A wildly popular choice for what’s good in our socio-political sphere is the over $300 million project that went online this year, removing the most egregious chunks of nastiness that have been flushed in enormous quantities into the harbour for centuries. In a March 2007 article in The Coast, Tim Bousquet reported that, at the time, health officials warned “against even touching the water lest you contract any number of ugly diseases. And the ecological balance of the harbour is hopelessly out of whack—biologists find snails that have mutated into a third, indeterminate sex, and speak of suffocating lobsters.” Now, with the new treatment plants operational for a few scant months, Peter Kelly crowed about the harbour’s cleanliness as a swimming hole---definitely not for days after a big rain, though---and, to his credit, offered himself up as a guinea pig and went for a dip. There can be no doubt that having some kind of treatment system is the first step to a cleaner harbour and a less disgusting environmental footprint.
1st Runner-up: Bike Lanes
2nd Runner-up: Improving Public Transit
