Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Single Use Retail Bag Program has recently had its fifth birthday. It was originally rolled out into stores in 2010 and had its last update in February 2011.

Many of us have come to know and appreciate the fact that the single use bag is being charged at 25 cents per use. That’s on paper, plastic, biodegradable and, certainly, compostable bags.

I’m on record many times supporting responsible environmental initiatives and I certainly support the principle of this retail bag initiative, but we must always be practical in our design. There are notable exemptions. As we know, prescription bags, dry cleaning bags and paper bags from restaurants are considered exempted from this fee.

But across Canada, they have found different approaches over the years. In some communities they do outright banning of particular bags and in other places they do partnerships through organizations such as Shoppers Drug Mart, and even Indigo Books have charged fees even though they’re not required to by legislation.

The point of the single use bag was to get plastic bags out of our landfills, away from our streets and in our yards. Get them out of the environment, Mr. Speaker. I think the program, in essence, has been a success from its original design. But this has also captured what I define as biodegradable bags and compostable bags. In my view, the single use bag was really intended to get the plastic bags out of the environment system because they do not break down, certainly at least not in our lifetime.

What’s being raised by business – and they’re talking to me about this – is the question, should compostable and biodegradable bags be included into the Single Use Retail Bag Program and policy? Because they are doing exactly what the intent was, which is they wanted bags that break down and don’t harm the environment.

Across Canada, according to The Star, in 2014 it talked about the quietly changing policies across Canada where some jurisdictions are even repealing or amending their original legislation because they’re finding challenges with it.

The point I’m really raising here is technology has advanced in a way that we have better products on the market here, people are using paper bags, they’re encouraging multi-use bags such as cloth bags given out by many of the MLAs, such as myself and others, but the idea was to get plastic bags out of the environment.

Later today I’ll be asking the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources about maybe reviewing this policy, updating it so it’s practical in a way that makes sense to everyone and still

achieves the initiative we always wanted: a cleaner environment.