[spider]

Hipster,

First of all, it's not a tax. The City doesn't collect a cent from it. The more proper term to use would be "user fee".

Whatever, semantics.

Secondly, the amount of money that is actually collected from it is so minimal that it doesn't make sense for the City to dedicate the manpower and resources to collecting it for revenue purposes. It would also be an enormous pain in the ass for retailers to keep tabs of how many bags they've sold. Some stores may sell 10 bags, or less, a day. It doesn't make sense for a merchant to fill out paperwork and for some drone at city hall to be hired to audit what might amount to 50 cents worth of daily claims.

At the end of a day or week the merchant counts the contents of the container, divides by 5 and has the number of bags sold, pretty simple.

Finally, I think it's only fair that retailers - and not the City - get to keep the revenue from plastic bags. I did a quick check on Ali Baba and a Chinese manufacturer sells 20,000 plastic bags at 5 cents (US) per bag.

The same manufacturer offers a larger than usual bag for less than $0.01 each, I'll bet the big stores do MUCH better than that.

in other words, the bag fee barely makes up for the cost that merchants have to shell out when they buy plastic bags. This is hardly a "1000% markup" (did you really think it cost 0.5 cents to manufacture and distribute a plastic bag? If that were the case, you could buy 10,000 bags - which would need to be shipped in a truck - for just 50 dollars), and, of course, the choice of paying for a bag should be passed on to the consumer.

See above.

 

[Hipster Duck]

Whatever, semantics.

No. Not semantics. Here is my explanation in another thread about the difference between user fees and taxes.

And even under the strictest of definitions, this isn't a tax because the money is not going to the government.

At the end of a day or week the merchant counts the contents of the container, divides by 5 and has the number of bags sold, pretty simple.

Since there is no paper trail left by the customer, what is preventing the merchant from cheating and pocketing the money himself? How many people will need to be hired at City Hall to audit the claims from the 50,000+ merchants in Toronto that will be sending in their receipts and checks? We're talking about chump change here.

The same manufacturer offers a larger than usual bag for less than $0.01 each, I'll bet the big stores do MUCH better than that.

I checked around and can't find the link. Maybe you can provide it.

To me it seems highly unrealistic for a merchant to buy plastic bags at your originally quoted price of 0.5 cents/bag. Think about it: above and beyond extracting and processing the raw materials, a manufacturing plant has to churn out bags, which then have to be shipped to a port, then into a container, travel across the ocean, trucked to a logistics warehouse, redistributed to another seller, then the merchant has to order the plastic bags which are then shipped in a delivery truck to his store. Under your calculations 10,000 bags should cost $50, but it would also weigh 50 kg and probably take up more than a cubic meter of space in a truck. The economics don't seem sound.

 

[k10ery]

One summer back in the early `80s I was in Munich for a few weeks: one way to the language school I was attending was parallel to one of the downtown cemeteries, and I would occasionally enter the cemetery for a little peace from the traffic noise, and I was always surprised at the presence of young ladies sunbathing topless among the tombstones... they certainly added a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to these peaceable kingdoms.

The other good thing about Munich? They charge for plastic bags.

 

[GraphicMatt]

Ford does not have the power to remove the mandatory five cent bag fee. He barely has any procedural power at all these days.

 

[CDL.TO]

First of all, it's not a tax. The City doesn't collect a cent from it. The more proper term to use would be "user fee".

I don't even feel like "user fee" is the right term. It still implies money to the government.

It's really price controls. Just on a really, really humorously small scale.

The incredulity that has been directed towards this issue, the phasing out of the penny, and the Ford administration in general has really illustrated how much of the population is apparently "penny wise pound foolish".

 

[Glen]

The city cannot collect a single cent from the bag fee. If it did it would amount too an indirect tax, which cities are not allowed to impliment.

 

[BurlOak]

Discouraging the use of plastic bags is a mistake? Good quality, re-usable fabric bags cost $1 - $2 and last for years! How can saving millions of plastic bags from landfills and encouraging recycling be a mistake?

Lets assume that years means 10 years and millions means one million. Also, assume a person does their shopping twice a week. That means the shopper is using about a thousand bags per time to make your math work.

 

[adma]

Get your facts straight. NOW magazine and others were making Ford's weight a major issue (naked picture of him on the cover) long before he did the weigh in thing. Ford didn't make it an issue other people did.

Er, to be fair, the NOW cover was more about depicting him as naked, rather than depicting him as fat--and once one considers that fact, any "fatness" was simply the consequence of their seeking a more-or-less accurate body-model depiction of a portly man. (Indeed, with that under consideration, NOW's depiction might actually have been flattering compared to any hypothetical nude-Ford reality.)

 

[junctionist]

Stores like No Frills or Food Basics charged for plastic bags long before David Miller was even mayor. Guess your memory is not as good as it used to be. Now where's the undo key?

Now most stores in Toronto, along with some stores around Toronto, charge for them.

My memory is the same as ever . Those stores only do that because they aim to cut costs anyway they can, such as by not subsidizing bags and not paying for cardboard disposal. I doubt environmental concerns underlie their longstanding policies, though they might now reinforce them.

 

[nfitz]

The city cannot collect a single cent from the bag fee. If it did it would amount too an indirect tax, which cities are not allowed to impliment.

Not sure why 5¢ a bag isn't a direct tax, any more than (for example) $10 per sports ticket, or $20 per hotel room would be. Section 267(3)2 of the City of Toronto Act states that (the by-law) must state the tax rate or the amount of tax payable. 5¢ a bag is an amount.

 

[nfitz]

Er, to be fair, the NOW cover was more about depicting him as naked, rather than depicting him as fat ...

Naked ... or simply showing that he has no clothes?

 

[MetroMan]

[video=youtube;STsOdmkH5fI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsOdmkH5fI[/video]

The Mayor we lost. I've already gotten so used to having a bumbling idiot as Mayor that I nearly forgotten what a good Mayor is supposed to be like. I had set my expectations low for whoever opposes Ford but this video has reset it back to the kind of Mayor we had just 2 short years ago.

On another note, it's nice to see Miller finally take a few stabs at Ford. I keep wishing throughout this video that this is a campaign speech.

 

[Thanos]

To those who are against the bag fee, do you really think the stores will stop charging the fee?
As someone stated earlier, No Frills used to have the fee before the city made it mandatory. As far as i know Loblaws, has the fee in pretty much all of Canada. I've been to other cities in Canada and the US that don't have this fee yet certain retailers still charge you.
Say the retailers decide to still charge the fee because it will cover the plastic bag cost. What power does city have to prevent them from doing this? Absolutely none.

 

[Thanos]

Lets assume that years means 10 years and millions means one million. Also, assume a person does their shopping twice a week. That means the shopper is using about a thousand bags per time to make your math work.

Last i checked there's more then 1 person living in Toronto. Somebody skipped math class.

 

[BurlOak]

Last i checked there's more then 1 person living in Toronto. Somebody skipped math class.

I re-read the original post, an I guess you are correct. When I read a bag costs $1 to $2, I assumed they were talking per person.

To save (tens of) Millions of plastic bags, the population in Toronto will have to spend a total of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on cloth bags.