Editorial

Editorial

Eco-fees must die, now

When a consumer pays sales tax at an Ontario retail shop, s/he can be confident the proper amount of tax is being charged on the proper items, and that the money is going exactly where it is intended (to government).

Why is that?

There is a massive structure in place: federal and provincial legislation setting out how sales taxes are to be charged and collected, and an army of tax collectors monitoring retailers. (This army is called the Canada Revenue Agency, CRA.) Retailers must fully account for their sales and the sales taxes they charge to CRA, must make regular reports to CRA (they can be fined for being late with a report!), and must remit in full the appropriate amount of sales tax on a regular basis. If a retailer messes up, CRA is quick to descend.

Eco-fees are a whole different matter. Consumers can have no such confidence in the integrity of the eco-fee system.

No agency is responsible for monitoring eco-fees. Eco-fees are not enshrined in any specific legislation and are not backed by a cadre of government officials. They are, in the words of Stewardship Ontario, “determined by the manufacturer or retailer”.

But no retailer or manufacturer is required to report to Stewardship Ontario, or to any government body, how much in eco-fees it is charging, or how much it has collected.

No retailer remits any amount of eco-fee money to Stewardship Ontario or to any government body. (It is, instead, the manufacturer or first-importer who remits stewardship fees. To be fair, many large retailers also act as first-importers of the goods they sell, and do pay stewardship fees. But those are stewardship fees – based on the amount of recyclable goods they purchase to resell in their stores – not the eco-fees they collect as retailers.)

This is a system ready to be abused. Strike that, this is a system virtually designed to be abused.

Eco-fees must be eliminated.

The only alternative is to create a huge bureaucracy similar to the Canada Revenue Agency to collect eco-fees and enforce the rules around their application.

There is absolutely no need for such a system. It won’t help recycling efforts, and it won’t help keep toxic wastes out of our landfills and water table, the whole reason Stewardship Ontario exists.

Producers and first-importers should continue to pay for the cost of recycling and safely disposing of the goods they manufacture and import. They do this well through Stewardship Ontario now, by paying stewardship fees at the level of production and import.

Newspapers have been paying stewardship fees since 2004, and have never used a separate eco-fee. Instead, the stewardship fee is simply considered part of the cost of buying newsprint, a cost that newspapers recover through sales. The stewardship fee is part of the supply chain.

Eco-fees are an unnecessary add-on to the system, and serve no useful purpose.

In his letter to Stewardship Ontario last week, Minister of Environment John Gerretsen said: “I will consider options to ensure consumers are not being misled about any fees being charged, or eliminate altogether the ability to charge additional set fees to consumers.”

Stewardship Ontario should tell the Minister clearly and directly that its business is recycling and the safe disposal of toxic wastes. It should tell the Minister it is not willing to police eco-fees.

And the Minister should not turn Stewardship Ontario into the eco-fee police. Instead, he should make good on his ‘threat’ (promise?) to eliminate them.

Michael McKinnon