[Technical difficulty—Editor] multiple times expressed concern over this. Industry has expressed concern.
I think of myself as a managing director of a business where I had to fill in an environmental report to the board of directors every year. The board of directors in England had to know that I was complying with all laws, that I was actually tracing where shipments were going, that they were being handled properly and that the waste disposal companies that we had under contract were delivering according to environmental standards. I couldn't sign that paper with this type of legislation because I don't know.
The definitions are moving. The list is a list that we can change later. One of our witnesses said that they did not know where this list came from and that this is certainly not the list that the Basel Convention is following. We have this fictitious group of products—some are plastic, some are gases, some aren't either—and trying to enforce that....
Years later, I was on the solid waste management committee at the City of Guelph. We had contracts with other countries and other jurisdictions to share waste that we could use as a resource. We had contracts in place. What happens to those contracts? Now the waste management committee at the City of Guelph needs to, instead of shipping on a contract to recycle, put it in the ground. We don't have the landfill capacity. We've had testimony that we have a landfill capacity that will be maxed out in many communities by 2030. Now we're putting legislation in place to accelerate that.
As for the clip of “the Liberals don't care about waste and don't care about plastics”, we deeply care. We need to have legislation that is enforceable and that meets the recycling objectives that the world has. This, on the back of a napkin...and change it later? I'm with Mr. Bittle. Putting my name on this report.... At least we have testimony I can refer to that says, “This was a terrible piece of legislation that we're going to try to fix later. I tried to make my points but we didn't have the votes in committee. The votes came from the NDP, the Bloc and the Conservatives. They weren't Liberal votes.” I can count votes and I know where this is going.
There are real-world consequences on the businesses that are going to be affected by this legislation, as well as every municipality in southern Ontario that's shipping waste across the border. We're not making friends with this legislation and rightly so, because we're not objectively looking at this in terms of meeting the plastics diversion targets that we all have.
I'm very disappointed. I'm disappointed in the committee, disappointed in the politics that's going on, but mostly I'm disappointed because we didn't listen to the voice of industry. We shut that down. We didn't call on witnesses from municipalities. We shut that down. We tried to get the Federation of Canadian Municipalities involved. We rushed this report and the result is that we have a report that's really not a good report.
I'm disappointed, but I've had my say and that's on the record.