Victoria disappointed by high court refusal to hear plastic bag bylaw appeal

VICTORIA — It’s another setback for the capital as the Supreme Court of Canada says it won’t listen to Victoria’s argument when it comes to banning plastic bags.

It is the latest in a long battle as governments try to regulate these kinds of environmental issues. In its ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada did not say why it won’t listen to the city’s arguments — which is normal.

Craig Foster with the Canadian Plastic Bag Association is relieved this is over.

“The distraction is done and now we can get back to doing the work we need to do in terms of working with government to get a good policy in place,” he says. “I think that the light is starting to dawn on the fact that they’re not recyclable, that we wind up in a situation where the substitutes that we’ve been talking about are going to create more waste than the typical reusable bag when its life is done.”

Foster says he expects the province to continue work on environmental issues.

“We have done a very good job in this province in terms of the environmental policies that we have in place, particularly with regard to packaging containers,” he says.

Meantime, the mayor of Victoria says she’s disappointed Canada’s highest court won’t reconsider a lower-court ruling that stopped her city from regulating single-use plastic bags.

However, Lisa Helps says there are other ways to eliminate the items.

The Canadian Plastic Bag Association, which challenged the original bylaw, says it welcomes the decision which requires B.C. municipalities to “follow the law and respect the limits placed on their authority when addressing environmental issues.”

When the bylaw was struck down last July, Helps vowed to move forward, saying the ruling didn’t “undermine the soundness” of the regulation but only dealt with the process for its adoption.

Helps says in a statement Thursday that the city will look for every opportunity to reduce plastic waste.

She says her city’s original checkout bag bylaw kept more than 17 million plastic bags out of the landfill over the year it was in place and the “community continues to avoid plastic bags despite these setbacks.”

Victoria has launched a zero-waste strategy which Helps says is designed to cut the 25,000 single-use items discarded in the city every day.

“We’re confident we will see bold leadership from the provincial government in its Plastics Action Plan,” Helps says, referring to initiatives by the B.C. and federal governments to develop shared waste reduction standards.

A plastic bag ban is being implemented in Vancouver in January of next year.

The Canadian Press