Of plastic bags and insanity - Ask ABE

Courtesy of the Liberal Party, Justine Trudeau has mandated the banning of plastic bags and disposable plastics across Canada. This is an attack on Canada’s prosperity, and on its citizenry. On prosperity, this is a selective tax on businesses and it decreases their profit margins. And more concerning, it is an attack on specific industries that manufacture these products. Suppose there is a Canadian manufacture that is making plastic forks, and distributing them to untold numbers of customers across our continent. A company is someone’s private property. It is someone’s possession and livelihood. It is created with blood, sweat and tears, with their labour and their life. We are only allotment a limited number of days on this earth, days with which we create and build to survive. And as such, your private property represents a portion of your lifespan. To steal a man’s labour is to steal his life. This is effectively what this affective legislation is doing.

When was it exactly, that Canada changed? So that it became the arbitrator of selective malicious legislation, pitting citizen against citizen? This was never in the purview of Canada’s Federal Authority. Our government doesn’t and has never had, the power to strip a man of his life, of his years, and of his private property. Such powers are tyrannical and are not found in Western democracies. Oh, it’s just a plastic bag, the green eyed demon might interject, as a man’s livelihood, his business, is arbitrarily relegated to obsolescence by central planning, and he is forcefully and purposefully bankrupt by powers sworn to protect him.

And to what end? Do the ends justify the means? Are we so quick to sacrifice our liberty to an abusive overlord who purposefully strikes out at us? And on what grounds do we allow our fellow citizens to be targeted by these aspiring czars? By taking our plastic bags, they are taking a piece of someone’s life, and when we give them power over our lives, we give them power over our deaths. A bag today, your home tomorrow, slowly, methodologically chipping away at our freedoms: Chipping away at our liberties while simultaneously conditioning us to be their slave class that blindly follows them towards the economic precipice.

I have a blue recycle bin in my city. And as I retrieved it from my back alley on garbage day, I noticed that there was a sticker affixed to it. The city will no longer empty our blue recycle bins. It said they will now only pick up blue plastic bags filled with our recyclables. Blue disposable plastic bags filled with plastics? How arbitrary and contradictory our wannabe overlords are. They will mandate the elimination of plastic bags from their one hand, while simultaneously requiring us to buy them from their other.  How can I recycle if plastic blue bags are illegal? 

Inevitably, this leads me to ponder the fate of my blue plastic bin.  Mere years ago, I was required to buy it to facilitate the city’s public recycling initiative. Yet now I am no longer allowed to fill it with recyclables. I can’t even repurpose it for regular garbage usage because it is blue, and the garbage man will avoid it like a covid coughing non-mask wearer. There are likely millions of these now obsolete plastic recycle bins scattered throughout Edmonton, and with the flick of a bureaucratic switch, they will all be thrown into the landfill. You could try to recycle them, but they won’t fit in the frigging blue bag!

Do not give fools the power to take your property, to stifle industry and economic progress. The progressive green movement is an environmentally regressive movement with tyrannical overtones, for now without plastic bags, we will have to return to our pre-plastic days, we will fall back on yesteryears lesser and less scientifically expedient technology: paper bags. In the name of saving our environment, we will begin on the accelerated clear-cutting out forests. Insanity.

honest ABE