Focus on Ontario’s pollution problem

As a former Ontario resident living in Alberta for the last 20+ years, I paid my mother a visit last week near Kemptville. While walking near her rural property, I was horrified by the number of discarded water bottles and pop cans that were along the side of the road; we lost count at more than 30 in a span of about one kilometre.

You would never see that in Alberta, as all beverage containers have a 10-cent deposit, sufficient for entrepreneurs to retrieve and return such discarded containers. I hope the same behaviour doesn’t occur in Ontario’s waterways, which feed into our oceans.

I thought by all the rhetoric from our prime minister and environment minister that pollution was no longer free in Ontario, and Alberta was a wasteland. Perhaps instead of focusing on banning straws, Catherine McKenna should institute a national beverage return program similar to that of Alberta. That appears to be low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking.

Doug Bowles, Calgary