Plastic's back! Canadians ditch “going green” to stop spread of coronavirus

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Sometimes, it takes a doomsday scenario to appreciate what you really have. Family, friends, faith, preparedness, self-reliance, and single-use plastic.

I love plastic. It's the perfectly inert perfect garbage. It can be stored safely for years, recycled into anything, or burned to create energy to heat and power homes. It's also playing a major role in keeping us safe, healthy and sanitary as we fight the coronavirus pandemic. But Liberals hate plastic and have promised to ban single-use plastic by 2021.

Canada's health minister, Pandemic Patty Hajdu, tweeted about the dangers of plastic as recently as February 3 — the same day the number of deaths due to the coronavirus overtook of the death toll of SARS.

A week and a half ago, as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down schools across North America, Justin Trudeau's Liberals were promising to declare plastic a toxic substance, by listing plastics as toxic under Schedule 1 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act along with things like methane; mercury; asbestos; lead; formaldehyde; and bisphenol-A.

But as it turns out, in the middle of a pandemic, plastic isn't so toxic after all. Coffee shops that used to encourage you to bring your own mug are now insisting that they give you a single-use cup with a beautiful plastic lid. Shortages of plastic bottles are preventing alcohol distillers from creating mini bottles of hand sanitizer. Major grocery chains are reverting away from those horrible reusable grocery bags in favour of much more sanitary single-use plastic bags.

By now, we were supposed to be all drinking from paper drink box water bottle sort of things and plastic was to be a distant memory for us, no more than campfire boogie man story we would tell our kids, with Greta Thunberg and Catherine McKenna as the heroines who slew the plastic coffee cup lid monster.

Instead, fanatical plastic banners are currently being mugged by the reality of how important plastic is to maintaining our quality of life and first world hygiene standards.