Ottawa should end war on plastics for sake of the environment

Here’s the shocker: Meng shows that for 15 out of the 16 uses, plastic products incur fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives…

For example, when you swap plastic grocery bags for paper, you get 80 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substituting plastic furniture for wood—50 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substitute plastic-based carpeting with wool—80 per cent higher GHG emissions.

It’s been known for years that efforts to ban plastic products—and encourage people to use alternatives such as paper, metal or glass—can backfire. By banning plastic waste and plastic products, governments lead consumers to switch to substitutes, but those substitutes, mainly bulkier and heavier paper-based products, mean more waste to manage.

Now a new study by Fanran Meng of the University of Sheffield drives the point home—plastic substitutes are not inherently better for the environment. Meng uses comprehensive life-cycle analysis to understand how plastic substitutes increase or decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by assessing the GHG emissions of 16 uses of plastics in five major plastic-using sectors: packaging, building and construction, automotive, textiles and consumer durables. These plastics, according to Meng, account for about 90 per cent of global plastic volume.

Here’s the shocker: Meng shows that for 15 out of the 16 uses, plastic products incur fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives. Read that again. When considering 90 per cent of global plastic use, alternatives to plastic lead to greater GHG emissions than the plastic products they displace. For example, when you swap plastic grocery bags for paper, you get 80 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substituting plastic furniture for wood—50 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substitute plastic-based carpeting with wool—80 per cent higher GHG emissions.

A few substitutions were GHG neutral, such as swapping plastic drinking cups and milk containers with paper alternatives. But overall, in the 13 uses where a plastic product has lower emissions than its non-plastic alternatives, the GHG emission impact is between 10 per cent and 90 per cent lower than the next-best alternatives.

Meng concludes that “Across most applications, simply switching from plastics to currently available non-plastic alternatives is not a viable solution for reducing GHG emissions. Therefore, care should be taken when formulating policies or interventions to reduce plastic demand that they result in the removal of the plastics from use rather than a switch to an alternative material” adding that “applying material substitution strategies to plastics never really makes sense.” Instead, Meng suggests that policies encouraging re-use of plastic products would more effectively reduce GHG emissions associated with plastics, which, globally, are responsible for 4.5 per cent of global emissions.

The Meng study should drive the last nail into the coffin of the war on plastics. This study shows that encouraging substitutes for plastic—a key element of the Trudeau government’s climate plan—will lead to higher GHG emissions than sticking with plastics, making it more difficult to achieve the government’s goal of making Canada a “net-zero” emitter of GHG by 2050.

Clearly, the Trudeau government should end its misguided campaign against plastic products, “single use” or otherwise. According to the evidence, plastic bans and substitution policies not only deprive Canadians of products they value (and in many cases, products that protect human health), they are bad for the environment and bad for the climate. The government should encourage Canadians to reuse their plastic products rather than replace them.

Author:

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

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The Liberal budget is a massive FAILURE: Former Liberal Cabinet Member Dan McTeague

Published on November 5, 2025

Dan McTeague

Prime Minister Mark Carney tabled his government’s long-overdue budget yesterday and took the same approach as his predecessor – spend, spend, spend.

Canada’s deficit is now a staggering $78 BILLION. To make matters worse, Carney doubled down on the industrial carbon tax.

Dan McTeague explains in his latest video.

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Pulling back the curtain on the Carney government’s first budget

Published on November 5, 2025

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Carney government will spend more, run larger deficits and accumulate more debt than was previously planned by the Trudeau government.

In the 1939 film the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions travel to the Emerald City to meet the famous Wizard of Oz who will solve all their problems. When first entering the Wizard’s chambers, the group sees a giant ghostly head that meets their expectations of the “Great and Powerful Oz.” However, later on in the film (much to their disappointment) we learn that the Wizard is nothing more than an ordinary man operating a machine behind a curtain.

Canadians might feel a similar kind of disappointment about the Carney government’s first budget tabled on Tuesday. Prime Minister Carney promised a “very different approach” than that of his predecessor regarding Ottawa’s finances, and at first glance the budget appears to be this new approach. But when you pull back the curtain, it’s simply an escalation of the same failed fiscal policies Canadians have suffered for the last decade.

For context, the Trudeau government’s approach to government finances was record-high levels of spending, persistent deficits and massive debt accumulation. The Trudeau government created a fiscal mess, and as a “responsible fiscal manager” the Carney government has promised to clean it up.

To that end, the Carney government now separates spending into two categories: “operating spending” and “capital investment.” Capital investment includes any spending or tax expenditure (e.g. tax credits and deductions) that contribute to the production of an asset (e.g. infrastructure, machinery or equipment). Operating spending includes everything else, and is supposed to represent “day-to-day” government spending.

The government plans to balance the “operating budget”—meaning it will match operating spending to revenue—by 2028/29, while leaving capital investments to be financed through borrowing. Importantly, when calculating the operating balance, the government counts revenues that are foregone due to tax expenditures that are considered to be capital investments.

To help find the savings needed to balance its operating budget by 2028/29, the government initiated a “Comprehensive Expenditure Review” this past summer—the budget reveals the review’s results. Part of the review included a long overdue reduction in the size of the federal public service, as the government will cut 16,000 positions this year, and reach a total reduction of almost 40,000 by 2028/29 compared to levels seen two years ago. As a result of this spending review, the budget projects spending in 2028/29 will be $12.8 billion lower than it otherwise would have been.

This is the fiscal picture the Carney government is focusing on, and the one it undoubtedly wants Canadians to focus on, too. When taken at face value, balancing the operating budget, initiating a spending review, cutting the federal bureaucracy, and focusing on greater investment would certainly appear to be a different approach than the Trudeau government—which made no meaningful effort to balance the budget or restrain spending during its tenure, grew the bureaucracy, and allowed business investment to collapse under its watch.

But here’s the problem. When you pull back the curtain, all the rhetoric and accounting changes are just a way to obscure the fact the Carney government will spend more, run larger deficits and accumulate more debt than was previously planned by the Trudeau government.

Both operating spending and capital investment (which represents either additional spending or foregone revenue) impact the bottom line, and by separating the two the Carney government is simply obscuring the true state of Ottawa’s finances. If we ignore the government’s sleight of hand and instead compare total government spending against the revenues that are actually collected, the true size of the budget deficit this year is expected to equal $78.3 billion. Not only is that considerably more than the “operating” deficit the government is focusing on, it’s also nearly double the $42.2 billion deficit that was originally planned by the Trudeau government.

The story is similar for years to come. While the Carney government claims it will balance the operating budget by 2028/29, the overall deficit will be $57.9 billion that year. Over the four years from 2025/26 to 2028/29, overall deficits under the Carney government will equal a combined $265.1 billion. In comparison, the Trudeau government had only planned to run deficits equaling a combined $131.4 billion during those same four years—meaning the Carney government plans to borrow more than twice as much as the Trudeau government.

Driving this increase in borrowing is a combination of lower revenues and higher spending. From 2025/26 to 2028/29, the Carney government expects to collect $70.5 billion fewer revenues than the Trudeau government had previously projected. This difference likely comes down to a combination of the economic impact of U.S. tariffs along with various tax measures implemented by the Carney government that lower revenues (including cancelling a proposed increase to capital gains taxes and cutting the bottom federal personal income tax rate).

On the flip side, the Carney government plans to spend $63.4 billion more in total than the Trudeau government due to the introduction of considerable new spending commitments (notably on defence and housing), and the expectation of higher interest payments on its debt. The reality that spending is only set to rise under the Carney government stands in stark contrast to the prime minister’s rhetoric regarding “austerity” and the “ambitious savings” found by the government’s so-called spending review.

Higher spending and larger deficits will help grow the mountain of federal debt. By 2028/29, the Trudeau government had originally projected that total government debt would reach $2.6 trillion—which, based on the budget forecasts, would represent 72.2 per cent of the overall economy. The Carney government’s fiscal plan now puts total federal debt at $2.8 trillion by 2028/29, or 78.6 per cent of the overall economy. For perspective, the last time total federal debt pushed 80 per cent of the economy was during the 1990s when Canada teetered on the brink of a fiscal crisis.

Finally, the government’s approach to spending and the deficit doesn’t seem to be in line with what Canadians wanted to see from this budget. A poll conducted prior to the budget showed that 69 per cent of respondents felt it’s important for the government to balance the budget, compared to just 27 per cent who supported continued deficit spending. In fact, three out of five respondents felt that too much government spending has contributed to the rising cost of living and inflation—the issue they’re most concerned about.

Like a certain Wizard, Prime Minister Carney has made grand promises to fix many of the serious problems facing Canada. At first glance, the Carney government’s first budget may appear to deliver a new plan that will get federal finances back in order. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.