Canada's pesticide regulator was 'captured by industry' from day one

More than 20 years ago, the inaugural report by Canada's newly-formed parliamentary committee on the environment slammed the country's pesticide regulator for its lax pesticide laws and a too-cosy relationship with the pesticide industry. 

The report, released in 2000, critiqued the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), a quasi-independent body within Health Canada formed five years earlier to regulate and police pesticide use in Canada.

"The PMRA is already a captive of the pesticide industry," the committee noted in the report.

The problem has not gone away, as shown in a recent investigation by Canada's National Observer that found Canada’s regulators are predisposed to working with producers to keep pesticides in use, despite evidence the chemicals are causing harm.

 "It's like pesticides have constitutional rights and they are innocent until proven guilty," said Elizabeth May, the federal Green Party leader, who first entered politics in the 1980s to fight excessive pesticide use. "The presumption is this needs to be kept in use because the connection and the cosy relationship between pesticide manufacturers and their regulators is deeply ingrained and has been there forever." 

Chemical pesticides have been regulated in Canada since 1927. But it was only after the Second World War that their use became widespread as farmers transitioned to more industrial forms of farming that rely heavily on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. 

The proliferation of pesticide use came alongside growing public awareness and concerns about the chemicals' health and environmental risks, which prompted the federal government to create the first version of the Pest Control Products Act (PCPA) in 1969. The PCPA remains Canada's primary pesticide law.

Pesticide regulation was initially the purview of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a ministry whose mandate, spelled out on its website’s front page, is to support farmers and agri-food businesses and promote international trade. Critics pointed out that tasking a ministry mandated to promote the agriculture industry to regulate toxic chemicals used by food producers was an irreconcilable conflict weighted in favour of industry and against human health. 

"It's the agriculture culture," said Pierre Mineau, a professor at Carleton University whose work with Environment Canada and the Canadian Wildlife Service in the 1980s and 1990s touched on pesticide issues. "the fact that they were captured by industry was really quite clear." 

When pesticide regulation was shifted to Health Canada and the PMRA was formed, it carried all these same conflicts and perverse incentives. Since 2020 alone, that agency has been called out for colluding with pesticide companies, attempting to increase pesticide residue limits on food and failing to release data needed to assess pesticide risk.

'A huge amount of laxity'

While critics had long slammed the pesticide industry's influence over Agriculture Canada's pesticide branch, the industry's out-sized influence was under a spotlight  in the years leading up to the creation of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) in 1988 to regulate toxic chemicals. 

"Agriculture Canada kept pesticides out of [CEPA]," said May, who was working as a policy advisor to the environment minister at the time. "They were specifically excluded because of pressure from the department that was the regulator of the day." 

But environmental and health advocates continued their push to remove pesticide regulation from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. In 1990, they successfully pressured the government to create a special pesticide review team to assess which department was best suited to regulate the chemicals.

In its report, the team recommended pesticides be controlled by an independent, arms-length regulatory agency that would report directly to the Minister of Health. The government went only part way. Instead of creating a fully arms-length agency, in 1995 it formed the PMRA, a semi-independent body within Health Canada. 

The shuffle didn't lead to the autonomy hoped for by critics. Most of the people who had worked on pesticide regulation at Agriculture Canada shifted over to the new PMRA, carrying with them their pro-industry biases.  

"The regime stayed the same," explained May. "The culture stayed the same and the same actual people — a group I came to call, and not affectionately, the nozzle-heads — stayed in charge." 

Industry influence over the pesticide regulator was highlighted in 2000 after the parliamentary committee spent months examining the failures of Canada's pesticide regulatory system.

The committee’s report concluded the country's pesticide regulator needed to prioritise protecting human health and the environment, take a more precautionary approach to approving pesticides, aggressively promote pollution and pesticide use reduction and become more transparent. 

"[There was] a huge amount of laxity," recalled Clifford Lincoln, who was secretary to the minister of the environment between 1993 and 1996 and participated in the committee's study. "It seemed to us that the agricultural side was really dominant and there was very little oversight and control [of the regulator]." 

A chronic problem

If anything, the situation got worse after the PMRA took over, said Mineau, the Carleton professor and former Environment Canada researcher. 

Before the PMRA was created, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's pesticide division consulted with experts in other ministries as part of its approval process for pesticides. It was "basically a post office" that distributed  studies from pesticide companies to Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Natural Resources Canada and Health Canada, which were all involved in the approval process for pesticides at the time. 

"They would receive the information and mail it out to the various departments," he said. "We basically all sat around the table and everybody would say yea or nay." 

That didn't necessarily stop Agriculture Canada officials from approving harmful pesticides, but it offered some oversight from ministries with fewer links to the pesticide industry. Once the PMRA was created, all those consultations and decisions were made in-house, giving the regulator more power — and creating a single target for the industry’s lobbying, said Mineau. 

"The entire Agriculture Canada group that was dealing with [pesticides] moved lock, stock and barrel to the PMRA and then hired whoever they wanted to fill the gaps left by fisheries, environment and the other groups," he added.  "The first PMRA director-general prided himself on never having banned a pesticide in his life."

Meanwhile, pesticide use in Canada has soared despite growing evidence the chemicals are harming human health and devastating the environment. Canada falls behind nearly 90 per cent of countries when it comes to banning pesticides. 

Since 2020 alone, the PMRA has been caught colluding with a pesticide producer to undermine environmental data supporting a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides; ignored red flags from its own scientists regarding the health impacts of a pesticide chemically-related to WWII-era chemical weapons; come under fire for proposing the increase how much glyphosate residue can be on food at the request of pesticide company Bayer; and seen a prominent researcher resign from his position as co-chair of a scientific advisory committee that was created to improve the agency due to its lack of transparency. 

The agency does not track how many pesticides are used, where they are used and when; instead it relies on private companies for that information and doesn't make it publicly available. The PMRA itself only collects rough sales data which it will only release publicly for  pesticides sold by more than three companies, it told Canada's National Observer in October.

This criticism pushed the government in 2021 to spend $42 million on a so-called transformation agenda meant "to further strengthen its human and environmental health and safety oversight and protection." That process ended in August, but critics say little has changed. 

In a September statement to Canada's National Observer regarding the effort, the agency said it is "committed to improving transparency of its decision-making process on pesticides. We recognize the importance of providing the public and interested stakeholders with easy and timely access to information that forms the basis of our decisions. Since 2021, the PMRA has launched and implemented several initiatives...to make this information more accessible." 

These include expanding its water testing program,  developing a new "framework" for a pesticide database yet to be implemented in practice, and creating a continuous oversight process to better review pesticides in light of new science. 

But May said a lot remains to be done. Ideally, she would like to see pesticides regulated under CEPA like most other toxic chemicals. She also wants the PMRA to take a more precautionary approach, stop taking the pesticide industry's reaction into account and "do what's in the interest of public health and the environment."