THIS SUMMER the City of Toronto’s parks and sanitation departments are teaming up to introduce their new program, Back in Sight, Back in Mind: a Paradigm Fish, which is sure to stir things up in the garbage universe. The departments are intent on showing Torontonians that a vast amount of our waste ends up in lakes and oceans, in a bid to create awareness around the long-term detriment of our daily single-use items. Here’s how the program will work: for every unit of human litter (plastic forks, takeout containers, used vape cartridges) collected by sanitation workers, a unit of fish garbage will then be left in its place (chum, roe, mulm, or Planaria worms). 

We sat down with parks dept. representative, Geoff Monsoon, to discuss why they feel this program is so deeply necessary:

 “Not only,” says Monsoon, “will this help remind people that somewhere, some fish is wearing their KitKat wrapper like a superman cape, but also that somewhere else, some shrimp is riding their disposable plastic fork like a surfboard. And while that sounds gnarly in the good way, it’s actually gnarly in the terrible way. ”

For those concerned that the smell of rotting fish might interrupt their summer plans of slacklining between the poorly maintained tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park that killed a woman in July 2023, and the poorly maintained tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park that killed a man in June 2016 which Sgt. Scott Villers called one of the "once in a lifetime things that we see" despite that it happened again only 7 years later in the same park, your fears may be justified:

“Yes, it’s absolutely about the smell. Smell is about the only defence fish have!” Monsoon continues. “Look, we’ve tried everything: 2 decades worth of documentaries about penguins, legislating the corn-based straws, getting those freaks at PeTA to barf on people. But the amount of useless plastic junk we humans make continues to swell! Cafe’s have started putting little Playmobil hats on their muffins and croissants now, have you seen this? Enough is just enough to me!” he yells, “T.O. is about to get B.O and it’s gonna knock some scents into you!” 

But where do fish come from? Commercial fishing has literally decimated (reduced to one tenth) Earth's large ocean fish populations, and incurs an incredible 38 million tons of bycatch annually (that’s 76 billion pounds of unintentionally caught and mutilated animals, namely dolphins, turtles, squids, whales, and porpoises every single year, an amount which weighs about as much as you, your mom, and every single other person on the continent of North America alive today). This bycatch is usually just "thrown out", but Geoff feels there may finally be a better use for it.

“I don’t know about you, but if someone killed everyone in North America with a big net and just dumped them all over our city, I’d be darn peeved. That's what we've been doing to ocean life for decades. Whether people like it or not, we need a taste of our own medicine. We must witness it now, spooled in puddles of gore at our feet, a horror commensurate with our blindness, as a monument to our crimes.”

Speaking of live catch, to punish those caught in the act of littering, Toronto police will be using a small portion of bycatch (churned up and made into chum), by reintroducing it to the Torontonian psyche under the Caught Red Handed Act, under which punishments for littering and dumping infractions may involve offenders dunking their offending hand into the “chum dumpster", slurping back a “chumshot” (it’s just as disgusting as it sounds), even having their gender pronouns forcibly changed to “chumslut” on all social media. And if you think something’s fishy here, it’s not. These punishments have all been deemed legally enforceable by police in the province of Ontario.

But at the end of the day, Geoff believes punishment alone isn’t enough. Monsoon thinks it’s a spiritual problem we face. “People have become obsessed with modern conveniences. You used to get a roll of quarters at the bank 40 quarters to a roll, and they come individually wrapped now! What, are we gonna start putting PUD funnies in our pizza crusts? It’s just so sad to me; we have forgotten our ancestry as fish!”

Torontonians can expect rotting fish in their parks as soon as Gemini season, 2024.

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HEY! Do our fish ancestors proud, help the oceans for real: https://only.one