Its proponent's social-control thinking drove people nuts. Larger goals are often hidden behind seemingly minor actions like a little bag bylaw
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Blanket zoning sucked the air out of paper bags. That’s one way to see Tuesday’s meagre turnout — only five speakers — for a public hearing on repealing the big bag blunder.
The repeal went through by a comfortable 12-3 vote of city council. Today, you don’t have to pay 15 cents for a paper bag, a clerk isn’t forced to offer you a paper bag and nobody will be fined $250 for breaking the rules, since they no longer exist.
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The hearing was a tame affair, especially after more than 700 people spoke during nearly two weeks of hearings on the proposed bylaw to upzone detached single-family neighbourhoods to multi-family.
The heat over the bag bylaw — January’s spectacularly hot issue — got absorbed into the zoning bylaw, which is far more important.
Public hearing fatigue may explain why so few speakers turned up Tuesday. But as several councillors note, this doesn’t mean people have forgotten about it.
Few city hall measures have ever seemed so picayune and invasive. After years of being told paper bags are good because they aren’t plastic, they were suddenly bad.
That didn’t make much sense, until it was revealed as part of a much larger environmental agenda.
I treasure the following comment from a city official, previously quoted, that showed the wider city hall ideology behind the assault on paper bags.
They are “way easier to recycle, but we need to think of the life-cycle cost of that paper bag,” this senior bureaucrat told council.
“If we can bring our own bag from home, then we don’t have to worry about the trees that were cut down and the logging trucks that bombed along the logging roads scaring recreationalists, and the pulp mills and the storage and the transportation of those paper bags.”
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So it wasn’t really about paper bags at all. The real target was forestry, one of Canada’s major (and sustainable) industries. A harmless, compostable product found itself in the crosshairs.
The social-control thinking drove people nuts. Larger goals are often hidden behind seemingly minor actions like a little bag bylaw.
That tendency certainly didn’t die Tuesday at city hall.
Even though council repealed the bylaw by a wide margin, a majority is still in favour of working up a new one with the same intent, to be introduced when Calgarians are in a better mood.
We can all agree that there should be less waste. Long before the bylaw took effect, many people were shopping with their own reusable cloth bags. Paper bags were irrelevant until council declared them a menace.
But does council really have to deal with this issue in the first place?
Councillors remain deeply split, not just on this measure but on the very nature of city hall and what it should be doing.
“It’s improper to bring to council things that are not within its mandate, like the bag bylaw, the climate emergency,” says Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp.
“These things are not for us to be focusing on. We should be focusing on taxes, infrastructure, public safety — the things that are clearly within our mandate, that matter to people.
“I signed up to represent Calgarians and bring their voices to the horseshoe — not to push things through, or ideologies.”
But the very slim majority on council is committed to doing what they think is best, not necessarily what voters want.
In their view, the real problem is Calgarians who aren’t properly educated in their way of thinking.
Ward 12 Coun. Evan Spencer said the bylaw was “noble work” that created “a firestorm on social media.” Now it’s “back to the drawing board” to achieve the same end.
Courtney Walcott of Ward 8, asking the first question of the session, wanted to know how long it would take to work up a new bylaw.
The next 18 months will be about which council faction wins the 2025 election. The candidates will almost certainly run under party banners.
That will be a dust-up for the ages, and they’re at it already.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
X: @DonBraid
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