Ban on single-use plastics overturned by Canadian court

USA

Plastic bags have disappeared from the checkouts of Canadian retailers after the federal government banned them last year, along with a handful of other single-use plastic items such as straws and disposable cutlery for takeout food. But just as businesses and consumers were adapting, a court ruling upended the policy, a key part of Canada’s efforts to be among the “world leaders in the fight against plastic pollution.”

Regulations banning six single-use plastics – stir sticks, plastic checkout bags, cutlery, straws, six-pack rings and some foodservice containers – were announced last June by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The government has issued a cabinet order for the first time to regulate these plastics in 2021, classifying the items as toxic substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

But Federal Court Judge Angela Furlanetto ruled On Thursday, the government announced that the classification of the substances was too long, calling the items listed “too broad to be listed” as toxic substances. She called the cabinet order “both unreasonable and unconstitutional.”

The government “acted beyond their authority” and the decision to add the plastic items to the toxic list “was not supported by the evidence” before it, Judge Furlanetto wrote.

The decision marked a victory for the coalition of plastic manufacturers and industry groups that challenged the government’s ban, including Imperial Oil, Nova Chemicals and Dow Chemical, one of the world’s largest producers of single-use plastics.

“Alberta wins again,” Danielle Smith, the province’s premier, said in a speech rack, underscoring her province’s key role in plastics production, with Canada’s largest petrochemical sector and the country’s largest supplier of natural gas. Alberta and Saskatchewan both filed submissions with the court as interveners, objecting to what officials claimed exceeded federal jurisdiction.

The government is reviewing the court’s ruling and is “strongly considering an appeal,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a statement. rack posted on X, the social media site.

[From The Times’s Style Desk: Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic]

The decision is the third “blow to the federal government’s agenda in recent times” in environmental policy, said Mark Winfield, a professor in the faculty of environmental and urban change at York University in Toronto.

The previous two setbacks Professor Winfield mentioned came in October, when the Supreme Court ruled that several parts of a law governing environmental impact assessments, a process largely used to consider how infrastructure projects could affect the environment, were unconstitutional. Later that month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced that the government would temporarily lift the carbon tax on home heating oil to address the high cost of living, a move that some environmentalists denounced. has fallen back on its climate goals and environmental agenda.

One of those goals is to no longer produce plastic waste by 2030.

“We are disappointed with the decision,” said Lindsay Beck, a lawyer at Ecojustice, an environmental law group in Toronto, which represented two other organizations as interveners in court. “By labeling plastic as a toxic substance, the government has taken a very important first step towards reducing plastic pollution.”

Unlike these more complicated policy issues, addressing the court’s ruling on single-use plastics could be a matter of limiting the government’s list of toxic substances, Professor Winfield said, for example by restricting specific types of plastics and resins. identify.

“This is probably solvable to some extent,” Professor Winfield said. “They need to come back and be more specific about what exactly — types of plastics and uses of plastics — they’re actually banning, and that’s something that would have a reasonable chance of surviving a constitutional challenge. That would be the fastest.”

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Vjosa Isai is a reporter and researcher for The New York Times in Toronto.

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