Banning plastic bags and public policy in Newfoundland and Labrador #nlpoli

Effective public policy must be based on a clear understanding of the problem and its relation to other issues, as well as public needs and behaviour.

"...almost 50% of all wind borne litter escaping from landfills in Newfoundland and Labrador is plastic, much of it single-use plastic bags....

There's the problem, defined neatly.

The quote is from Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador's campaign against plastic shopping bags.

Put the quote in a search engine on the Internet and you will turn up all sorts of places, including news stories, that use that phrase or a slight variation on it in coverage of the popular campaign to ban plastic bags from the province.  Here's an example from The Telegram in 2017 and another a couple of days later that went province-wide.

One small question:  what's the source for the statistic?

Trash talk #nlpoli

The folks at the City of St. John’s wanted to boost their curb-side recycling program.

Last fall, they launched a campaign called “Blue is the new Black”.  Blue is the colour used for recycling bags and the campaign name is fairly plain play on a very old phrase to describe something that is currently fashionable.

No one seems to have noticed the campaign until last week when the St. John’s Status of Women Council took issue with the cover illustration from the newly issued guide to city services (right).

Recycling a tire recycling story

Environment minister Ross Wiseman announced on Wednesday that his department found a couple of cement plants in Quebec to take a bunch of old tires off his hands.

The crowd in Quebec will burn the tires to replace coal in their heating system or some such.

The provincial government will issue a tender call to ship the tires to Quebec.  Presumably the provincial government will be footing the bill.

Scroll down through the news release and you’ll see mention of another plan to ship tires to Quebec for burning.

It’s from 2010.

And guess what?

The provincial government is paying to ship those tires to Quebec as well.

Still, aside from the whole trading with the enemy vibe this gives off, is there anything in this latest announcement that counts as new?

- srbp -

Knuckle-dragging council pissed off at hard-working recyclers

Put aluminum cans and other recyclable beverage containers on your front doorstep in some parts of St. John’s and they’ll be gone before morning.

The aluminum fairies are busy.

Think of it as a form of curb side recycling.  These hard-working men and women have been trekking the streets since the provincial government introduced the beverage-deposit system to encourage recycling. Why they do it is of no concern.  The fact is that they have helped to cut down on the amount of garbage in our city.

And they’ve been doing it for years.

Rain, sleet or snow.

The same years that the knuckle-draggers at city council resisted running a curb side recycling program altogether.  Sure they had money for other stuff:  Wells-Coombs memorial money pit.  Cruise ship junkets.  Council was willing to spend other people’s money  - yours and mine, that is - on anything, by the bagful.

But something like recycling that is fundamentally part of what the city should be doing. anyway?  Too expensive, supposedly.

And so it fell to the people some affectionately call aluminum fairies to do what the crowd downtown would not bother to do.

Now some people are complaining about the aluminum fairies.  And some other people are trying to figure out ways to stop the aluminum fairies from plying their chosen trade. Plenty of crap-talk has been tossed around as well, likening the people who collect beverage containers to gulls or suggesting they are all people on social assistance. Hardly socially progressive talk, one would think, but definitely indicative of the bigoted attitudes held by some people in this town.

The only obvious reason is that the knuckle-draggers at city council have been counting on people tossing out beverage containers so that the city could pick up some spare change.  But that would just cut into the legitimate business of a whole bunch of people who are not – as city council clearly is – a bunch of johnnies-and-janes-come-lately to being environmentally responsible citizens of an otherwise stinky planet ee-arth. 

They may be grubby compared to the tonier lot at Tammany at Gower but at least the aluminum fairies work hard for their nickels.  And it would be exceedingly bad form for the crowd on council to do anything but change the recycling program they’ve started up to allow the aluminum fairies to do their business unhindered.

Chuck the stupid blue bags, for starters. Next time Doc O’Keefe can spare a moment from gallivanting around with cruise ship folk or hobnobbing at the local Connie convention, he might try hitting up his Conservative confreres for a few bob to supply the good folks of St. John’s with blue boxes. 

The colour should be appealing to their Connie sensibilities, for starters, so they should look favourably on the idea. And as for the cash, the provincial Conservatives have bags of it, thanks to the beverage recycling program. Blue boxes are also a damn-sight better than the blue bags, as well, since they make it easier for residents to put all their recycling in one container.

With a blue box at the curb, the fairies won’t have to make a mess to get at the stuff they are interested in.

But fines or tickets? 

Forget about it. 

There’s not a city councilor in St. John’s fit to look on one of those people shoving a shopping cart full of cans and tetra packs around our streets let alone shag with their work.

- srbp -

A new era of original ideas

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador spent an untold sum on a consultant to develop a so-called youth retention and attraction strategy.

They created a new ministerial title: “Minister Responsible for Youth Engagement.”

The news release has nine paragraphs and no fewer than four media contacts.

The “strategy”, as described by the consultant, consists of four elements. 

It took 13 focus groups with young people across the province and in Ottawa and Fort MacMurray to come up with these highly innovative concepts designed to keep young people in the province:

1.  Create jobs.

2.  Put services in major centres. Like maybe St. John’s, Gander, Grand Falls-Windsor and Corner Brook?

3.  Link education to the labour market.

4.  Build “an understanding of the benefits of immigration and diversity through public education, community dialogue and strengthened curriculums in the education system.”

 

The “strategy” document describes this as a “fresh, modern approach.”

At least the current administration is getting faster at peddling someone else’s old ideas in new packages. 

In 2007, they unveiled the provincial government’s 2002 waste management strategy.

This took only 18 months.

You could not make this stuff up if you tried.

 

-srbp-

Lemme get this straight…

The guy who liked to recycle expense claims (in one case three times) and who serves in an administration renowned for recycling announcements (in some cases as many as eight times) is criticising another politician for supposedly recycling announcements.

Oh yeah and to make it even funnier, this same guy campaigned not once but twice for the guys he now criticises and he’d-a-been out there a third and fourth time if his boss hadn’t told him he couldn’t.

Can you say “credibility gap”,  boys and girls?

Maybe he’d have been waving around a signed contract for the feds to help pave the Trans-Labrador Highway.

Speaking of HMV, where exactly is that lawsuit against Roger Grimes, John Hickey?  If memory serves, Hickey was suing Grimes for something Danny Williams actually said.

Now there’s a brilliant law suit for you.

By the by,  who is stunneder in that case:  the guy who gave the advice to sue or the guy who took it and wound up paying the bill out of his own pocket?

Tough call.

Oh yes, and this latest release recycling news release is itself recycled.

-srbp-

Recycling news

The Williams administration announced a $200 million waste management strategy today that will be fully implemented by 2020.

The strategy will establish a waste diversion program, establish waste management regions, develop modern standards and technology, maximize economic and employment opportunities, and assist with a public education program.

Bravo.

On April 10, 2002, then-environment minister Kevin Aylward announced a waste management strategy for the province.

The Provincial Waste Management Strategy is premised on five primary actions: increase waste diversion, establish waste management regions, develop modern standards and technology, maximize the economic and employment opportunities associated with waste management, and public education. The ultimate goal is to have full province-wide modern waste management by 2010, with some components of the strategy to be implemented this year.

Nice to see the provincial government is practicing what it preaches by recycling old news.

Now stop and think about this for a second.

This is exactly the same strategy that was announced over five years ago. In those 60-odd months, the implementation of the plan went from nine years to 13 years.

Rather than implement the plan by 2010, the same plan will now be completely implemented a full decade later.

Stay tuned. Next week, the minister of agriculture will be announcing an innovative plan to grow cucumbers in a large plastic-covered warehouse in Mount Pearl.

To return to a serious note, though, one has to wonder why it took three years for this plan to be completely re-announced. If the former crowd had merely shagged around and done nothing with a perfectly good idea, there's no reason why the new guys taking office in 2003 just didn't get on with it.

They could have spent the last three years hammering the old crowd for their laziness and ineptitude.

Instead, we get this bumpf.

Compare the two releases and look at the amount of material that appears to be cut and pasted. Recycled communications staff from the former administration must be happy they can dig into their old files and breathe new life into stuff they got paid for years ago, only to get paid for it yet again.

It really makes you wonder if that cucumber joke might wind up being closer to reality than we'd dare to believe.

Has Tom Rideout been hunting for Greg Stamp?

-SRBP-