There is news today that the government of Prince Edward Island is ending a ban on the sale of soda in cans, a ban that goes back more than twenty years. The side of me that supported the introduction of Sunday shopping in Nova Scotia applauds this move. While wealthy folks in the tony outports of that province fought the loss of a charming anachronism, the truth is that the old legislation in Nova Scotia had only enough loopholes for them to buy some caviar at Pete’s Frootique and a macchiato at Starbucks. Folks unlucky enough to work for a living lost a valuable day to do some of the necessary retail chores forgotten about in all discussions of the “quality time” the sabbath might give to families, like it did in films set in the 1950s and 1960s.
You see, this is one of the problems with an unthinking nostalgia sometimes confused with conservatism, as I define it, or traditional values, as I understand them: people try to apply it piecemeal. I, too, mourn the loss of the Pepsi bottling plant to be closed in Prince Edward Island – the end of a couple of dozen jobs in a place where that still means something, as well as the ginger ale, lime rickey, and orange flavors that sprung from the operation. It is difficult to force islanders to drink their limes out of bottles when, after a jaunt across the confederation bridge, contemporary “smugglers” bring back cases and cases of canned Coca-Cola. Why should island retailers be prevented from selling in a format in which people, apparently, want to buy their product? And isn’t making people drive to New Brunswick to get it, or at least making it an indispensible part of any trip to the land of spruce trees and freezing rain, a trifle unfair?
Would it be refreshing – or at least as refreshing as a ginger ale made from Tignish spring water (they must have springs in Tignish?) – if people voted for the anachronism with their feet – or their taste buds, in this case? Wouldn’t it be nice if, this time, people’s desire for old-fashioned orange was worth the inconvenience, apparently, of foregoing cans? Now, I am not against progress. I am simply for giving people a clear view of the implications of their choices before inevitability has caught up to them. And from the number of people who still, apparently, want vinyl records and wood stoves and bicycles, newer and flashier and more convenient and better marketed is not always what people really want. Indeed, I think we can find examples where the newest and flashiest is not always best. Email is so much better and more productive than letters and phone calls, and yet how has the Blackberry helped turn us into a generation of Bob Cratchits, begging for one day a year away from the demands of the work-a-day world?
Would consumers on Prince Edward Island have made the choices they made if they had known the eventual implications of those choices? Would they have foregone convenience? We are not flush with examples of people having chosen thus, but I can think of one example related to this very issue. When I was a child, and perhaps even an adolescent, back at the time during which the government of P.E.I. banned cans, littering was a very common activity. Everyone did it. Rather than stockpiling trash, it was widely and enthusiastically thrown from car windows. Roadsides were covered with the stuff. I still think, strictly speaking, it is easier to litter today, but I would no sooner throw a Tim Horton’s cup out the window on the long and desolate drive from Calgary to Lethbridge than I would club a baby seal in the town square. Relative merits or demerits aside, the public taste would never stand for it. In our lifetimes, we convinced people that it would be better not to choose the demonstrably more convenient option for the sake of a greater public good. Does anyone remember how we got here so effectively? Could anyone tell me how we might, then, apply this strategy to dependence on fossil fuel, rampant personal debt, and general retail excess?
