-kilometer stretch of federal land stretching from the city’s Lachine Borough in the west to Old Port in the east. Much of the canal was once an industrial shipping corridor and is now bordered by parks, cafes and glass apartment buildings. Parks Canada says online that it attracts more than one million visitors a year, and in the summer, the park’s banks host festivals, spikeball tournaments and countless informal gatherings.

The agency said in an online notice on Wednesday that removing the bins is a pilot project to address overflowing bins caused by household and construction debris accumulating at the recreational site, while also encouraging residents to use more Learn more about the amount of waste generated that will be sent to landfills.

Parks Canada said it plans to monitor the effectiveness of the program, has teams ready to pick up litter, and will continue to evaluate and adjust the program. It did not say how long the measure would last. Parks Canada did not make anyone available for interviews Wednesday.

But Cyril Laib, 24, and Lisa Rossignol, 26, said the lack of litter boxes has become a major inconvenience when walking and picking up their dogs. so terrible. Rossignol said Wednesday it was too ineffective. We had to walk a long way to find the trash because obviously we weren’t going to take this home.

Zaira Silva, a 45-year-old Griffintown resident, said it makes sense for Parks Canada to encourage visitors to its vast wilderness reserves to manage their own trash, but the policy is limited to the narrow Seems out of place in a city historic site.

“It was different compared to the big parks we went to, and we knew it would be difficult to collect trash,” she said in a phone interview. You can’t compare a national park to a park like this in the city, where a lot of people pass by.

She said she hopes Parks Canada will be more proactive in its communication efforts, such as replacing trash cans with posters explaining the change.

Pernille Bertram-Larsen agreed that a companion strategy should be developed to inform the public. The 29-year-old Danish tourist said she didn’t know there had been bins where she had lunch on Wednesday, but she liked the idea of ​​making people responsible for their own rubbish.

But I don’t think you can just remove bins without telling people what to do with them,” she said.