Any future talk about banning plastic bags in Regina would take a long time, according to Wade Murray city councillor for Ward six.

"We've never had that discussion but something like that would entail a tremendous amount of debate because there are so many nuances that would be involved in it," he explained.

He was very surprised to hear that Toronto's city council banned plastic bags on Wednesday in what appeared to be a snap decision at their Wednesday night meeting.

"It's just crazy that it would take 20 minutes or whatever time it took them to decide oh let's just flippedly ban plastic bags," Murray commented.

He says this exactly the opposite to how these decisions are usually made because they usually require hours of debate so they can consider options from all angles.

Murray also doesn't think an outright ban would work even if the idea did come up because in his opinion it should be up to city council.

"It's a corporate choice, it's something that the corporations could simply say 'we no longer supply plastic bags' and they could do it from their end but but people need to have choice," Murray commented.

Even if a motion to ban plastic bags from all stores did come up in Regina, Murray doesn't think it would work very well.

"My preference would be that you try to nudge people in the direction that's better and more environmentally concious as oppose to slam the fist down and say this is the way it will be," he said.

Murray pointed out that if stores decided to charge more for plastic bags they could solve the problem on their own.

"Really if you charge five cents or ten cents a bag people very quickly would say hang on I'm going to get rid of my plastic and bring my recyclable bags in all the time and they would stop forgetting them," he said.

In fact simply forgetting to bring the reusable grocery bags was the most common response from people we talked to outside a Safeway in Regina on Thursday.

Other people pointed out that plastic bags can be reused for different purposes.