Lee Harding warns that Ottawa’s new Federal Plastics Registry (FPR) may be the most intrusive, bureaucratic burden yet. Targeting everything from electronics to fishing gear, the FPR requires businesses to track and report every gram of plastic they use, sell, or dispose of—even if plastic is incidental to their operations. Harding argues this isn’t about waste; it’s about control. And with phase one due in 2025, companies are already overwhelmed by confusion, cost, and compliance.
Businesses face sweeping reporting demands under the new Federal Plastics Registry
Canadian businesses already dealing with inflation, labour shortages and tariff uncertainties now face a new challenge courtesy of their own federal government: the Federal Plastics Registry (FPR). Manufacturers are probably using a different F-word than “federal” to describe it.
The registry is part of Ottawa’s push to monitor and eventually reduce plastic waste by collecting detailed data from companies that make, use or dispose of plastics.
Ottawa didn’t need new legislation to impose this. On Dec. 30, 2023, the federal government issued a notice of intent to create the registry under the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act. A final notice followed on April 20, 2024.
According to the FPR website, companies, including resin manufacturers, plastic producers and service providers, must report annually to Environment Canada. Required disclosures include the quantity and types of plastics they manufacture, import and place on the market. They must also report how much plastic is collected and diverted, reused, repaired, remanufactured, refurbished, recycled, turned into chemicals, composted, incinerated or sent to landfill.
It ties into Canada’s larger Zero Plastic Waste agenda, a strategy to eliminate plastic waste by 2030.
Even more troubling is the breadth of plastic subcategories affected: electronic and electrical equipment, tires, vehicles, construction materials, agricultural and fishing gear, clothing, carpets and disposable items. In practice, this means that even businesses whose core products aren’t plastic—like farmers, retailers or construction firms—could be swept into the reporting requirements.
Plastics are in nearly everything, and now businesses must report everything about them, regardless of whether plastic is central to their business or incidental.
The FPR website says the goal is to collect “meaningful and standardized data, from across the country, on the flow of plastic from production to its end-of-life management.” That information will “inform and measure performance… of various measures that are part of Canada’s zero plastic waste agenda.” Its stated purpose is to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment.”
But here’s the problem: the government’s zero plastic waste goal is an illusion. It would require every plastic item to last forever or never exist in the first place, leaving businesses with an impossible task: stay profitable while meeting these demands.
To help navigate the maze, international consultancy Reclay StewardEdge recently held a webinar for Canadian companies. The discussion was revealing.
Reclay lead consultant Maanik Bagai said the FPR is without precedent. “It really surpasses whatever we have seen so far across the world. I would say it is unprecedented in nature. And obviously this is really going to be tricky,” he said.
Mike Cuma, Reclay’s senior manager of marketing and communications, added that the government’s online compliance instructions aren’t particularly helpful.
“There’s a really, really long list of kind of how to do it. It’s not particularly user-friendly in our experience,” Cuma said. “If you still have questions, if it still seems confusing, perhaps complex, we agree with you. That’s normal, I think, at this point—even just on the basic stuff of what needs to be reported, where, when, why. Don’t worry, you’re not alone in that feeling at all.”
The first reporting deadline, for 2024 data, is Sept. 29, 2025. Cuma warned that businesses should “start now”—and some “should maybe have started a couple months ago.”
Whether companies manage this in-house or outsource to consultants, they will incur significant costs in both time and money. September marks the first phase of four, with each future stage becoming more extensive and restrictive.
Plastics are petroleum products—and like oil and gas, they’re being demonized. The FPR looks less like environmental stewardship and more like an attempt to regulate and monitor a vast swath of the economy.
A worse possibility? That it’s a test run for a broader agenda—top-down oversight of every product from cradle to grave.
While seemingly unrelated, the FPR and other global initiatives reflect a growing trend toward comprehensive monitoring of products from creation to disposal.
This isn’t speculation. A May 2021 article on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website spotlighted a New York-based start-up, Eon, which created a platform to track fashion items through their life cycles. Called Connected Products, the platform gives each fashion item a digital birth certificate detailing when and where it was made, and from what. It then links to a digital twin and a digital passport that follows the product through use, reuse and disposal.
The goal, according to WEF, is to reduce textile waste and production, and thereby cut water usage. But the underlying principle—surveillance in the name of sustainability—has a much broader application.
Free markets and free people build prosperity, but some elites won’t leave us alone. They envision a future where everything is tracked, regulated and justified by the supposed need to “save the planet.”
So what if plastic eventually returns to the earth it came from? Its disposability is its virtue. And while we’re at it, let’s bury the Federal Plastics Registry and its misguided mandates with it—permanently.
Lee Harding is a research associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
