Brossard council votes in favour of plastic bag ban

The city of Brossard, population 83,000, fired the first salvo Tuesday night in a battle on single-use plastic bags that could soon see nearly half the population of Quebec having to learn to live without.

The city’s councillors adopted a bylaw prohibiting the distribution of plastic shopping bags and biodegradable shopping bags across the municipality during Tuesday’s night’s council meeting Those who defy the ban, which does not extend to thicker, reusable plastic bags (thicker than 0.1 millimetres), paper bags, or dry-cleaning bags, could face fines ranging from $100 to $4,000 for repeat offenders. The ban will start Sept. 1, following an awareness campaign. A survey conducted in 2015 found 63 per cent of residents were in favour of the ban.

“The banning of plastic bags appears, to the members of the council, as a necessary measure in the protection of the environment for future generations,” Mayor Paul Leduc said.

In voting for a ban, Brossard was also opening itself up to a legal battle that cities as large as Toronto have already lost. The Canadian Plastic Bag Association sent Brossard a legal warning earlier in February, calling the move “an abusive and unreasonable abuse of power,” given the lack of public consultation or discussion with the various stakeholders. Outside the meeting, 40 protesters, mostly employees of plastic bag manufacturing firm Omniplast located in nearby StHubert, held banners proclaiming, in green: “YES to dialogue!!! No to banning plastic bags.”

A ban would prove disastrous, said Marc Robitaille, member of the plastic bag association and owner of Omniplast, in part because it will result in a flood of non-recyclable, thicker reusable bags in landfills. A similar ban in Austin, Tex., was recently overturned after two years, Robitaille said, for those reasons. Plastic bags, he claims, are recycled at a rate of 33 per cent and reused roughly 60 per cent of the time. Cities need to speak with manufacturers and recyclers to find ways to reduce the environmental impact of all bags, Robitaille said.

The 82 municipalities of the Greater Montreal area, representing 3.9 million people, unanimously adopted a resolution on Dec. 11 calling on all its member cities to ban single-use plastic bags from stores by April 22, 2018.

The Retail Council of Canada denounced Brossard’s decision Tuesday night.

While a similar effort to ban plastic bans by Toronto in 2013 was quashed by legal challenges from the plastic industry, Mayor Leduc said rules pertaining to how cities adopt bylaws differ in Quebec: “What we did is within our municipal competencies. There is nothing illegal in what we’ve done.”