Sometimes soon, the federal government will be introducing a bill that will ban plastic bags in Canada. A draft version of it was posted to the canada.ca website on Dec. 21.
That would bring to end the use of single-use plastic bags—at least in Canada—less than 60 years after they were introduced.
Back in 1965, a fellow named Sten Gustaf Thulin, who worked at a company called Celloplast, made the world’s first plastic bag.
It was introduced to a rather lukewarm public, who preferred the old fashioned paper bags (which themselves were only invented just over a 100 years before that, in 1852, by Francis Wolle). Well, okay, there may have been one-off paper bags before that, but Wolle invented the paper bag making machine.
According to Thulin’s son, Raoul, his father invented the plastic bag in an effort to save the planet. He was concerned about how many trees were being cut down to make paper bags.
We all know how well that turned out. It turned out that all those plastic bags going into the landfill, into the ocean? Those were actually bad for the environment. Rather than save the planet, his invention was helping to destroy it.
Except…
Except plastic bags? Weren’t invented to be single use. Thulin himself would carry his used bags back to the store with him. They could be folded up and carried in a pocket, didn’t fall apart when they got wet and replaced single use paper bags in one fell swoop. And if your plastic bag wore out? Well, then you could get a new one.
Plastic bags were the original re-usable bags that re-usable bags were created to replace.
But everyone just threw them out, and instead of being better for the environment, they became much, much worse.
What was designed to heal instead became harmful. So now we’re going back to … you guessed it, paper bags. (Fortunately, this time the emphasis is on recycled paper bags. And we now have reusable cloth bags that we can take to the store. (Did I mention what people used to take with them to carry their groceries home before the paper bag? Go on. Ask me what they used. Asked me. Oh, you guessed. It was supposed to be a surprise.))
We do things that are supposed to make things better. And in some respects, they do.
And in other respects? They cause harm.
I make fun of politicians who seem to take Ray Bradbury’s famous motto to heart: “jump off the cliff and learn how to make wings on the way down.”
While this works in creating a book (which is what he was talking about when he said it), it’s terrible public policy.
In politics, as in science, one needs to be very forethoughtful to determine the harm of something, be it a new law or a new invention.
Back in 1920, for instance, the US passed a series of laws prohibiting the sale and distribution of alcohol.
The goal was to increase the sales of goods like clothing, new homes, chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drink. The motivations? Were good and noble.
But instead of improving the quality of life for these industries, prohibition instead caused many restaurants to fail. People weren’t going out to the restaurant, so they didn’t go to the theatre, either, so theatres failed.
And instead of seeing a small bump in unemployment from people who worked at breweries and distilleries, the job market had to deal with thousands of ancillary lay-offs of coopers and truckers and waiters.
Many states, which previously had gotten much of their money from liquor sales found themselves having to make up a 75 percent shortfall in tax revenue. The federal government lost $11 billion, while having to spend $300 million to enforce.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Which is something we can say 100 years this side of prohibition, but it took the United States 13 years to finally say “well, that didn’t go as expected.”
Good ideas lead to unintended harm.
Which brings us to mandates around Covid. Because, while they are trying to accomplish good things, we can’t deny they are also causing harm.
Last year in BC, there were at least 1,782 drug overdose deaths by the end of October, making it the deadliest year for drug overdoses. Many of those were caused by the government reaction to the pandemic. In 2020, the number of people who died was 1,765.
In 2019, before the pandemic started, the number of people who died from drug overdoses was 984. Which means that about 1600 more people have died from overdoses during the pandemic.
Which is a lot. But during the same time, 2,597 people died of Covid, and that’s with all the public health precautions that were taken. What would have happened if no action was taken?
Chose one course of action, one segment of the population suffers harm. Another course of action? Another segment of the population is put at risk.
This is not to say mandates are wrong, but simply that decisions are hard.
Invent a plastic bag to save the trees, and ruin a planet. Introduce measures to save the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people? And you wind up with hundreds also dying for different reasons, often caused by the course of action
These are the calculations that are being made again and again and again. By scientists, by policy experts, and by governments. How to come up with policies that do the least amount of harm.
It’s hard. Even when you think you’ve found the right course of action, balanced all the moving parts, chances are, something, somewhere, will be out of whack, and it will cause unintended harm.
Because sometimes, even the right decisions can cause harm. There is no perfect choice. Only the best in a series of bad ones. To paraphrase Churchill: “This was the worst decision ever. Except for all the other options available.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
