Talk about self-inflicted wounds. The Ontario government had hoped to finesse any disquiet over its new consumer product taxes by having a murky industry group collect them as so-called eco fees.

Now it faces the worst of all worlds. The scam has been revealed. Even the dimmest bulb understands that a state-mandated levy is a tax, regardless of what the government and its agents choose to call it.

As Environment Minister John Gerretsen effectively admitted Tuesday, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government is in full retreat. The controversial and chaotically applied tax has been suspended for three months while Queen’s Park flails about trying to figure out what to do.

Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with taxing environmentally harmful materials. Done correctly, such taxes can encourage people to shift their buying patterns towards products that are easier on nature.

But this was a particularly badly designed tax. Created ostensibly to encourage recycling of hazardous materials, it did no such thing. It was levied on materials — from detergent to hair spray to fertilizer — that are almost never recycled (detergent goes down the drain; fertilizer is dug into the soil; hair spray is sprayed on hair).

Yet neither was the tax high enough to discourage consumption of environmentally hazardous luxuries.

As for those so-called designated items that potentially may be recycled (used motor oil, dry cell batteries, mercury thermometers), the government and its hapless agent, Stewardship Ontario, got everything backward.

Instead of first making it easy to recycle, say, flashlight batteries and then charging a fee to pay for that service, it did the reverse.

It first charged the fee, but without making recycling any easier.

Put simply, the mere fact that someone pays an extra cent or two for a double-A battery won’t prevent him from tossing the spent cell into the trash.

He is more likely to recycle if doing so is made simple. Ontario’s blue box experience shows that.

But after two years under the leadership of Stewardship Ontario, there is still nothing simple about so-called hazardous waste. In Toronto, you can store your used flashlight batteries until you have enough to qualify for a pickup by the city. Or you can take unpaid time off work to drive them down to one of the big waste management yards.

Outside of Toronto, it’s even harder. In Lucknow, a village near Lake Huron, you will have to store your used flashlight batteries (in temperatures, according to Stewardship Ontario, that should be neither too hot nor too cold) until the annual hazardous waste day — which usually lasts for two hours.

For McGuinty’s government, the lessons of this disaster should be straightforward. First, admit a tax is a tax. Second, administer this tax like any other; don’t contract it out to industry.

Stewardship Ontario’s shortcomings may have been less visible when its main purpose was to funnel industry recycling taxes to municipalities. But with program management costs at about $6 million annually, it is a redundant and expensive bureaucracy. It should be axed

Third, organize any tax in a manner that gets the desired result. If recycling is the aim, make recycling possible.

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No one did any of that with the eco-fee fiasco. Now the government has a second chance.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

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