The federal pesticide regulator collaborated with an agrochemical giant to undermine research by a prominent Canadian scientist to stave off an impending ban of a class of pesticides harmful to human brains and sperm and deadly to bees, insects and birds, Canada's National Observer has found.
Water sampling data collected on the Prairies by Christy Morrissey, a Canadian ecologist and University of Saskatchewan professor, helped form the basis for a national ban, proposed in 2016, on imidacloprid and two other related neonicotinoid pesticides used on corn, soybeans, potatoes and other crops.
Unbeknownst to Morrissey at the time, the decision to nix the proposed ban was based in part on a scant replication of her research conducted by the giant pesticide company Bayer Crop Science — with full support from federal officials in Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), at Environment and Climate Change Canada, and at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Morrissey was stunned. "I couldn't understand how the government flip-flopped from the ban," she told Canada's National Observer. "We had all the data, and the levels we found all exceed the levels of concern. I didn't understand how they got to their decision."
Critics were furious, slamming the decision as inadequate to tackle the chemicals' environmental risk, which the PMRA had noted in the 2016 document proposing the ban was "not sustainable."
Used both as a seed treatment and sprayed on fields while crops are growing, neonics leach into soil, snowmelt and runoff then wash out of fields and into streams and wetlands, where they kill insects – including pollinators – and can contaminate water supplies. Those ecological harms have led to stringent restrictions or bans on neonic use in the E.U. and some U.S. states, and a partial ban in Quebec.
Elsewhere in Canada, neonics remain widely used by farmers, albeit with a few new restrictions.
The imidacloprid revelations come on the heels of several recent investigations by Canada's National Observer into the regulator's transparency and independence from industry that have left critics skeptical of its ability to protect Canadians and the environment from harmful pesticides.
"The PMRA's flip-flop on neonics will go down in history as a failed attempt to reduce the overuse of pesticides accumulating in our environment and causing ecological harm," said Lisa Gue, manager of national policy for the David Suzuki Foundation.
Morrissey's story has left other scientists working on public health and environmental issues spooked that they could be the next targets. From chemicals like PFAS to the climate impacts of greenhouse gases, the world's largest polluters have a long history of muffling research into their harms and convincing regulators to turn a blind eye.
"This could happen to any of us," said Chelsea Rochman, a freshwater ecologist and microplastics expert at the University of Toronto. Her work has been key to Canadian and global efforts to better regulate plastic. "I'm lucky they haven't targeted me yet."
A 'Morrissey Report'
Morrissey knew something was amiss as soon as she heard that the federal government had done an about-face on its neonics ban.
In February 2016, the professor and freshwater ecologist shared unpublished water sampling data she had collected from wetlands in Saskatchewan farmland with the federal pesticide regulator. The data complemented her published studies on neonic contamination, which the PMRA also reviewed. Few had ever collected such a detailed trove of information about the water flowing from Canada's millions of acres of prairie farmland into the region's marshes, creeks and seasonal ponds — and her findings were damning.
Much of the water she tested was filled with enough neonic pesticides to blow through the government's safety guidelines, and the government cited her findings and other research to justify its proposed ban on imidacloprid and initiate a special review of two other neonics. Yet, five years after she submitted her data to the pesticide regulator, it reversed course and approved the pesticides' ongoing use.
Mystified, Morrissey raced to figure out what had happened and filed a formal rebuttal to the regulator’s decision, called a "notice of objection." Notices of objection must be submitted within 60 days of the regulator's decision and present an argument refuting the agency's decision based on scientific research, similar to a formal research paper.
Time and convenience were not on her side. Most of the data used by the PMRA to reverse the ban was considered proprietary to the pesticide companies that produce imidacloprid and was locked away in the agency's files. The only way Morrissey — or anyone else — could view the data was on an encrypted thumb drive mailed to her by the agency. She signed an affidavit promising not to copy the data, which was locked in a view-only and unsearchable format, and use it only to write her objection.
When the thumb drive finally arrived in the mail, it revealed what Morrissey had feared.
"There's what amounts to a whole 'Morrissey Report,’" she told Canada's National Observer. Industry did a "big job behind the scenes" to convince the PMRA it should exclude her data from its final assessment, she said. “They wanted to try and prove that we were wrong."
How, she wondered, had Bayer even known about her inconvenient data?
‘Bad news every time’
Morrissey didn't know it when she uncovered the hidden file on her work, but efforts by industry and government officials to undermine her findings started almost immediately after the proposed ban became public in November 2016. Within weeks, federal and provincial officials met with Canada's largest agribusiness lobbyists to find ways to prevent the proposed ban from going through.
A trove of internal meeting minutes obtained this year through access-to-information legislation (hosted on a database maintained by the Investigative Journalism Foundation) depicts meetings between officials from the PMRA, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and Environment and Climate Change Canada, as well as provincial government and industry group representatives. The representatives met for hours under the auspices of a so-called "multi-stakeholder forum" convened by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada about imidacloprid and two other neonics the government proposed to ban, clothianidin and thiamethoxam.
With hundreds of members, the forum was ostensibly tasked with informing farmers and industry groups about the risk assessment process and helping them inform the government's decisions and find pesticide alternatives, according to the documents. Bayer was invited to participate in the forum, the company told Canada's National Observer in an emailed statement.
But in practice, meeting minutes from December 2016 show that federal officials and industry representatives collaborated to find ways to skirt Canada's pesticide laws and keep neonics in use. Although the people aren't identified in the minutes due to privacy laws, the tone is collegial, deferential to industry and aimed at preserving neonic use.
Under Canadian pesticide laws, the government must implement pesticide bans or restrictions if they find that a pesticide poses an excessive threat to human health or the environment. Morrissey's data was of particular interest to the forum because her findings were among those cited by the government to justify the proposed ban.
Early in the discussion, a speaker cites Morrissey’s data, asking if any future research would have to go through the same research process Morrissey used to collect her data, adding, "hope it doesn't have the same outcome."
The government's goal is not to "take away products from agriculture," they said — but the agency couldn't approve a pesticide if they considered data that showed doing so would break the law.
The group kicked around ideas about how to circumvent Morrisey’s problematic findings. One speaker said "based on observations from Bayer, [we need] a broader discussion on how monitoring is done, and where."
"If we look hard enough we will find things. If we look at the most sensitive species and sampling that is done in protected areas, then bad news every time. [There is] value in discussing where and what type of body [sic]" that sampling occurs, they said.
Another person responded that the regulator wants "to know if there is a path forward out of this, and…to get to a place where environmental risks are in an acceptable place. No matter how that happens." They continue by saying that, for the regulator to back off the proposed ban, it needs "information that shows the product is acceptable."
Bayer heeded the call.
Industry-selected data
Morrissey was on the phone with a colleague from Ducks Unlimited when she learned the backstory to what she calls Bayer's "Morrissey report."
Bayer was funding a Ducks Unlimited research project, and in a meeting earlier that year, the company's representatives had pulled up her unpublished wetland data from 2014. Data she had shared with the PMRA — not with Bayer.
That dataset — showing high levels of neonics in prairie wetlands — had somehow made its way from the pesticide regulator into the hand of the pesticide manufacturer. Morrissey had shared it with the regulator thinking it was confidential; the PMRA had told her in an email that it would only be shared with industry if they signed an affidavit to use it as part of the registration process and return it afterwards.
If she had known it would be shared with industry without her consent — which is technically allowed according to an obscure provision of Canada's pesticide laws — she would never have included locations or farm identifiers.
"I was pretty shocked," she said. "I've never shared unpublished data again with the PMRA since then."
In an emailed statement, a PMRA spokesperson said that pesticide companies "have an opportunity to review and provide comments on data submitted by third parties with respect to [their] product(s),” and admitted the agency had shared the data under the applicable laws.
Armed with Morrissey's data, Bayer hired a team of researchers to verify the "relevancy" of the sites Morrissey's team had examined three years earlier. Both Morrissey and Canada's National Observer saw the final 27-page report, which is not peer-reviewed, in the encrypted files she requested to write her formal objection.
"I was like 'wow,'" Morrissey recalled. Bayer had pared down her data to remove problematic sites and used the document to convince the PMRA to reject over half of the wetland samples it had used in its 2016 proposal to ban the chemical.
Morrissey's sampling tested 115 wetlands in early summer alongside bird breeding surveys conducted annually along prairie roads. The wetlands were all within 100 metres of the road, but only some were identified with exact GPS coordinates to protect the landowners' confidentiality. She found most of the wetlands contained dangerous levels of neonics, especially clothianidin and thiamethoxam which are more commonly used on the Prairies than imidacloprid.
If these wetlands become contaminated with neonics, they can kill off the insects with impacts throughout the ecosystem. Other research backs Morrissey’s statement, emphasising that seasonal wetlands are critical to sustain biodiversity.
In contrast, Bayer replicated her tests during the end of summer when fields were dry and neonics weren't running into the water. Instead of visiting and taking water samples from the sites, they relied primarily on Google Earth and Street View to find the wetlands Morrissey sampled and evaluate if they were relevant to the PMRA's pesticide risk assessment. Bayer's team only visited "a few sites" in person, the report says.
Many of the wetlands Morrissey studied had dried up during the drought or didn't appear on Google Earth, while the snow she had tested was long melted, making it impossible to test for neonic contamination. Bayer's researchers also claimed that Morrissey's GPS location data was inaccurate, but did not reach out for the specific GPS coordinates, Morrissey told Canada's National Observer.
In an emailed statement to Canada's National Observer, Bayer did not deny compiling the report and said that as a member of the "multi-stakeholder forum," it helped generate water monitoring data between 2017 and 2019.
The PMRA appears to have adopted Bayer's method to decide which sites Morrissey had sampled were "relevant" to its aquatic risk assessment: in the regulator's final decision to allow the pesticide's continued use, it echoes nearly word-for-word Bayer's conclusion that most of Morrissey's data was "not relevant" to the risk assessment.
In a statement, a PMRA spokesperson said that "the report provided by Bayer contains a critical analysis of the ecological relevance of the water bodies selected for the 2014 data collected by Dr. Morrissey. The rationales provided by Bayer were critically considered by the PMRA."
The agency used similar justifications to exclude from its final decision Morrissey's published research, which also showed dangerous levels of neonic contamination in prairie wetlands.
In an emailed statement, a PMRA spokesperson said “The lack of GPS coordinates is one consideration among other factors" in the decision to exclude data.
However, researchers note the PMRA's own risk assessment guidance doesn't require researchers to submit GPS coordinates for sampling sites.
The PMRA relied more heavily on data from 27 industry-run studies of simulated outdoor environments, or mesocosms. Those studies found that farmers could continue to use imidacloprid and other neonics without breaching the agency's safety thresholds, she wrote in her notice of objection. It let the industry provide water quality samples collected several times a season from sites with minimal neonic contamination, which "flooded" the assessment with enough "clean" data to drown out studies that found high levels of neonic contamination, she told Canada's National Observer.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, and European Union and Dutch pesticide regulators consider mesocosm studies too scientifically weak to set water quality guidelines for pesticides.
Regardless, the industry's effort worked. In its 2021 decision to approve the continued use of imidacloprid, the PMRA rejected over half of the wetland samples it had used in its 2016 proposal to ban the chemical. All had been collected by Morrissey's lab, published in her peer-reviewed, public scientific articles and submitted to the PMRA, she notes in her notice of objection.
Instead, the agency relied on 303 samples — 66 per cent of them collected by pesticide companies or agricultural industry groups.
Eliminating Morrissey's data enabled federal regulators to justify their controversial decision by pointing to water quality datasets where dangerous levels of neonics occurred two-thirds less frequently than if Morrissey's data was included in the evaluation.
Industry ‘allowed to hide’
Nearly three years have passed since Morrissey submitted her objection to the federal pesticide regulator's decision to keep neonics on the market. In theory, the agency should review it and, if it determines the complaint has "scientific merit," send it to an external committee for additional review.
She has yet to receive a response from the PMRA on whether it believes her formal objection has merit, nor has it proceeded to an external review, she told Canada's National Observer.
In an emailed statement, the PMRA said "the timeline for completing a review of an objection depends on a variety of factors. They include the number and complexity of objections received, additional clarification needed from objectors, as well as the number of objections raised…and volume of supporting evidence received. As a result, the timeline to complete the review of an NoO is determined on a case-by-case basis."
Neonics remain in use — but it’s nearly impossible to know how much is being used. Usage data is considered proprietary information, while sales data is only publicly available for imidacloprid, and only from 2012 to present. That data shows a steady increase in sales, until Quebec restricted the use of neonics in 2019.
Canada's National Observer asked the PMRA if it was aware that Bayer was compiling a report about Morrissey's work, but the agency did not respond to the question.
"Clearly, it got bad — to the point where decisions were being made that are not scientific at all and industry was being allowed to hide under the guise of proprietary information," said Morrissey. "At the end of the day, if you're using these chemicals in the environment on a huge scale, you have to be open and transparent."
Regardless of whether the PMRA's efforts to be more transparent and accountable succeed, they will do nothing to keep neonics out of the environment for years. Without a change to Canada's pesticide laws, the health and environmental impacts of neonics are next scheduled to be reviewed in 2036.
Morrissey's frustration was still palpable when she talked with Canada's National Observer last month. Neonics are still being sprayed on fields, leaching into wetlands and "killing things," she said. And without her efforts — which came on top of her teaching and research responsibility — few would know that their continued use has been enabled by a close collaboration between Canadian regulators and the pesticide industry.
"Industry had about four and a half years to produce new data and get data thrown out, to allow the decision to be manipulated," she said. "That's how they did it."
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