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The Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of the federal government’s ban on single-use plastics, the top court said Thursday.
In 2021, the Liberal government listed all plastic-manufactured items as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
An industry group called the Responsible Plastic Use Coalition challenged the order, and in 2023, Federal Court Justice Angela Furlanetto struck down the ban.
In her ruling, Furlanetto said Ottawa’s decision to classify as toxic plastic-manufactured items (PMI) such as grocery bags, cutlery, styrofoam containers, stir sticks and straws was too sweeping.
The ruling went on to say that the federal government did not demonstrate that all plastics cause harm to humans and the environment and that it was trespassing on provincial jurisdiction.
In January, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the government’s order to list plastics as toxic, delivering a significant blow to Canada’s plastics industry.
The three appeal court justices said that the lower-court ruling was “predicated on an incorrect premise” and that the ban did not infringe on provincial or territorial jurisdiction.
Federal Court of Appeal Justice Donald Rennie authored the decision backed by the two other judges on the bench. It read as an overwhelming rejection of the 2023 Federal Court decision, which Rennie described as “a classic example of a court engaging in a ‘line-by-line treasure hunt for error.'”