Bag of bags

The Liberal government here in Canada just announced that they are going to be banning single use plastic by 2021.  Naturally this isn't going to be a *full* ban.  They will cave to all kinds business pressure in the name of 'being competitive' but hopefully a substantial amount of single use plastic will stop. 

The phrase competitive is constantly brought up in these sorts of debates as though it is some kind of magic bullet, when it so often is meaningless or silly.  Who cares if businesses are inconvenienced, if they are selling in the Canadian market against other businesses here who are equally inconvenienced?  If your unique business model requires generating loads of trash and plastic waste and your competitors do not, you *should* go out of business because you are depending on hurting society and government largesse in cleanup to maintain your bottom line, and the rest of us shouldn't put up with that.  If everyone in competition is doing it, then you all change your practices and prices together, no big deal.

Naturally the Conservatives are against this, because of the effects it might have on business.  This is something I always find hilarious, as though the important thing in the world is business.  Don't worry about humans - corporations are the crucial thing, goes their thinking.  Corporations should exist to serve humans, not the other way around.  If a decision is good for people and bad for corporations... then it is good for people!  Easy!

I personally try to work on not using single use plastic, but it is rough.  When you are a tiny slice of the market it isn't in most companies best interests to provide you with options, so we really need the government to bring the big club down and force it.  I prefer soft enforcement, like a $1 tax on every disposable plastic bag, for example, to hard enforcement, but I will take what I can get.

If only we could actually elect someone willing to put environmental issues like this as high on the agenda as their impact on people actually warrants... but for the moment that is a bit of a pipe dream.