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Montreal celebrated the start of 2018 by banning single-use plastic bags, with grocers and retailers facing thousands of dollars in fines if they refuse to comply after an initial grace period. A plastic bag ban, enthusiastically endorsed by federal environment minister Catherine McKenna, is also scheduled to take effect in Victoria later this year, and politicians in other cities and even in Manitoba’s Conservative government are now considering bag bans as well.

The ill-conceived ban is a policy that cannot possibly pass a cost-benefit analysis, not least because politicians have no way of measuring the cost of the regulation — that is, the amount of inconvenience that the ban forces consumers and businesses to suffer. Meanwhile, there is pretty strong evidence that the benefits of the regulation (supposedly a cleaner environment) are either zero or negative.

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In the first place, one of the reasons plastic bags are so popular is because of all the ways they make the environment cleaner and less hazardous to humans. Dog walkers use plastic bags to clean the environment of pet waste. People use plastic bags to carry clothes and books and everything else from place to place in order to keep their belongings clean from the dirt on the ground.