It doesn't really matter if they work when they're ballot box poison for anyone who implements them. In western Canada there are large groups of people who are absolutely wildly outraged about plastic bag and cutlery bans. They're a constant refrain in the right wing rage farming ecosphere here, because you're exposed to the (very, very mild) negative effects of the ban almost daily, but never to the positive outcome. It's a very easy lever to pull if your goal is to paint any environmental or climate change action as pointless posturing, and it's being used as such.
I think they're only ballot box poison in western Canada, which is not going to vote for anything other than conservative MPs regardless.
Having grown up in Western Canada, no one does more whinging and complaining than Albertans. Every little thing, from taxes to masks, is a huge imposition. But the whinging is then rationalized as "defending freedom".
The back of my house looks (and smells, in the summer) like a recycling center. The thing that really pisses me off is that after all that work it all ends lumped together more often than not, and the only thing that is really valuable (metals) is quite frequently lost because there is no separate way to collect them.
In my childhood days everything got recycled. Glass bottles, metals, paper, clothing, vegetable matter (skins, off-cuts) and so on. People made a living going door to door to collect them. Single use plastic was absolutely unheard of.
Some people are just complete and utter snowflake softies. Having meltdowns over their plastic bags or whatever and then shouting “fuck your feelings” is the pinnacle of irony.
So I don't know Canada but when the ban was first bought in in Scotland a lot of people, albeit still a minority, had similar views but within a year or two no one really cared.
