Bag Me and Gag Me

For the past year now, Toronto merchants have been forced by idiotic city decree to charge shoppers a five-cent fee for each plastic bag. The move was designed to cut down on plastic bag usage--so environmentally unfriendly, don't you know?--as shoppers got used to putting their groceries and other purchases into reusable bags. Now, Mayor Rob Ford may be getting set to nix the fee--much to the Toronto Star's dismay:

First, let’s get this straight: Toronto’s 5-cent fee for a plastic shopping bag is not a tax. That nickel goes to merchants, not the city treasury. Nor is it a huge burden; the charge is easily avoided for most purchases simply by bringing a reusable bag from home.

Furthermore, Mayor Rob Ford didn’t promise to eliminate this fee when he ran for office.

Despite all that, Ford now says he wants to get rid of the “bag tax” because his conversations with shoppers have convinced him that they “can’t stand” it. Apparently such anecdotal evidence has become the basis for policy-making at city hall these days.

Eliminating the bag fee would be a mistake. It costs the city nothing, but it produces tangible benefits. Pre-fee, it was estimated that Torontonians used about 460 million retail plastic bags a year.

According to merchants, with the fee in place there has since been a marked reduction — 71 per cent by one count — in the circulation of these bags.

That’s good for the environment. But it’s also good for the city’s bottom line since these bags eventually end up in our garbage or blowing about as litter in parks and streets. Disposing of them costs taxpayers money, so a 5-cent charge makes sense as a deterrent to accepting these bags at the checkout counter.

Several questions arise here:

1. What are merchants doing with the extra moolah they make selling plastic bags? How much are they making? 

2. If people were using these plastic bags--as I was--as trash bags, and now have to buy plastic bags for their trash instead of getting them "free" at the grocery store, haven't you merely succeeded in transferring the cost from the merchant to the customer?

3. Reusable shopping bags carry dangerous germs and are even less environmentally friendly when disposed of than are the plastic ones. Why must I either risk infection or fork over five cents for a plastic bag so that you can get a virtue rush when there's no evidence whatsoever that the bag tariff (because, as the Star points out, it isn't a "tax" if the money doesn't go to the government) is benefiting the environment?