CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Public Washrooms in Cities

NARRATOR: Anyone who has hunted for a washroom in a Canadian downtown knows the predicament. The coffee shop restricts its facilities to paying customers, the library has closed for the evening, and the nearest public option is a locked, graffiti-covered kiosk. Advocates argue that this scarcity is not a trivial inconvenience but a quiet barrier to public life, one that falls hardest on seniors, parents with toddlers, delivery drivers and people without housing. Several municipalities are now debating whether to invest substantially in freestanding public washrooms, and the conversation has proven surprisingly heated.

NARRATOR: Urban planner Miriam Okafor contends that washrooms belong in the same category as sidewalks and streetlights: basic infrastructure that a city simply owes the people who use it. She points to research suggesting that many older adults limit how far they travel, or drink less water before leaving home, because they cannot count on finding a toilet. In her view, every closed door quietly shrinks someone's world. Okafor also dismisses the notion that businesses should shoulder the responsibility. Shop owners, she notes, never volunteered to be the city's plumbing, and a patchwork of customers-only policies simply pushes the problem onto whoever happens to be most desperate.

NARRATOR: Councillor Stephen Marchetti doesn't quarrel with the need, but he is decidedly sceptical of the price tag. A single staffed, accessible washroom, he points out, can cost upwards of half a million dollars to build, and considerably more to clean, repair and secure each year. Marchetti recalls a pilot project in his own ward where an unattended kiosk was vandalized so frequently that it spent more weeks closed than open. Rather than scattering expensive buildings across downtown, he favours paying nearby businesses a modest annual fee to keep their washrooms open to everyone.

NARRATOR: Okafor counters that the vandalized kiosk illustrates her argument rather than his: a facility nobody maintains will inevitably fail, which is why attendants must be part of the budget from the outset. Marchetti, for his part, worries that taxpayers will balk at the cost once the ribbon-cutting photographs have faded. Still, the two agree on more than their rhetoric suggests. Neither considers the status quo acceptable; they differ chiefly on who should hold the keys. And whichever model prevails, a city that cannot offer its residents somewhere to go can hardly claim to be welcoming.