Last summer, rats were everywhere. At least, that’s how it felt where I live in downtown Toronto. After weeks of texts chronicling our rat encounters, my roommates and I started keeping a daily tally on a small chalkboard. The record? Six, all caught racing through a residential neighbourhood within half an hour. It wasn’t just us. Rats have been running wild all over the country—scampering across busy sidewalks, swimming in toilets, sometimes spilling right out of restaurant ceilings.
At Maclean’s, we wanted to find out what was behind this rodent boom. The experts I interviewed for this feature pointed to a host of factors, including an uptick in construction, ongoing transit digs and rising urban densification, as well as escalating climate disasters, which can leave wreckage—a free-for-all rat buffet—scattered through residential areas.
How do we take our cities back? Several companies are floating shiny new tech: rat birth control, smart rat traps, even solar-powered trash compactors. But rats are a notoriously complicated problem for any city to solve. No single fix will do the trick. Sometimes, in the evenings, I walk past piles of black plastic trash bags, leaking murky fluids next to overflowing plastic bins. As rat researcher Kaylee Byers told me, “We need to look in the mirror and realize that we largely provide the things rats need to survive: food, water, and a place for them to live.”
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—Jadine Ngan, digital editor, Maclean’s
