In the city of Toronto, anyone buying anything in a store must pay five cents for each plastic bag they get with their purchases. Supposedly this covers the cost of disposing of these bags. I submit that this is nonsense.

I occasionally buy something at Tiger Direct. Before the Bag Tax, I would get a very decent, strong, large plastic bag with Tiger Direct advertising on it. This advertising would work, because I or my spouse would use the bag until it was getting tatty, and then probably line a wastebasket with it.

However, once the bags were forced to be paid for, the Advertising departments lost control of the bags and their quality, and the number crunchers seem to have taken over. So, a vendor who could afford to deliver a really nice bag for free, now needs to deliver a bag that definitely is not worth five cents. Every store is using crappy bags. The LCBO stopped using plastic (you can still get paper, for nothing) – we use one of these bags to hold recyclable containers, and we must have had it for years. The bag tax guarantees that the newer bags are flimsy, and thus will go into recycling or garbage after one or two uses.

Now for the dumb question: who gets the bag tax, and what is it applied to?