ENGLISH SUMMARY

First thing first:

to get a no-flyer logo for your mailbox, click here.

This said, the leaflet problem isn't eradicated when you post a logo on your mailbox, for the issue extends far beyond your own yard. In Montreal, 900,000 bags of advertising material are left every week on the doorsteps of residents, most of whom never asked for such deliveries. And since one of the leaflets is regularly granted a separate, transparent bag, the total often reaches 1.8 million bags. That's 500 weekly tons of unsolicited tras which inevitably clog up our recycling network—since few people bother to separate the plastic bags from the paper contents, a must for the system to work properly.

In addition, distributors often ignore the logos. Also, the advertising material is frequently left on stairs, balconies or fenceposts, even though mailboxes and doorknobs are the only valid options, per Montreal's By-Law Concerning the Distribution of Advertising Material (or the nearly-identical variants adopted by each borough). Adding insult to injury, the straps that used to bind the bales of leaflets wind up on sidewalks by the hundreds, in violation of the By-Law Concerning Cleanliness (again, along with its borough variants).

For a list of 30,000 infractions by the TC Transcontinental distribution company (from January 2018 to May 2021), click here.

It doesn't end there either. Both TC and municipal administrators have set up elaborate systems to handle protest letters—yet neither yield results in the long run. We filed more than 440 complaints in vain, and were only promised improvement when a TV crew got involved. Even then, Transcontinental was merely sent toothless warnings, and the number of spotted infractions actually increased in the following weeks. Had the rules been enforced adequately, City officials could have collected $120,000,000 in fines, but in October 2018, they admitted publicly that they weren't willing to go down that route.

So we switched tracks and proposed two corrections to the by-laws, which would:

end the practice of delivering flyers to everyone but those who object, and replace it by a system akin to the one enforced by the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, which states that online circulars can only be sent to people who expressly request them (in other words, stop forcing objectors to use "no leaflet" logos and have interested parties post "pro-leaflet" logos);

ban the use of plastic bags for leaflets (like Montreal did with shopping bags) and replace them with envelopes which don't require triage before recycling.

These proposals were endorsed by 13 major groups, including Équiterre, Greenpeace, the Suzuki Foundation, Nature Quebec, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Council of Canadians, and the indigenous defence charity RAVEN. A province-wide version was also submitted to the Quebec government, backed by politicians from all major parties.

It took four years, but on April 11, 2022, the City of Montreal finally announced that it would implement both of our demands as of May 2023.

More English info is available on our Media page. We're now working on getting other Quebec cities to follow suit. To lend us a hand, please contact us.

Thank you.

About the author

Charles Montpetit is a longtime activist and the author or co-author of 15 books, including the First Time anthology, the December 6 essay on the Montreal Massacre, and the children's fable The Great Menace. He has won a Governor General's Award, a Signet d'or and a White Raven (the latter being an honour granted to the world's best works for young people). And he's hopping mad about companies who refuse to do their share to pull the world back from the environmental brink.