CORNWALL, Ontario – For nearly 30 years Glen Runions has been cleaning up County Road 20, mostly collecting refuse in garbage bags that he leaves for township trucks to pick up – and mostly alone.
That is expected to change soon, as South Glengarry is expected to erect signs at both ends of the busy country thoroughfare, in memory of the daughter he lost just weeks ago.
Runions daughter Tracey Runions-Firth, passed away in Guelph unexpectedly due to a blood clot.
To say the passing of their daughter has left a hole in the Runions family would be an understatement. But they are taking some small solace in the fact that she will be memorialized on County Road 20, where she grew up, and where her father has been working for 27 years to remove garbage people leave strewn in the ditches.
“She would help me a little bit, in high school,” Runions said with a smile. “But not much. She told me I was nuts to do it.”
Tracey was living in Guelph, with a top-level job at the Canadian Animal Health Institute when tragedy struck on Nov. 8. She succumbed to a blood clot at the age of 42, leaving behind her husband Jon.
“Good,” was how Runions understated the feelings that will well up when he considers having his daughter remembered on the same stretch of road he has helped to keep clean all these years.
He also suggested Tracey would not have approved of the fuss. “She wouldn’t have wanted all this, I don’t think.”
Runions won’t be back out cleaning County Road 20 until May, when the last of the snowmelt is finally gone. Last year he collected in the neighbourhood of 100 bags of refuse, mostly pop cans and water bottles that drivers and passengers likely chucked out the window as they whizzed along.
Runions has campaigned in the past for the reintroduction of a deposit system for bottles and cans that would, in a small way, give people an incentive to return the items instead of throwing them away.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” said Runions. “You wouldn’t believe what people are throwing out.”
