The Eco-Fee Imbroglio: Lessons from Ontario’s Troubled Experiment in Charging for Waste Management

Charging for the life cycle cost of waste management is contentious. The recent example of some retailers charging “eco-fees” in Ontario, with respect to sales of household products such as detergent, batteries and fluorescent light bulbs, is a case in point. However, the Ontario program for municipal waste, which the provincial government has partially abandoned, is just one example of the movement known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which is spreading across the country and to many products. As in numerous other jurisdictions, Canadian provinces have imposed, or are considering, similar EPR programs for products such as tires, electronics and countless other goods. This Commentary uses lessons from Ontario’s waste programs to examine EPR’s potential attractions – when such programs are properly designed.Economic Growth and Innovation, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), Ontario, Canada, eco-fees, waste management life cycle cost

Law and Economics

Prior to 1960, most North American law schools paid attention only to anti-trust, public utility regulation, and perhaps tax policy from a law and economics perspective (sometimes referred to as the old law and economics). However, beginning in the early 1960\u27s with pioneering articles by Guido Calabresi on tort law and Ronald Coase (the 1991 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics) on property rights, followed by prolific writings and a comprehensive text by Richard Posner on a vast range of legal issues, the field of law and economics has burgeoned with many lawyers and economists around the world now exploring the economic implications of almost every aspect of the legal system. The new law and economics is often as much interested in non-market as market behaviour to which the old law and economics largely confined itself. This development has been accompanied by the initiation of a number of specialized law and economics oriented scholarly journals, and the appointment or cross-appointment of professional economists to the faculties of many North American law schools. The law schools at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Virginia, Stanford, George Mason, Northwestern, and Berkeley have particularly strong concentrations of scholars in various aspects of law and economics. In Canada, the Law and Economics Programme at the University of Toronto Law School was founded in 1976. Currently six scholars in the Law School have major interests in law and economics, and four economists are cross-appointed to the Faculty

Critiques of the Limits of Freedom of Contract: A Rejoinder

This rejoinder to the foregoing critiques of the author\u27s book, The Limits of Freedom of Contract, focuses on several themes: a) what range of contractually-related issues do courts possess the requisite institutional competence to address? b) whether problematic normative issues in contract law are amenable to rational analysis and at least provisional resolution, or are inherently indeterminate, contingent, and political? c) what the value of individual autonomy implies in terms of the type of transactions parties should be permitted to engage in? d) whether an internal rather than consequentialist theory of contract law is conceivable? and e) whether autonomy values are inconsistent with welfare values in women\u27s participation in market activities

The Social Insurance-Deterrence Dilemma of Modern North American Tort Law: A Canadian Perspective on the Liability Insurance Crisis

This Article surveys the trends in the United States and Canadian tort systems and discusses how they have impacted American and Canadian liability insurance markets. A major thesis of this Article is that the changing complexion of the United States tort system, paralleled by similar trends in Canada, explains many of the recent problems in availability, affordability and adequacy of liability insurance. Changes in parameters of liability and quantum of damage have made it increasingly difficult for insurers to price various types of risks. In particular, the author argues that attempts to pursue deterrence objectives and compensation (social insurance) objectives simultaneously through the tort system entail irresolvable contradictions that have destabilized the system and its associated private insurance arrangements

Critiques of the Limits of Freedom of Contract: A Rejoinder

This rejoinder to the foregoing critiques of the author\u27s book, The Limits of Freedom of Contract, focuses on several themes: a) what range of contractually-related issues do courts possess the requisite institutional competence to address? b) whether problematic normative issues in contract law are amenable to rational analysis and at least provisional resolution, or are inherently indeterminate, contingent, and political? c) what the value of individual autonomy implies in terms of the type of transactions parties should be permitted to engage in? d) whether an internal rather than consequentialist theory of contract law is conceivable? and e) whether autonomy values are inconsistent with welfare values in women\u27s participation in market activities

Electricity Restructuring: The Ontario Experience

Over the last decade or so, a number of jurisdictions throughout the developed and developing world have embarked upon major competitively oriented restructurings of their electricity industries. Ontario has recently joined this list. Historically, Ontario Hydro has been the largest state-owned enterprise in Canada, having been created by the government of Ontario in 1906 initially to construct and operate a provincial transmission grid which would deliver power from privately owned hydro-electric generators to various municipally owned distribution systems. Ontario Hydro quickly broadened its vision to embrace a province-wide transmission grid and the progressive acquisition of most privately owned generating facilities in the province, as well as the construction of massive new generating facilities of its own. Ontario Hydro currently generates about 90% of the electric power sold in the province, about 60% of which is generated by nuclear facilities built in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout its history, Ontario Hydro has occupied a unique and in many respects dominating political and economic influence in the province. It has rarely been far from the public eye, and major cost over-runs in system expansion precipitated the first of many commissions or like inquiries as early as 1920. By 1923, debts incurred on behalf of Ontario Hydro amounted to one-half of the entire provincial debt. Despite frequent public inquiries over the years into aspects of its operations, the basic vertically integrated, public monopoly structure of the industry that emerged in its first 20 years of operations has remained intact until very recently. The current Ontario government has now committed itself to wholesale and retail competition in electricity by the year 2000 and has restructured Ontario Hydro into two state-owned successor companies constituted under the Ontario Business Corporations Act. One of these will own the high voltage transmission grid and the other will own the generating facilities subject to commitments to transfer effective control of these facilities to private competitors so as to reduce Ontario Hydro\u27s market share to 35% of price setting plant output within 3 1/2 years of market opening and 35% of all generating output sold in the province within 10 years. Significant rationalization of the almost 300 municipally owned local distribution utilities (LDCS or MEUS) in Ontario through amalgamation or privatization is anticipated (and is already occurring, albeit slowly)