ENGLISH SUMMARY

First things first:

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

This said, posting a logo on your mailbox doesn't solve the leaflet problem, which extends far beyond your yard. In Montreal, 900,000 weekly bags are left on people's doorsteps, most of them unsolicited. And since sorting centers fail to separate so many plastic bags from their paper contents, these 500 weekly tons of refuse end up in nearly-overstuffed landfill sites. In Quebec, that's 182 million bags per year, or 100,100 tons of trash.

In addition, distributors often ignore the logos. Also, the ads are frequently left on stairs, balconies or fenceposts, even though mailboxes and doorknobs are the only options allowed in Montreal. Adding insult to injury, the straps that bind the bags together wind up on sidewalks by the hundreds, in violation of the cleanliness bylaws.

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. Protest letters yield no results. We filed more than 120 complaints in vain: the distributors were merely sent toothless warnings, and the number of spotted infractions actually increased in the following weeks. City offficials could have collected $120,000,000 in fines, but in October 2018, they admitted that they wouldn't do that.

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're now working on getting other Quebec cities to follow suit. So far, about 90 of them have either done so or announced that they will. For more English info, see our Media page. To lend us a hand, please contact us.

Thank you.

ENGLISH SUMMARY

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