Many of our members, I will say—not all of them—are members of the Canada Plastics Pact, and it is an initiative that the Canadian Beverage Association is supporting.
This is a place where industry, recyclers, processors and even some environmental groups have come together and said, “Let's work together collaboratively to try to remove more plastic from the environment,” which is what we all want to do.
My only concern at the federal level, when it comes to the beverage sector in particular, which I represent, is that there is a bit of a lack of understanding about what goes on in every single province when it comes to beverage container recycling.
Again, we have programs in place in every province. Some are EPR and some are run by industry, which is, of course, what I think almost everyone around this table has said we need to support. Some are government controlled, which we are not as much in favour of. We want to take responsibility for our containers, but there needs to be collaboration around the fact that these files lie at the provincial level.
Obviously we appreciate the idea of harmonization on a national level; we would like that. It's hard to work in every province and every territory with a different program, but perhaps, through CCME, we really need to take that idea of harmonization to a new level. Simply having the federal government weigh in with new rules that are not coordinated at the provincial level, which is where waste and recycling is handled, is problematic.