Environment committee  I think the Competition Act needs to be reconsidered and include very strong prohibitions on misleading advertising about the environmental qualities of products. I think that is happening across the board with products. Corporations have figured out that consumers are reluctant

Environment committee  In the gun that we need is the question of price. Currently what happens is that plastics are too cheap. It's been mentioned so often that these are cheap, and that's why they proliferate. Why are they cheap? Part of it is the multi-billions of dollars of government subsidies tha

Environment committee  We can use plastic if it's reused. I think that in the Loop system they will probably be using plastic containers, but they will be reusing them. Then there are other materials that can be used that may not have all the negative impacts of plastic.

Environment committee  I agree with Mr. Valiante that the economics of this are critical. There does need to be a price on plastic that's too cheap and, therefore, gets wasted. In our report, we do talk about the possibility of the federal government's taxing the plastic so that it's not wasted. I do

Environment committee  Sure. A number of these examples that I'm going to give are contained in our report. California is an interesting example, because a number of local communities in California banned plastic shopping bags. After Napa County did that, they found that it reduced their marine pollu

Environment committee  Yes. It's a very wide variety of plastics. The people who are cleaning up the beaches have a list of the common plastics that are on our beaches behind me. Those include things like food wrappers—that's one of the top things—plastic bottle caps, plastic beverage bottles, beverage

Environment committee  I think it's this idea of moving to a circular economy and not being mesmerized by this chimera of recycling. Now we have this new chemical recycling that will be the answer so that we can continue to be as wasteful as we have been over the last few decades. The real solution wil

Environment committee  I think government needs to take the lead. In fact, I think the federal government could play a major role in educating people about the crisis we face. I'm increasingly struck by the children who are going on climate strike right now. These issues of climate—this is a climate is

Environment committee  I think there are a number of alternatives, many of which are canvassed in the report that was submitted to the committee, “A Blueprint for Federal Action”. CEPA is one tool. We're also looking at things like to what extent can you argue there's a federal role here because of the

Environment committee  Okay, that's great. I have some [Technical difficulty--Editor]

Environment committee  You'll see behind me the Strait of Georgia, the Haro Strait, which contains an amazing amount of plastic. The latest studies show that any cubic metre of sea water out of that strait typically has over 3,000 particles of microplastic. I understand that in Ottawa today, you have