ENGLISH SUMMARY

First things first:

to get a no-flyer logo for your mailbox, click here;
and for a detailed analysis of the issue (in French), click here.

This said, posting a logo on your mailbox doesn't solve the problem of promotional leaflets, and neither does dropping the latter in the recycling bin. Until 2023 in Montreal, 900,000 bags of flyers were left every week on everyone's doorstep, most of them unsolicited, and since sorting centers couldn't separate so many plastic bags from their paper contents, these 500 weekly tons of refuse ended up in nearly-overstuffed landfill sites. In all of Quebec, that amounted 182 million bags per year, or 100,100 tons of trash.

In addition, distributors often ignored the logos (see the above pictures). Also, the bags were frequently left on stairs, balconies and fenceposts, even though mailboxes and doorknobs were the only options allowed in Montreal. Adding insult to injury, the straps that bound the bags together until they were distributed wound up on sidewalks by the hundreds, in violation of the cleanliness bylaws (see the pictures below).

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

Furthermore, protest letters yielded no results. We filed more than 120 complaints to the authorities, but the distributors were merely sent toothless warnings, and the number of spotted infractions actually increased as time went by. City offficials could have collected $120,000,000 in fines, but in 2018, they actually stated that they wouldn't bother to do it.

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

replace current practices by a system akin to the one already enforced by the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, which states that online flyers 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.

It took five years, but on May 17, 2023, the City of Montreal finally announced that it had implemented both of our demands. We then asked other cities to follow suit. By November 2023, about 90 of them (45% of the province) had either done it or promised that they would in the near future. At that point, TC Transcontinental announced that they would progressively stop distributing publisacs throughout Quebec by May 2024.

Until that point, some cities refrained from regulating flyers out of fear of getting sued by TC, or inconveniencing the local newspapers that were sometimes included in the bags. Now that both excuses are obsolete, they should soon adopt bylaws about other types of flyers. Meanwhile, Canada Post still delivers ads with the mail, but unlike Publisac, they actually refrain from doing so when they see a no-flyer logo. So, again, do get yours here.

Thank you for your interest in this issue!

ENGLISH SUMMARY

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