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On Thursday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra argued that a garbage pile growing in the middle of a new street in Innisfil, Ont., is a small sign of a wider collapse in Canada's civic standards, with governments only now beginning to respond.

Photos posted on Sept. 21 by the X user @bears_aware show brand-new houses on the shore of Lake Simcoe, an hour north of Toronto, with builders' fencing still up. In front of them sits a heap of couches, boxes, bags, a car seat and toys that residents have added to all summer. "This is not the Canada I grew up in," he wrote.

The cause, he said, was not collection. "This is from residents that produce more garbage than their bins can hold. Instead of paying for excess garbage tags, they dump it here for free." A tag for extra garbage in Simcoe County costs $4, yet people who likely paid $700,000 or more for homes would rather turn the street their children walk down into a dump.

Innisfil, Ontario:
New residents of this new subdivision in Innisfil have created a community garbage pile. It has been growing all summer as residents keep adding to it.
This is not the Canada I grew up in. pic.twitter.com/uW5h6l3NNX

— AwareBears (@bears_aware) September 21, 2026

The pattern has a name. In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued in The Atlantic that one unrepaired broken window invites more, because it signals that nobody cares and nobody is watching. Rudy Giuliani applied the idea in New York, going after turnstile jumpers and squeegee men, and the murder rate fell sharply.

Rebel News reporter Angelica Toy documented couches, mattresses and construction waste dumped in northeast Calgary this month, where delivery driver Nick King has filmed it for months. Rocky View County reports spending half a million dollars a year on cleanup, heading for $1 million by 2030. Jamie Sarkonak's figures in the National Post show Montreal's complaints went from 16,000 in 2017 to 28,000 in 2023; Vancouver logged 22,000 incidents last year, Mississauga's doubled and Rouge National Urban Park saw record dumping in 2024.

Penalties have not kept pace. Alberta's maximum provincial fine for an individual dumper is $250. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said this month "the Province is considering tougher penalties for illegal dumping, including fines of up to $10,000 and as much as two years behind bars," adding, "We take it quite seriously, and we're consulting on that now." She is right, because $250 deters no one.

The same signal runs through a video Canada Proud posted on Sept. 21 of young men in Toronto sitting on the hood of a car in the street, waving a rifle for a music video. Its caption asked where the police were. Those men and the people feeding the Innisfil pile have reached the same conclusion: that nobody will do anything, and so far they are right.

Nobody knows who lives on the Innisfil street. Canada is nonetheless bringing in people faster than at any time in its history, with 114,000 asylum claims last year, and a government briefing note found that 60 percent of those crossing at the Quebec border last summer were Haitian. The concern is less about newcomers than about a country that once would have knocked on doors and taught them how things are done here, and has now let a pile sit in front of a hundred houses since June.

Ontario should follow Alberta. Innisfil's bylaw already allows a $2,000 fine, yet there is no sign anyone on that street has been charged or even asked. No law can make people care about their neighbours, which is why the answer to the pile is to knock on the door or call the warden.