A Kamloops City Councillor says she is encouraged to see legislation that could pave the way for a provincewide ban on single use plastic products like bags, straws, and cutlery.

Dale Bass says the City already has a draft bylaw in place that will be reviewed once the provincial government passes its legislation.

“Once that happens and our bylaw is review and revised, the it will just come back to council for approval or to take out and talk to stakeholders. That will take a while,” she said. “We’re not going to get this done quickly but when I brought the notice of motion forward quite a while ago, about two years now, I didn’t expect it to happen quickly. It just has to happen and it will.”

Bass’s comments come about two years after she first proposed a ban in Kamloops.

“It’s my belief that we were elected to show leadership. I believe this follows the strategic plan showing bold leadership. It also fits in with creating and implementing plans, policies, regulations that focus on climate action,” she said at the time. “We have to stop leaving our mess for future generations.”

The province, in a statement, says decisions will be made based on the environmental and economic impacts that will come with such a ban. It also says the first phase of new regulations expected in early 2023.

“I recall when the notice of motion came forward I had single use plastic bags, cutlery, and straws and council didn’t like me having the cutlery and straws because ‘we were so far ahead of the game there’. Well, we weren’t,” Bass said on the NL Morning News. “We just didn’t know weren’t ahead of the game and that the province and the federal government was looking at it. So I’m just glad that we’re all in tune and we’re going to get this done.”

Speaking in the BC Legislature this week, Environment Minister George Heyman said the amendments will “establish province-wide bans on the sale, distribution or use of prescribed single-use and short-term products, to apply fees on alternatives to single-use products where necessary, and/or require that businesses make items available only by request.”

The government also says it will also add milk and milk-alternative containers to the deposit-refund system as of Feb. 2022.

“This legislation will support our government’s commitment to the province-wide phase-out of single-use plastics and it will reduce the environmental impact caused by the amount of plastic waste created in this province, as well as reduce the negative impact of plastic pollution on human health and the environment,” he said.

“It will also minimize the risk of unintended consequences posed by other non-plastic single use alternatives. The public expects strong action on problematic single-use products, and local government and industry expect a coordinated provincial approach, and this legislation responds to those expectations.”

This week’s announcement follows a decision from July of this year which allowed local governments to ban single-use plastics without requiring ministerial approval. Since that time, bans on single-use plastics were enacted in Esquimalt, Nanaimo, Richmond, Rossland, Saanich, Surrey, Tofino, Ucluelet, and Victoria.

“I am encouraged by everything the provincial government is doing on this because they are doing it,” Bass added.

“Quite frankly during the pandemic when you couldn’t use your own bags, my kitchen got full of plastic bags and other people must have discovered that. And I hope they realized that is what we’re putting into the landfill and those things don’t go away.”