Nineteen years ago this May the Honourable R. F. Nixon - then provincial Treasurer in the Peterson Liberal Government - introduced a $5 tire tax in Ontario. The tax was supposed to, "… help fund efforts to support recycling and environmentally sound disposal."
Just nine months later in February of 1990 a 14 million tire stockpile in Hagersville, Ontario burned.
Despite this dramatic event by the time the Bob Rae NDP Government repealed the tire tax in 1993 the province had accrued over $150 million in revenue from the tire tax yet had only spent less than one-tenth of that amount on promoting scrap tire recovery and recycling. Upon repealing the tax then Finance Minister Bud Wildman stated that, "What the industry said is quite true, that the whole amount was not used for recycling and for new technologies related to rubber. The revenues, of course, went to the consolidated revenue fund…
