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Weekly garbage collection will be maintained in Westmount, Que., come October, when the city normally moves to biweekly pickup.
The city’s municipal council decided in a vote earlier this month to extend weekly pickup for the next seven months, citing the population’s struggle with “practical challenges” related to the reduced collection schedule.
“People are just not ready at this point,” Westmount Mayor Michael Stern told CBC’s Daybreak Monday morning.
When he was elected in November 2025, one of Stern’s first moves as mayor was to make good on his election promise to restore the city’s weekly pickup through the winter and following spring for the 2025-26 year, after the city switched to biweekly for those periods in 2023.
The collection schedule was supposed to return to biweekly at the end of September 2026.
“As I knocked on doors, there’s so many people who found that this was such a challenge for them,” he said. “They have babies. You have diapers. You cannot compost.”
Stern says he hopes to decrease the amount of landfill waste Westmount produces, but argues that reducing garbage pickup doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome.
“Many people I speak to tell me … ‘You’re just forcing me to hold my garbage longer, which causes all kinds of problems with animals and smell and dirt and I’m not really reducing my garbage,'” he said.
Instead, he says he wants Westmount residents to focus on getting better at composting.
“People don’t understand it all that well. They don’t use it enough, which is sort of upsetting, but we do a very good job at recycling,” Stern said.
Westmount’s move to extend weekly collection comes as more municipalities and boroughs on the island of Montreal are implementing waste pickup reductions to adhere to targets set by both the City of Montreal and the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM).
The CMM requires all municipalities to comply with a maximum of 26 household garbage collections per year — or biweekly pickup — by December 2027. Montreal’s target for all 19 boroughs is 2029.
Biweekly collection is part of the City of Montreal’s plan to become a zero-waste city by the year 2030, with the goal to standardize biweekly pickup in all 19 boroughs by 2029. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada)
The boroughs of Saint-Laurent, Verdun and Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve have already begun implementing biweekly waste collections, and other boroughs will be following suit in the years to come, according to the city.
Toronto has had biweekly pickup since 2008, Halifax since 1999 and Vancouver since 2013.
Biweekly collection is set to resume in Westmount in April 2027. Asked whether residents will be prepared for the switch, Stern said he was unable to tell just yet.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see then.”