Callanan goes to the park with her kids regularly from about March through December. But almost all St. John’s park bathrooms – there are about fourteen across the metropolitan area to serve 200,000 people – are open Victoria Day in May through Labour Day. After that, parks staffing is cut back because kids are in school, days are getting shorter, and temperatures are dipping. ‘We generally only have walkers then,’ says St. John’s deputy city manager Paul Mackey when I speak to him in the fall of 2014. ‘Not so much activity.’ So for Callanan (and presumably all those lonely walkers), it’s the bushes.
The St. John’s Parks and Open Spaces Master Plan was presented to city council in late 2014. The plan was the result of scads of public meetings, but the records of the consultation include no mention of bathrooms whatsoever. Mackey tells me toilets weren’t part of the discussion because that would have been going into too high a level of detail. But, he says, the city has heard an earful from walkers on the Grand Concourse portion of the Newfoundland T’Railway, who wonder where they’re supposed to find relief along the pathway’s nearly two hundred kilometres. The Grand Concourse was designed to encourage active transportation and links St. John’s with eight-and-counting bedroom communities. Mackey says it’s well-used. ‘In the winter, people are still walking.’ (Mackey himself may now have joined them; he retired in 2015.) Some others, like Callanan, are out playing in the snow with their kids. Contrary to the point of urban parks, sometimes she opts for the mall when she needs to get everybody out of the house. It’s a ‘much less stimulating but accessible environment,’ she says. She would rather spend her money downtown, but at times the burden of being on bathroom red alert is too tiring.
It’s easy to pretend public bathrooms don’t need any fixing when no one talks reasonably about their problems. Toilet talk boomerangs between clinical and bust-a-gut. We can spill to our doctors about our toilet habits. (Well, some of us, anyway.) We can toss out potty jokes. But we don’t have the language to deal with the everyday. Your kid had to squat behind a shrub and wipe with purse-bottom-mottled Kleenex? You shit your pants in line at Starbucks because you had to buy something to get a bathroom key? Or at Tim Hortons, because you’d been denied the key due to some prior misdeeds. (For context on this one, search Google videos for some combination of ‘Tim Hortons,’ ‘British Columbia,’ and ‘angry pooper.’ Actually, you know what? Don’t.) La-la-la… I can’t hear you… Meanwhile, targeted ads follow us around the internet pushing plush toilet paper and wet wipes. The glossy design mags I browse at my local magazine store paint clean scenes of fluffy towels and svelte toilets looking more like hat boxes than your average commode. It’s not difficult to see where the bathroom-sexiness line is drawn. Toilet advertising is all about improving the private bathroom experience selling luxury, cost-saving eco-friendliness, or hypercool design. It’s not about bettering public conveniences and simple access. After all, what’s there to sell in a public bathroom? There’s no commerce in social justice and public health.
Plus, on a global scale, we’ve got it good. Here’s a truth bomb, care of the World Health Organization (who) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF): 2.3 billion people live without basic sanitation – roughly equivalent to the populations of Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia combined. That count is from the 2017 sustainable development goals Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. And, while the report acknowledges that things are getting better, the goal of universal basic sanitation by 2030 will not be met at the current rate of improvement.
One solution, such as it is, for lack of basic sanitation is open defecation, which I’m sorry to say is exactly what you’re likely picturing – people shitting in fields and on streets. Open defecation is a daily reality for 892 million people, most of them in Central and Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Inadequate sanitation and open defecation spread disease – intestinal worms, schistosomiasis, and trachoma, for starters – and causes diarrhea, which is directly responsible for the deaths of 280,000 people a year, according to the who and UNICEF. Add in the related woes of inadequate water and hygiene, and the number of annual deaths shoots to 842,000. Almost half are children under five.
Take a second to sit with that. Almost half the deaths are of infants and toddlers. When a child in Halifax gets diarrhea, she goes to bed, rests up, and maybe munches some pediatric electrolyte freeze-pops. In too many nations, diarrhea, added to a lack of easy access to clean drinking water, soap, and a place for handwashing, mows down 361,000 little kids a year, plus another 480,000-odd adults. These are staggering numbers, and ones, perhaps, easy to dismiss as you fill a water bottle at your kitchen sink. But know this: open defecation happens in major North American cities, too. When homeless people look too shabby to be welcome in cafés and malls, when they’re unsheltered and sleeping rough, when they don’t have a free on-street bathroom to visit, or enough spare change to pump into one of the automatic public toilets (APTS) spouting like mushrooms in some North American cities, they have to go somewhere. The average person goes to the bathroom six to eight times a day. You do the math.
Spring 2014. The never-open Pavilion public bathrooms of my kids’ childhoods are now caged with chain-link and permanently padlocked. Those dank concrete stairs I used to clunk down now collect desiccated leaves and McDonald’s coffee cups. The city will open them for special events if organizers put in a request, but I can’t fathom they’re used much. Halifax’s supervisor of contract services, John Cook, takes me in to show me around. The bathrooms are ghostly and dark, and notably cleaner than I’ve ever seen them. The chipped plywood stalls have been replaced with plastic laminate separators, the broken mirrors removed. Still, no strollers or wheelchairs can get in, and even for the able-bodied who can get down the stairs, there’s something eerie about this windowless, subterranean space. It feels, from the perspective of a woman, too easy to be trapped, too difficult to be heard. Most people probably make the two-minute walk to the new public washrooms on the other side of the Common, even when these are open.
The new bathrooms were built in 2007 in response to the community clamouring for better provision. Business owners were fed up with people asking to use their customer washrooms because the Pavilion toilets were dirty, scary, or locked. A nearby Royal Canadian Legion reported to the city that, on average, three hundred people a day were coming through the door to relieve themselves. The new Common bathrooms are large, accessible, and, crucially, more vandalism-proof than those of the Pavilion, which was racking up somewhere in the range of $30,000 for annual fix-ups, graffiti removal, and repainting. But vandal-proofing comes at a different cost. At the new Common bathrooms, there are no mirrors at the sinks and no paper towels. The taps, flushers, and hand dryers are automatic. This provokes uneasy, perhaps unanswerable, questions: What makes a good public bathroom? Can durability go too far? I appreciate the new Common bathrooms, I do. But, jeez, there aren’t even toilet seats. You just perch on a cold stainless-steel rim.
I get it – unbreakability is a virtue. These are public bucks and taxpayers are tight-fisted hands at the grindstone. But the new Common bathrooms don’t necessarily address user needs. They’re open only 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., which sticks early-morning exercisers or anyone walking across the Common late at night (it’s a popular route from downtown bars to Halifax’s west-end and university neighbourhoods) back in the bushes. Plus, when the city built this brick shithouse, it didn’t winterize it. The bathrooms are closed November 1 through May 1, recalling downtown St. John’s – though there, according to Paul Mackey, most of the bathrooms are winterized; it’s just that there’s little winter demand. In Halifax, it’s a perplexingly opposite situation – great demand and no ability to open the bathrooms. The Halifax Common has become a winter hot spot since the addition of a four-hundred-metre speed-skating oval in 2010. The oval sees more than 120,000 skaters through December,