Supreme Court of Canada declines to hear Victoria’s appeal of plastic bag-ban ruling
Credit to Author: Ken Bradshaw| Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2020 17:01:56 +0000
The court battle over Victoria’s ban on single-use plastic bags has reached a dead end.
The Supreme Court of Canada today declined to hear the city’s appeal of a lower court decision that struck down its bylaw.
As is typical in such cases, the court provided no reasons for its decision.
“While we are disappointed that the Supreme Court of Canada will not hear the case, there are other avenues for us to achieve our goals of eliminating plastic checkout bags and reducing waste in our community,” Mayor Lisa Helps said in a statement this morning.
“Thanks to our Checkout Bag Regulation Bylaw, our community has eliminated more than 17 million plastic bags from reaching the landfill. That achievement is too great for us to turn our backs on.”
In filing the appeal, Helps argued that the battle was about more than plastic bags.
“The decision, if allowed to stand, could potentially, substantially challenge the authority of local governments to make decisions in line with our communities,” she said at the time.
Under the bylaw, businesses were barred from providing customers with single-use plastic bags and instead had to charge 15 cents for a paper bag or $1 for a reusable bag.
The Canadian Plastic Bag Association, which represents manufacturers and distributors of plastic shopping bags, launched a court challenge before the bylaw took effect in July 2018.
Victoria won in B.C. Supreme Court, but lost at the B.C. Court of Appeal, which found that the primary purpose of Victoria’s bylaw was to protect the natural environment rather than to regulate business. As such, the city should have sought provincial approval for the bylaw, but failed to do so, the court said.
Helps said previously that the city fundamentally disagreed with that ruling and planned to argue that it ran contrary to the principle that “lawmaking and implementation are often best achieved at the level of government that’s closest to the citizens affected.”
Victoria pursued the appeal even as the federal and provincial governments contemplate their own bans on single-use plastics.
The province is poised to bring in new regulations this year, while the federal government announced last June that it will ban plastic bags and other items as early as 2021.