The City of Toronto and the striking outside workers union has just about reached a conclusion to their 39 day labour dispute.

My wife and I, living in the Danforth/Beach area, have not noticed that much of a garbage issue during the strike. For the most part, people here have been stepping up to the civic plate and helping keep our little area clean for all of us. Well except for our renter Redneck Neighbors that is! Unfortunately, I’ve seen on TV some parts of the city have not been that successful. Some people here can be quite the bunch of “City’its”! (Ha!)

As a matter of fact, last weekend I decided to drop off 4 bags of garbage at the Bermondsey Transfer station. I’ve heard that the waiting time for drop off was around an hour long. So, I brought along the Saturday Star newspaper, a coffee and some juice with me in anticipation of a long lineup.

As I drove there, I was wondering what I would be up against. On most TV reports, you see angry citizens screaming at the striking workers. On other news clips, you see strikers screaming at angry citizens. You think to yourself, why can’t we just get along?

To my pleasant surprise, I was the only one in line … besides the strikers that is. I slowly drove up to the gate. I was greeted by these two really nice guys. We chatted for around 3 minutes and they said ” if you want, you can just drive right on up?”. Wow, absolutely NO CONFRONTATION so far.

Then I drove up to the gate. There were around 8-10 guys just milling around and talking. Beside them under a really big tree was about 20 strikers, just passing the time by playing cards and drinking coffee.

The guy at the other gate was really cool. I stopped the car, got out and started a conversation with him. It was nice to see that the stories the TV stations were airing where totally opposite to what I was going through.

Now a bunch of guys came up, around 10 of them, we shook hands, talked for a while, had a smoke, I finished my coffee and then they asked very politely “Do you have any garbage you’d like to drop off?” I then said yes and all of them proceeded to the back of my car!

At this point, I was starting to get nervous. We are only allotted 2 bags per car and I had 4. We’ve been told through out the dispute to save all of our recycling for later date and the four bags was our total of garbage for what had been a month or more of garbage strike (maybe 6 weeks if you count when the last garbage pick up was!). I opened the trunk and they just went in and grabbed everything! I sheepishly asked if that was ok and they replied “Sure, why not?”

So that was my big experience with the BIG GARBAGE STRIKE OF 2009! Through all of the gloom and doom that the media was portraying to us and the rest of the world, it was not as bad as they said – at least in my experience.

The latest news regarding the garbage and civil workers strike …

Garbage collectors were back on the streets early this morning, clearing out the trash from overflowing garbage bins after they – and other outside workers – ratified the latest settlement Thursday.

Whew! Glad that’s over with!