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Article by Rebel News staff.

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Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: 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, and governments are only 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 builder's 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.

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 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.

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.

On Sept. 22, Keean Bexte of Juno News posted photos from the summit of Devil's Thumb, above Lake Agnes near Lake Louise in Banff National Park, where three groups wrote their names on the rocks in black marker on Sept. 18, 19 and 20. One wrote, "Earned every step. The view was worth it." Another left the marker on the ground beside the name. Who they are is unknown, but people who sign and date a rock in a national park are sure no one will come after them.

Section 10 of the National Parks General Regulations says no person shall "remove, deface, damage or destroy any flora or natural objects in a Park," and Parks Canada says fines can exceed $25,000. In 2022, spray-painted rocks on the Whistlers trail in Jasper brought a $4,000 fine after other hikers filmed it and called it in. Asked by reporters on Sept. 22 whether it was investigating Devil's Thumb, Parks Canada had not answered by that afternoon.

A country runs on the self-respect that stops people dumping when nobody is checking, and when it goes, decline arrives one pile at a time. Desperately poor Port-au-Prince is choked with garbage, while Hiroshima, levelled in 1945 and penniless in 1946, is spotless and thriving. The difference is culture, and people carry culture with them.

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 60 per cent 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.

Ordinary people are filling the gap. This spring, a Caledon farmer at Forest Lawn Farms traced garbage dumped in his cornfield to a Brampton address and forklifted it back onto the dumper's driveway, asking, "Would you like this in the driveway, or where would you like it dumped?" At Wasaga Beach two summers ago, the mayor instead attacked a mother who reported people using the sand as a toilet, and Premier Doug Ford could only plead, "Folks, don't be pooping on the beach."

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, or the marker on the rock, is to knock on the door or call the warden.