GFL facility hit by gunfire

An office of Ontario-based waste and recycling firm GFL Environmental Inc. has received gunfire from an as yet unidentified person or people, according to several Toronto area reports.

Citing a Toronto Police Operations post on X (formerly Twitter) that refers to the gunfire—although not a specific address—reports from Bloomberg, the Toronto Star and other news services connected the incident to a GFL facility on Weston Road in Toronto.

According to the Toronto Police X message, the shooting site showed broken windows and damage and evidence of gunfire, but there are no reported injuries.

The Bloomberg report, citing earlier reports by the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, says, “The shooting comes after reports earlier this month of shots fired at the home of Patrick Dovigi, GFL’s founder and CEO, as well as the home of a consultant working for the group.”

That Toronto newspaper also reported police in and around Toronto are investigating fires earlier this year at three Ontario locations tied to GFL Environmental and a sister company as potential arson.

Although the Toronto-based National Post quotes Dovigi as saying, “This is not The Sopranos,” and suggesting a randomness to the earlier shootings, the Toronto Star says Toronto investigators with the guns and gangs task force believe the most recent attack was targeted.

Bloomberg mentions GFL’s rapid growth and its acquisition program as having “weighed on its balance sheet.”

GFL also has been involved in the province of Ontario’s packaging extended producer responsibility (EPR) system and its current and future implementation.

The structure of the EPR system has received criticism from some waste and recycling industry participants and observers in Ontario for being complicated and potentially anti-competitive.

In 2021, GFL formed the Resource Recovery Alliance (RRA). The waste and recycling firm said the move was made in response to the government of Ontario’s EPR regulation requiring product and packaging producers to operate and fully finance Ontario’s blue box residential recycling program.

“RRA will become a producer responsibility organization (PRO) under the new legislation and will be vertically integrated within GFL’s service offerings," GFL said at that time.

That same year, GFL also acquired the Canadian Stewardship Services Alliance (CSSA).

“With the acquisition, RRA will be a comprehensive resource recovery and compliance solution for producers in North America, augmenting GFL’s existing capabilities in collection, sorting, processing, marketing and reporting of blue box material in Ontario,” the firm stated at that time.

The next year, however, RRA was in turn acquired by Toronto-based Circular Materials, a not-for-profit producer responsibility organization.

Circular Materials has a board of directors consisting of executives from Loblaws, Costco, Coca-Cola, Maple Leaf Foods, Procter & Gamble and a dozen other major companies.

An April report from CBC says Circular Materials “wants the government [of Ontario] to give it a monopoly as the only producer responsibility organization for blue box materials.”