First, let’s be clear: All the players acknowledge this isn’t the biggest news story of the week.
No violent QAnon crackpots stormed the outhouse. No Canadian politician was caught emerging from a beachside porta potty in Margaritaville. Nothing happened that would cause Dr. Bonnie to swallow her gum.
Besides, any controversy involving a taxpayer-funded one-holer is inherently funny. Toilet humour rocks.
That said, Tom Michell was hardly laughing when he found a cyclist barfing at the edge of his parking lot last Sunday. And that came only a couple of days after the Central Saanich farmer discovered some human waste behind Michell’s Farm Market. It turns out that when you give people no place to go, they go anyway. So, yes, Michell wants to see the return of the portable outhouse that the Capital Regional District abruptly pulled from the side of Lochside Drive.
This is a toilet tale that goes back several years, when farmers and other area land owners found that the walkers, runners, riders and birdwatchers on the increasingly popular Lochside Trail were not just enjoying being out in nature, but answering its call, ducking behind fences and into fields to drop spandex and relieve themselves. Either that or they would pile into Michell’s market, where the lineup for the tiny lavatory could rival the one at the cash register.
The CRD, which oversees regional trails, responded by erecting a portable outhouse beside Lochside Drive near Island View Road. It instantly became popular, or at least well used, even if said use involved A) a certain queasiness and B) the risk of losing your sunglasses down the hole.
But then, a few months ago, the CRD pulled the privy. It says the structure was always meant to be temporary. It didn’t even sit on CRD property, but on roadside land belonging to the municipality of Central Saanich. It had always been the plan to haul the outhouse away once permanent trailside facilities were built elsewhere, including a pit toilet that opened at Saanich’s Fowler Park, four kilometres to the south, in September.
Also, the CRD had found that many of the people availing themselves of the Lochside loo were coming from a busy seasonal outdoor cafe adjacent to the farm market. Should taxpayers be maintaining the WC for them?
OK, but the cafe is closed this time of year, and people are still packing the trail like Christmas at Costco. Some arrive with bursting bladders; Fowler Park might only be four kilometres away, but that’s a long way by foot if you’re trying to run with your legs crossed. Alas, at the site of the now-vanished outhouse, all these people find is a household toilet sitting in the open, positioned as a porcelain protest. Michell and his neighbours bear the consequences.
Central Saanich councillor Niall Paltiel sympathizes. It’s nuts for the CRD to let people get used to having the porta potty at the location, then yank it away, he argues. “If we want to support active transportation and the regional trail system, it’s a no-brainer,” he says. The municipality could build its own facility, but Paltiel bristles at the idea of Central Saanich taxpayers assuming what should be a regional cost.
On the other hand, he’s also aware of how silly this all sounds. It’s a jurisdictional squabble over an outhouse, not the Cuban Missile Crisis. Relative to the just-completed $765-million wastewater treatment project that chased Mr. Floatie into retirement, it’s a tempest in a peepot, not a calamity worthy of the cabinet table. (“Never mind climate change, there’s a cyclist dancing the Gotta-Go Polka on Lochside.”)
At the same time, as ridiculous as this brouhaha may be, it involves the kind of fundamental service people expect local government to provide. Elected officials who ignore the basics — sewer, water, roads, rinks, parks and phone calls from residents who just want the damn potholes fixed — do so at their peril. Municipal politics are conducted at ground level, where we live.
“It really is politics that you can taste, feel and touch,” Paltiel says. “Or in this case, flush.”
The CRD and Central Saanich will meet this week to look for a joint solution. Chances are they’ll find one, because people will be ticked off if they don’t.
