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HOLLAND
COLLEGE • October 20, 2001
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INSIDE |
EDITORIAL
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By Kirsten Ferguson The minimum fine for drunk driving is $600 under the Criminal Code of Canada. The minimum fine for selling non-alcoholic carbonated flavoured beverages in cans on Prince Edward Island is $1,000 under the provincial Environmental Protection Act. Somehow, these figures don't look right to me. Attending Uncommon Grocer owner Barb MacLeod's Oct. 9 provincial court trial was quite a learning experience. I learned illegal canned beverages in Island store shelves are stored in plastic Baggies and locked in seizure rooms. I learned cans, fruit juice, and carbon dioxide combined together can create irrepairable environmental damage, but only on P.E.I. Of course, canned fruit juice without the fizz causes no environmental damage. Neither do unflavoured carbonated beverages like club soda. Does this explanation make any sense to you? It doesn't make sense to me, either, but it's the reason why canned pop and beer have been missing from Island store shelves since the mid-1980's. It's also the reason why provincial court judge John Douglas said MacLeod had no choice but to pay $1,000 for selling fizzy canned fruit drinks in her store, even though he earlier said she and her lawyer made an interesting argument about why some canned drinks are banned in P.E.I., but not others. Prince Edward Island is the only place in North America selling pop in refillable glass containers, but that doesn't stop thousands of us from coming home with boxes of illegal canned pop every time we return from a trip to another province. Maybe the Confederation Bridge staff should start searching every vehicle entering P.E.I. to make sure none of those nasty, environmentally-unfriendly pop and beer cans Òfrom awayÓ can pollute our beautiful island. Broken beer and pop glass bottles look much better scattered along our roadsides than those ugly tin cans, you understand. MacLeod will have to appeal or take her case to the legislature if she wants the law to change, even though she says she doesn't want to lift the Òcan banÓ itself. She just wants the right to sell a healthy alternative to soda pop. But her case might finally cause the legislature to change this ridiculous and outdated act, which some people say exists not to protect the environment, but to protect the local Seaman's bottling plant employees. Environment Minister Chester Gillan says another reason why the law hasn't changed is because there's no recycling program for non-refillable containers on P.E.I. If the Waste Watch management program is established province-wide this year, this will soon change, too. Until then, I have a solution. Why doesn't P.E.I. lift the ban on selling fizzy canned drinks and keep selling pop in glass bottles while the rest of Canada bans those ugly plastic pop bottles, which truly are environmentally-unfriendly? Islanders could then buy all the canned pop and beer they wanted and Seaman's employees could keep their jobs while supplying the rest of Canada with glass-bottled pop to replace those horrible plastic pop bottles. I don't think we would hear too many complaints about that. |
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