The lowly paper flyer is getting a makeover in Canada’s second biggest city.
In an apparent bid to keep its lucrative home advertising business alive in Montreal, Transcontinental Inc. TCL-A-T, the country’s biggest printer, said Monday it has developed an “innovative” circular for the city that will cut the volume of paper from flyers by nearly 60 per cent and eliminate the plastic bags they come in entirely.
The new product is a leaflet folded in four that combines flyers from various retailers into a single printed product with a limited number of pages, the company said.
“Research shows that most consumers continue to rely on printed flyers to plan their visits to local stores,” Patrick Brayley, Transcontinental’s senior vice-president of premedia, distribution and in-store marketing unit, said in a statement. “We have paid close attention to the dialogue surrounding our offering in recent years and trust this innovation, together with our new digital platform, will deliver on the expectations of all stakeholders.”
It’s the latest development in what has become a highly touchy debate in Quebec in recent years over Transcontinental’s Publisac business, a plastic bag stuffed with flyers, coupons and sometimes a free local newspaper delivered to about 3½ million householders in the province. And it mirrors a question that is being asked in other regions of the country as well: In the digital age, is there still a raison d’être for the paper flyer?
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Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration put in place new rules starting next month that ban the delivery of advertising flyers to homes unless the homeowners or tenants explicitly signal they want to receive them. The move reverses the current system, where flyers are delivered to every household except those who opt out by slapping a special “No flyers” sticker on their mailboxes or doors. Advertising wrapped in plastic will also be prohibited.
City leaders say 41 million flyers end up in municipal recycling centres or waste sites a year, a sum that puts significant pressure on its already-strained resources. They say it no longer makes sense to recycle materials that many people don’t even read.
The city of Mirabel north of Montreal has made similar changes that are already in effect. Other municipalities could follow.
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For Transcontinental’s Publisac business, a veritable institution in Quebec for the past four decades, it’s a potential death knell in the making. Week in and week out since 1986, deal seekers in the province have counted on Publisac for guidance on the latest specials and promotions at their nearby retailers. Hundreds of thousands of people use it as a paper blueprint to plot their weekly purchases.
Transcontinental argues Publisac is a valued tool for low-income households, allowing them to save up to $1,500 a year by knowing which stores are offering discounts on everything from food to toothpaste to winter tires. Critics of the program don’t dispute that but say it creates an enormous amount of waste whose cost is borne by all taxpayers regardless of whether they wanted the flyers or not.
“We applaud all efforts by organizations aimed at reducing waste at source,” said Marie-Andrée Mauger, Montreal’s executive committee point person on the environment. But the population’s decision to move forward with an opt-in system for advertising is clear and will go ahead, she said by e-mail.
Montreal has set an ambitious goal to be “zero waste” by 2030, a target that would include cutting waste sent to landfills in half. Transcontinental says its reinvented flyers eliminate all plastic while also addressing the paper issue.
Nicolas Van Praet