The end of plastic stuffed with bags?

Now that Canada has banned producing and importing plastic checkout bags, what comes next? This Canadian on a wet, grey February day buying unguents, sport socks and aging sushi in the retail confusion that is the modern Shoppers Drug Mart wants to know.

You will be able to buy reusable bags and you’ll have to, unless you start stuffing toothbrushes and cough syrup into the pockets of your cargo pants, which many men will because their pants have pockets to spare. They don’t grasp that pockets aren’t there to overstuff and ruin the line of their clothing. They just shovel it in and waddle away.

Women aren’t like that. They have purses, many purses, but we generally use just the one. It contains a chic reuseable Baggu bag, which we don’t take out for the same reason we don’t use self-checkout. We forget. We’re lazy. You do it.

So customers who buy lavishly, the kind of people you’d think Shoppers would try to attract, will have to buy reusable shopping bags. But who wants to reuse a Shoppers-branded bag or worse, a Loblaws one?

Then people know you shop there, enriching Galen Weston Jr., who may well be the nation’s least popular oligarch in a yellow sweater.

The truth is though that no one cares. We think the world is judging us, which is why people worry about illusory “stigma,” but the world is actually busy with its own thoughts and pants. It didn’t even notice your horrible Loblaws bag.

So who really wants to own 10 of them? No one. But people also don’t want to own big bags, round as Santa’s belly, in their closets, filled with thousands of plastic shopping bags occasionally decanted into a smaller bag of bags in the kitchen for planet-loving compost bins.

Except they aren’t decanted because more plastic bags are coming into the house daily. “This has to stop,” I often say, mostly about George Santos, the economic polycrisis, and the way I save high-quality paper shopping bags in a huge high-quality EQ3 bag “just in case.” In case of what?

My late mother, who lived through the Depression, saved bread bags for her home-baked bread and put them in a special bag. I abhorred this and then the stock market tanked and perhaps one day I will do this myself.

Putting things inside other things inside other things is what drugged-up people like Edie Sedgwick of Any Warhol fame did. Speed gives you the energy, the concentration, the drive, the drill. This fascinates me. My mother was no Edie; she was rabbiting things away to make a vast overstuffed nest if times went bad again.

Consumers are supposed to buy old-fashioned elegant cloth bags for groceries — self-bagging will be woven into daily life — which I do at great expense and forget when I leave the house. Also other Loblaws customers habitually steal reusable bags out of my cart, so I don’t want to bring attractive cloth bags I got for free in kinder, nicer countries.

I suppose I could write my name on these bags, but at a certain point we are effectively reliving the Second World War. In a chinchilla coat and velvet hat, smoking, I’m lining up for five hours with coupons for meat rations, hissing at other tougher ladies for winking at the butcher and getting a fat covert slice of bovine tongue as their reward.

The federal government has done the right thing and cut off Canada’s bags. But shouldn’t they be replaced with paper and wood and string so everyone can see your box of tampons when you walk home from the apothecary? Especially since spy satellites went retro and became balloons?

I no longer recall a paper bag world though I know it existed, as did touch-tone phones and spending a summer afternoon with a friend poking at rocks with a stick and thinking ourselves fortunate, our days packed with incident.

Did we? Were we? Did I make this up?