Freeland - Trudeau to re-ban single use plastics

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Sept 20

The World Economic Forum released a study which showed that ninety percent of world oceanic pollution came from ten rivers: The Yangtze, Indus, Yellow, Hai He, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Nile and Niger.  Eight of these rivers lie in Asia, and two in Africa.   As a result of the pandemic, the Trudeau government suspended its ban on single use plastics, but Deputy Prime Minister Freeland recently announced that the ban would be re-instated.

Single use plastics, such as shopping bags, were permitted during the pandemic because of their cleanliness, while the alternative cloth bags were deemed too risky a carrier of disease.  Now that the pandemic is nearly over, the ban on plastics is going to be re-instated on the grounds that they are toxic and harmful, and contribute to oceanic pollution.  The re-instated ban is part of the green restart of Canada’s economy announced by Freeland.

No one at the press conference asked Freeland which of those ten rivers passed through Canada, or on what continent she thought Canada lay.  Nobody asked her if she was aware that Canadian cities by and large landfill their municipal waste.  Nobody asked her why she was accusing Quebec of dumping massive quantities of municipal waste into the St. Lawrence River, where it ends up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and thence the North Atlantic.  Nobody asked her why Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, having no ocean access, needed to be included in the ban.

Nobody asked Minister Freeland why the justification for banning single use plastics – their toxicity, harmfulness, and contribution to oceanic pollution - could be so patently absurd.  Is the government that stupid, or they think we are?

The answer to plastic waste is incineration, but the Liberals have snookered themselves on that point because they are committed to eliminating carbon dioxide emissions.

And they govern us.

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