I sort of draw the analogy with water regulation, and you might all feel like letting your minds wander when I say that, but I deal a lot with water. We virtually do not manage water in Canada, except in a few areas. We have very little conception of who is using water in what quantities and then, ultimately, what that means for the level of pollution in those water bodies. The Great Lakes are excepted, to a certain extent, at a macro scale, but throughout communities across Canada, we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of understanding the way in which we use that fundamental resource.
I would say the exact same thing about plastics. Plastics as products and as something that has helped our economy evolve in an efficient way are virtually uncontrolled in the sense of us as citizens and you as parliamentarians asking the question of what we expect or will tolerate from an industry in terms of our long-term view of how we want to use our natural resources, and then what comes out the other end in terms of plastics.
A plastic bag ban or a single-use plastic ban—which is a form of regulation that needs to be quite nuanced and that leads to more nuanced regulation—is really the absolute minimum bar for having some sense of recreating or shifting the industry into something that allows for a much more intensive use of that input as a natural resource. We always use the analogy that it's low-hanging fruit. It's the first step. It's a really very low bar to have for entering into that conversation about how we want to retool our regulation and our economy for the circular economy.