The Editor,
We had the Port Coquitlam Ambassadors in the cul de sac one morning recently, looking through the bins.
While legally we can have no expectation of privacy once the bins are on the curb for pickup, having government workers search through them is nevertheless a blatant intrusion on our rights to privacy — unprecedented and arbitrary. Even the police need search warrants.
Friends recently got home from work and after picking up their kid from daycare, found a note on their door from the ambassadors telling them that they will be fined $300 if they continue to contaminate their recycling. The contamination the ambassador found was a few grocery bags and bread bags that the husband, who is not as up on recycling as his wife, had innocently thrown in the bin.
Threatening fines on hard-working PoCo families is a sure sign that Multi Material BC’s rules are over the top and clearly unachievable. And once again, as it did with the garbage locks, PoCo council is downloading the problem on to citizens, doubling the fines and abandoning the issue rather than take on the battle with MMBC, the agency behind this lunacy.
MMBC has threatened PoCo with a levy of $120,000 if what it defines as contamination continues. At $300 a pop, the city would have to fine 400 families $300 each to recoup the MMBC levy. Good luck with that.
And who wants to live in a community where city workers look through your garbage bins for empty bread bags?
Eventually, if you fine or threaten fines on enough people for simple mistakes, they will opt out for fear of the fine. Instead of putting stuff in the bin, they will throw it out the car window at night or otherwise dispose of it.
Somebody needs to fix this.
Peter Manning,
Port Coquitlam
