Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
[1] https://wwf.panda.org/?348371/Could-you-be-eating-a-credit-c...
I don't really know how to take this.
Surely you're joking?
People have been banging on about plastics for at least the past 20 years while I've been paying attention, so probably longer.
So some report came out two years ago, that was long overdue.
A perspective.
"The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinning led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). By 1987, just two years after the hole was discovered, an international treaty was in place that cut the use of CFCs in half. Three years later in 1990, the Montreal Protocol was strengthened to ban the use of CFCs altogether in industrialised countries by the year 2000 and by the year 2010 in developing countries. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result."
https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-...
Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it without turning it to micro plastic eventually
The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere.
I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world and put it in one place it would be a kilometer cubed, or something like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/asia/indias-plague-...
The US alone produces near 300 million tons per year, and a kilometer cube of water weights 1,000 million tons.
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.
It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...
They claim plastic recycling doesn't work. It's true that most plastic isn't recycled, but that's because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier.
British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) in the incoming stream and then use air blasts to categorize it.
These streams are then separated by color. The material then goes to a plastics reclamation facility where the material is shredded, washed, dried, melted and forced through a filter, and turned to pellet.
The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in BC are recycled. Why isn't this done elsewhere? It's because BC has a tax on plastic packaging, and this tax money is then used to subsidize the loss from converting recyclables into new plastic pellet (the cost is higher than the revenue). And other governments don't want to do it, partly due to lobbying from plastics packaging manufacturers.
Plastic recycling does work when society wants it to. But instead we turn to paper. Paper produces double the CO2 emissions of plastic, and it requires vastly more energy: a European study showed that switching to paper in Europe would consume 57% more energy and 61% more greenhouse gases from packaging than are produced today. In a world where human existence is threatened most likely from runaway climate change, this seems like a bad idea.
And while we're so focused on transitioning plastic packaging to paper, we ignore the real problem with plastic in the oceans: plastic netting dumped from illegal fishing. Plastic netting wraps around animals and drowns or suffocates them. It can also drag along a seabed, killing the seabed life.
But this is considered a difficult problem to solve (international waters, policing is difficult, etc) so we ignore it.
The idea policy would be:
1. Tax plastic packaging. Use the tax money to pay for recycling that works, which has been proven to work.
2. Develop international treaties and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing and find ways to reduce fish consumption.
3. Implement carbon taxes that reflect the cost to human survival imposed by any kind of packaging, or other activity, in accordance with the degree of GHG emission.
Plastic has symbols that tell you what kind of plastic a given piece of packaging is made of, and the consumers need to figure out which kind are recyclable in their particular state or local area. Then some plastics are thermosetting and therefore unrecyclable - they have to be broken down through pyrolysis or similar.
So while it's true that plastic recycling is possible, you have to:
1) sort out the random mish-mash that is the recycling system which vary by local area and are incomprehensible to consumers for the purposes of sorting.
2) Increase that 74% number to something in high-90's. Probably forbid unrecyclable plastics for single-use consumer goods and packaging, and somehow constrain the wild variety of plastics that enter the waste stream to a few known varieties that can be sorted
3) forbid items that shed microplastics like there is no tomorrow. This would include clothing made out of nylon? This seems very unpopular.
But even 74% is already much higher than we get with aluminum cans. You say aluminum cans are "100% recyclable", as if they are 100% recycled, but that's a sleight of hand. PET, PP, PE is also "100% recyclable" but the issue here is what actually gets recycled. For aluminum, the actual recycle rates are less than 50% in the US.
Aluminum is an interesting example because it is intensely GHG emitting. Because of how energy intensive smelting is, an aluminum can produces five times the GHG of plastic, and more than double paper. If you wanted to choose the worst technology possible (with respect to the climate) to make containers from, aluminum is king.
I think CO2 is a red herring when it comes to packaging, most of world GHG emissions are not from packaging production - it's energy, transport, heating, etc. If tomorrow all packaging had zero CO2 emission, we would have made no real difference.
> The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in Canada are recycled
"Canadians dispose of about 3.3M tonnes of plastic each year [...] almost 50% of which is packaging. Well over 75% currently goes to landfills, a small proportion is incinerated and about 1% ends up directly in the environment. Only 9% — or 305,000 tonnes — is recycled, the 2019 study found." [1]
Seems rather misleading to focus on one region's moderate success with beverage containers when there have been such massive failures with larger issues, no? It's not like the problem was even unforeseeable [2].
[1] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/03/09/canada-drowning-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
The reason to focus on BC is because they are the only province to have passed EPR that allowed these facilities to be built. The point is that EPR, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling works, and BC versus the rest of Canada is the prime example of that.
Also, the study from the National Observer cited national data from 2016, which was only two years after BC passed the EPR bill. So it's old data and mostly covered provinces with no EPR policies.
As for BC, yes, beverage containers are the highest rate at 74%. But all rigid plastic still achieved a total recovery rate of over 55% in 2019, and the rates are increasing.
Should it be higher? Absolutely! And it's getting higher. But I'm mystified by so-called environmentalists who look at this success and cognitive-dissonance themselves into emitting more carbon and accelerating climate catastrophe because "plastic is bad", instead of asking how we can push for legislation to replicate BC's success everywhere.
I don't understand what this means or whom or what you're talking about, but regarding your general sentiment:
What you're doing is making some very generous extrapolations that are rather dubious and going to need a lot of evidence to make a compelling case for. Examples include:
- That all plastics are fundamentally recyclable with success comparable to some subset of them if only we care to invest more in it.
- That the rates will increase to be much higher than they are. (Because frankly I do not find it plausible that even 55% recycling globally across all plastics is going to do anything but stretch the deadline for a real solution a little bit.)
- That other countries that are still developing won't end up increasing global wastes N-fold, which would easily eat through any moderate 50% or 70% rate or whatever moderate amount you hypothetically manage to achieve. (And it's not even really a "budget" to begin with, given this stuff lingers around.)
- That if only environmentalists cared to spend time lobbying legislators, you'd see legislators across the world react the same way as they appear to have in BC, and on a short time scale. (i.e., you're basically ignoring differing politics, economics, and competing interests.)
By all means, we should make progress on every front we can. But we also don't want to let that distract us or get deluded by half-baked solutions with questionable scalability (and whether it's physical vs. economic vs. political barriers doesn't really matter here). Frankly I cannot fault anyone for believing we do not have the luxury to keep betting the future of the planet on an asymptotic solution. We need drastic global changes fast, and the average person has only so much bandwidth to spare. Giving people a false sense of optimism about recycling can (and has) made everyone too comfortable with plastic consumption, which has been vividly damaging.
As for taxing the containers: I think a market based approach would be better. Regardless of what you use in your packaging, you have to pay for it “cradle to grave”. Companies could use whatever packaging they prefer, on the condition that they recapture 100% of the waste, and are carbon / landfill neutral.
Can that be an excuse to stop any industry? Might as well stop selling phones, books, shoes, clothes and... really any industry. I'm sure they can all be traced back to "slave labor" somewhere.
Some clothing is sewn in route in international waters, but I get the impression it’s less feasible to transfer the contents of container vessels in open water. Also, it’s harder to conceal the slave labor on those boats: You’d need to make the paperwork match on both sides of the journey if you left with a “skeleton crew” and a load of textiles, and arrived with products ready to sell. There’s no source port for the fish, so that problem becomes easier. You just need to conceal one way shipments of supplies into the ocean.
Clothing manufacturing is also an abusive industry, but I get the impression that fishing wins out in terms of absolute number of literal slaves (not “slaves”, as you put it).
Next ban polyester, since the fibers are a major source of microplastics, and since they are flammable (made of plastic after all) they are coated in toxic and endocrine-disrupting flame retardants.
I will add that a weathered component of tire rubber has recently been identified as causing mass death of salmon when it washes off into streams.
> many textiles are polyester
Rubber can be natural or synthetic, and the synthetic rubber is a plastic polymer. Tyres use a mix of natural and synthetic rubber.
Polyester can be natural, but it's often synthetic. Synthetic polyester is not biodegradable. A lot of polyester clothing uses synthetic polyester.
https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0
Synthetic fibers include Rayon, Nylon, Polyester, Acrylic, and Spandex among the more widely used ones
Illustration of a tire cross section: https://www.michelintruck.com/img/tires/xze-zoomer.jpg
https://www.nokiantyres.com/company/sustainability/environme...
There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient.
It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.
Plastic recycling is not an eternal loop like metal recycling can be. It's almost entirely downcycling when it happens at all.
> Plastic recycling was invented by the plastics industry in the 1970s to assuage environmental concerns without substantially reducing plastic consumption, according to Max Liboiron, an expert on plastic waste and a professor at Memorial University.
> It has never worked. Despite decades of effort, only about nine percent of Canada’s plastic waste is currently recycled, according to the 2019 ECCC-commissioned study.
California has 87% of its plastic beverage bottles recycled.
British Columbia implemented an extended consumer responsibility policy that allows the mixed-stream plastic to get recycled through an automated sortation, shredding and sortation system. Their recovery rate of plastic beverage containers was 73.9% in 2017.
Paper produces vastly more carbon than plastic for most disposable items. The existential risk to humans is climate change, more than litter.
We need to control litter and excess plastic by increasing recycle rates. The unwillingness to adopt better recycling infrastructure is due to unwillingness to adopt taxes to fund the conversion (the cost of converting mixed streams is greater than the market price of the output commodity), not because it is technologically infeasible.
The constant theme of recycling that works is government policy that increases the cost of plastic packaging, and uses those funds to stabilize markets or invest in the expensive equipment that it takes to process the material. But it's worth it to do that compared to the wasteful, CO2 blasting approach of "just switch to paper."
Edit:. Looking around, electrical insulation, seals, and shock absorbers are the three things that I cant think of a good replacement for. Some seals like for weather proofing you could use spring bronze.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782
There's TONS of packaging that could be replaced by other materials -- particularly materials that can non-toxically decompose in the environment in a reasonable time frame.
Instead of using plastic to wrap shipping containers, you could use a more re-usable material. Or perhaps we could come up with cardboard "rings" or other techniques to keep stuff together instead of wrapping it in plastic.
We might have to use more soap or other sterilization techniques, but where practical, using glass containers and aluminum cans would still make sense. I'm certain that if plastic single-use containers were eliminated in convenience stores for a country, we'd see a switch to cans, glass and waxed paper instead, almost overnight. Same as in alcohol stores, perhaps.
Calling to mind palm oil, adopted as more healthy and sustainable. And then also over-done.
Disposability seems a deeper issue: a retreat to forest products doesn't seem the solution.
The fish-catching clear plastic rings that you throw away, or cut up, are bad, the cardboard packaging coated in paints is bad, but the craft beer heavy duty Paktech rings [1] and Roberts' Craft-Paks [2] seem harbingers of a more reusable + indefinably recyclable future, regardless ultimately of the specific materials involved.
A piece of the wider craft brewery innovation of the '10s in the U.S. [3]
2. https://shop.robertspolypro.com/collections/craft-pak
3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...
Don't glues generally involve polymers, like plastics?
Respectfully, CV boots on car suspensions have a lifespan of several years, same with phone cases potentially.
As a first step I'm more interested in replacing the things that hundreds of millions of people discard multiple times a day. Starting off by thinking about CV boots and phone cases strikes me as being precipitously close to the "we can't replace everything so lets replace nothing" path.
Plastic is an important part of our modern society but we need to use it and get rid of it wisely.
What could use a standard form factor would be packaging, especially for glass jars and bottles which could be endlessly re-cycled.
It's regressive in the sense that it will cause a hedonic hit to people who buy cheap things for comfort, but the majority of plastics begin and end their lives as disposable garbage. Let's just say when you clean up a park, creek, lake, or a beach, you don't end up with a collection of champagne bottles and caviar tins - it's all fast food bottles and containers.
The next one would be concrete and laws about disposing of contaminated fill, because that's the huge environmental horror afflicting rural areas that is a direct result of a real estate bubble manufactured by their other policies, but it's a start.
Electoral reform, indigenous reconciliation (or even just clean water for reserves), CO2 reductions, you name it...
Ok, we did get cannabis legalization.
Because there was so. much. money. in it. Both from tax revenue and from reduction in policing costs.
It's been a few years now and the world hasn't ended and it doesn't feel like cannabis consumption is any higher really. It was probably good policy to do it. While the NDP (who were ahead of the Liberals in the polls at the beginning of that election and actually in majority territory) have always had legalization as policy, I bet you that Mulcair wouldn't have had the political confidence or buy-in from the provinces to get it through like Trudeau did.
Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.
The rate of forest destruction accelerated so quickly with machinery I don't think it's possible to grasp.
I think we will eventually find it's also largely responsible for the tremendous drop off in birth rates and reproductive health that the world has been experiencing the last 10+ years and possibly other neurological and "brain" issues that have increased in frequency. Infertility of people in their reproductive prime is at an all-time high. We already know BPA has a lot of these side effects.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/17/micropla...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/05/us-birth-and-fertility-rates...
(1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you have made. That's one of the main techniques of fake news.
(2) Fertility rate has nothing to do with how many people can't get pregnant who are trying. It's just a variation on birth rate.
(3) Mother Jones - here cited many times as factual - shows a picture of a bird with a plastic mesh around it. That is not what "toxic" is. Maybe powerful lobbyists got Canadian legislators to pretend that plastic straws are "toxic", but again that flies in the face of scientific fact.
Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.
This also shows scientific ignorance. Some plastics can be somewhat inert (although their manufacturing process maybe embed random trash in them), but microplastics are a whole other beast. The smaller something is, the more likely its physical properties are to differ from its bigger counterpart.
The real problem is excessive fishing and plastic waste from fishing, far more than using plastic for a cup or shopping bag.
Is there an estimate that goes along with that number for when 95%+ of all fish stocks will be gone?
Given the extraordinarily fast depletion implied by the 80% figure (the vast majority of which has happened in the past century), it must be very soon. Within 10-20 years there would have to be almost no fish stocks left given the advance of world's population and its collective demand for fish.
Chemically pure hydrocarbon polymers may be inert and generally nonreactive, however pure polymers like nylon or polyester are virtually useless.
Plastics only become useful when they're mixed with a vast array of plasticizers, conditioners, chain extenders and other industrial chemicals.
And those chemicals absolutely leach out of the materials we laypeople refer to as 'plastics', even before you consider environmental factors that cause the materials to decay.
But clothes and other things that don't smell and aren't squeezable would seem on the face of it to be unlikely hazards. We've got built in chemoreceptors, so why be paranoid as though we didn't?
Are you aware of or concerned about PVC piping widely used for plumbing? Do you know of any practical plans for eliminating it?
https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...
I do hope plastics end up more or less benign, but there is a very real possibility that humanities gravestone will read "Here lies human beings. They managed to make their way into low orbit and their only moon, but were felled by their discovery of synthetic polymers"
Not only does it result in the most efficient way to "regulate", it results in tax revenue for the government, so they don't need to tax things like jobs.
On top of taxing plastic, we should also create a 'new' plastic quota.
Petro-chemical industry makes profit only on new plastic not recycled plastic. They will forever fight this transition away from plastic.
If you introduze a plastic 'from oil' quota, the Nestlé's and Unilever's of the world would have to bid for a share of new plastic in a "new plastic market", making plastic from oil more expensive.
This would incentivize manufacturers to either create plastic return deposit schemes, or to recycle more plastic, or just straight move to glass/aluminium/paper.
Edit: the point of this is that it would desincentivize manufacturers away from plastic while increasing the "per tonne" profit of petro-chemicals (who would be manufacturing a lot less).
Want less carbon emissions? Tax the source of carbon emissions, I.e. fossil fuels. How much? Keep raising the tax until the consumption levels go down sufficiently.
Same with plastic (although above solution would also prob solve plastics since they come from fossil fuels too).
Bottom line, has and always been, we can’t afford to have this many people living this luxurious of a life (quarter acre lots, single family detached house with 2+ cars, constant AC, $50/hour commercial flights, $0.50 per mile travel costs by car, dialysis for 80+ year olds, etc). Assuming the goal is to leave the environment in the same condition for future generations.
Recycling and reusing is far too little, reduce has been the only solution for a long time.
However, it is also possible to produce plastics from hemp, which is vastly superior on many dimensions compared to what is common today. Hemp was just legalized in many US states in 2018 after having been banned in the 30s due to lobbying pressure from cotton manufacturers. Moreover, there are recyclable (and I assume less toxic) plastics produced from corn, which you might see in cups at forward-thinking shops. These plastics biodegrade significantly faster than petroleum-based alternatives.
So hopefully any legislation is specific to plastics which are harmful.
[1] The report here goes into more detail on which specific long-chain polymers are commonly found in pollutants: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
PS/ABS? Maybe
Cellophane? That's just heavily processed wood.
Especially since straws aren’t even a real contributor or issue overall. But it’s not at all difficult for a populist or reactionary to hit a nerve with this kind of thing however well intentioned it is.
Where's the justice in this? Why charge the consumer when huge corporations like Asda, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys etc are happy to buy tonnes of plastic that's unnecessary and will be thrown away? Carrier bag charges are just posturing in the face of this.
I didn’t see where in the article that plastics in the environment were shown to be toxic. Can someone help point to the study this is based on?
> Under the proposed rules, Canada will ban six single-use plastic items, like straws and six-pack rings, create incentives for companies to use recycled plastic, and force plastic producers to pay for recycling
I suspect it won't restrict 3d printing, but could conceivably increase prices for some materials.
(I wonder how such a survey would fare today, when most people have smartphones with browsers and an internet connection.)
I mean, we implant plastic medical devices in humans.
Although I don't think Mother Jones is a legitimate news source, so would be careful about taking anything in the article at face value.
Maybe he should focus on providing vaccines instead (Canada's vaccination rate sits at barely 4% while the US is at 38%) [0] and stop pushing pipelines to export some of the most environmentally destructive oil on the planet [1].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-keyst...
I completely agree on the vaccine issue, Canada had failed miserably vs. comparator nations in this regard.
Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south.
Now that we have supply, Canada's vaccination rate is climbing rapidly. Well over 50% of the eligible (12+) population and climbing.
Citation needed? There are no, as far as I'm aware of, any trade restrictions on vaccines being shipped to Canada from the United States. The Trump administration simply invested earlier in promising vaccines, and therefore secured the first deliveries. Canada decided not to do so, and invested later so it wasn't able to secure earlier deliveries. It also wasted time and money backing the SinoVac which failed to deliver anything.
> Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south.
All Canada had to do was invest earlier. I fail to understand how the US are "letting Canada down" by simply... getting deliveries they paid for!
Trump enacted controls (used the US Defense Production Act) which prevented manufacturers from exporting until all domestic orders were fulfilled. It was questionable whether it was enforceable, but manufacturers have followed it. Biden has continued this policy. Even to the point of hoarding vaccines not yet approved in the US (AstraZeneca) though they did eventually relent and give a smattering of expiring doses to Mexico and Canada.
In addition there's recent controversy about US export controls on medical supplies & materials which would be used for administration or production of vaccines as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/24/world/covid-vaccine-...
Canada did invest early. With Pfizer's Belgium plant. But so did everyone else.
"There are no, as far as I'm aware of, any trade restrictions on vaccines being shipped to Canada from the United States" -- You're just plain wrong.
Other countries simply had to invest earlier, when it was more risky to do so, if they wanted to be the first to get doses.
FWIW Canada announced their order of the Pfizer vaccine August 5th. The US on July 22nd. Are you seriously trying to suggest that two weeks is the key decider here? Nonsense.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccines-...
And an executive order was signed later to make it clear, these vaccines were for America First (despite the R&D on them being done in Europe)
"Trump made his remarks just before signing an executive order intended to ensure that priority access for COVID-19 vaccines procured by the U.S. government is given to the American people before assisting other nations."
> FWIW Canada announced their order of the Pfizer vaccine August 5th. The US on July 22nd. Are you seriously trying to suggest that two weeks is the key decider here? Nonsense.
Two weeks is a huge amount of time! The US was smart to secure it's orders sooner. There's limited supply and one big buyer (the United States) placed a large order first. I don't understand why Trudeau decided to wait a whole week to place his order (but hey, If Canadians prefer to get vaccines later that's good for us). It's like with investing: if you show up a week late to the series A, it's too late!
> for COVID-19 vaccines procured by the U.S. government is given to the American people before assisting other nations.
"Procured by" here is the key. It's only natural that what the US government bought using American taxpayer's money goes to American taxpayers first. This EO does not prevent any company from selling internationally, it prevents the US government from distributing the dose it purchased to foreign countries. This doesn't impact Canadian purchases.
Not sure why there's so much misinformation floating around the Executive Orders and manufacturer's delivery schedules. Maybe the Canadian government is trying to save face?
If you have any prescription meds, check who it's made by and where it was manufactured.
I'm not sure what your point is meant to be, but I'll just mention that the main COVID vaccines (other than Moderna) all had their research and development in the EU.
BioNTech is in fact headquartered in the town my father is from (Mainz, Germany).
(Aurobindo, Lupin, Heritage/Emcure)
My point is just in a very general way, I think of drugs as coming from India in the way consumer products come from China, and I get cognitive dissonance from people talking as though everyone knows they all come from the US.
There was something in the news not long ago about a covid vaccine related factory in India that had a fire while under construction, so I'm pretty sure they are making vaccines.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/29/cdc-study-shows-single-dose-...
I'm still getting my first one this weekend but I'm not gonna assume I'm really much safer than I was before.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. It's a pretty risky move to try it out.
FWIW I think this provincial gov't is mind bogglingly incompetent, and also a bit malevolent.
Sounds like we're on the same page then :) I'm confused about the rest of your comment - healthcare, and whatever emergency powers they have unconstitutionally used to try and get us to stay home, are the responsibilities of the provinces. Does the federal government have a role in this at all? Are they somehow setting the overall vaccination policy?
Wait, that's a joke right? We're talking western nation here, not Cuba or Venezuela...
I'm calling this out.
Does Mother Jones have an agenda? Absolutely.
However, unlike some "news" sources, their reporting of actual facts is generally correct.
However, their reporting is mostly factual. I'd say more so than Fox News https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
I mean, they absolutely promised they’d ban single-use plastics, and I was under the impression that was definitely a real thing:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-us...
I just cannot find an actual press release from a government agency as of this week. I’d be appreciative if someone could actually dig that up.
But in the interest of proving to myself that this isn't all some big hoax I did manage to find the government page listing all the schedule 1 toxic substances [0]. Hopefully that helps a bit. The final item on the list when I write this is "Plastic manufactured items"
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...