A coalition of Canada's largest environmental and health protection groups, backed by several professors, is asking federal Minister of Health Mark Holland to temporarily ban a class of toxic insecticides until an independent expert panel has determined they are safe.
The call follows a bombshell investigation by Canada's National Observer that revealed how federal officials colluded with the pesticide industry to keep three neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides on the market. The investigation found that pesticide giant Bayer Crop Science commissioned a report to discredit a University of Saskatchewan professor's water sampling data, which showed dangerous levels of the chemicals in Prairie wetlands.
"Following reports in Canada's National Observer that Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) allegedly 'colluded' with Bayer Crop Science to maintain registration of the controversial neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid, we write to request that you urgently intervene to put safeguards in place to ensure that impartial PMRA scientists can do their job in service of the public interest and prevent inappropriate industry influence in pesticide regulation," the letter states.
“It looks like Bayer pushed the federal regulator to ignore data inconvenient to its interests,” said Lisa Gue, national policy manager at the David Suzuki Foundation. “We need the health minister to send a clear signal that this is not acceptable, and order an independent review of the environmental harms from neonic insecticides.”
Neonics are a class of insecticides so deadly to bees and other insects, birds and aquatic organisms that they have been banned outdoors in the E.U. since 2018. There is also growing evidence they can harm human brain development and the reproductive system.
Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) proposed to ban the three most common neonics in 2016 and 2017 because of their deadly impact on aquatic ecosystems. But in 2021 the agency shocked observers by backtracking on the proposal and allowing use of chemicals to continue largely unchanged.
That decision was enabled by an effort, facilitated by federal officials, that saw Canada's major pesticide and agricultural lobbies create datasets the regulator could use to justify their continued use, Canada's National Observer found.
"The breach of scientific and regulatory principles by PMRA is both blatant and egregious," said Mary Lou McDonald of SafeFoodMatters.org. "[The] PMRA is supposed to judge the evidence, not help create it. We call for an end to this ongoing capture of PMRA."
Environmental groups and Christy Morrissey, the Saskatchewan professor whose research was undermined by Bayer, submitted formal scientific objections to the PMRA's approval decision in 2021 raising doubts about the decision's scientific integrity. Canada's pesticide laws require the government to respond to these objections but it has not.
The findings from CNO’s investigation and the government's silence regarding the objections make an independent review of the government's decision "appropriate and necessary," the letter says. To be credible, the groups demand that the review panel must comprise independent experts who have no conflicts of interest with the PMRA or pesticide producers, and should provide its recommendations within three months.
The letter calls for a temporary ban on imidacloprid, the most common neonic in Canada, until the review is complete. It also notes that "evidence of undue corporate influence suggests regulatory capture" of the PMRA, and asks the minister to launch a broader "realignment" of how the agency completes its work.
“Canada’s federal government needs to stand up for independent science and shield it from corporate meddling,” said Cassie Barker, senior program manager, toxics, for Environmental Defence. “It’s a massive conflict of interest to have corporate actors, like Bayer, seemingly so embedded in the decision-making process. The feds need to tell pesticide manufacturers to buzz off before we all get stung.”
Comments
Fingers crossed something happens, but there's a long history of government subservience to corporate interests that needs to be overcome.
There was a time, I recall, when Canada's Federal Government invested in its own science advisors and made strong efforts to provide useful scientific/engineering and geological research to guide our development. Budget cutting rot settled in and for decades now we have lost most of that neutral expertise that made Canada a leader in many fields, attracting foreign students - like the Pakistanis who worked at Chalk River and went home to build their own nuclear weapons. One of our more ignoble failures.
Now, industrial espionage is so pervasive even the private sector cannot protect its proprietary knowledge, and fraud has compromised almost every aspect of commerce, science, and knowledge.
Virtually no trust can now be placed in any area of "expertise" - most especially in politics.
Canada's regulatory agencies were long ago captured by industry, to the point that decades ago now, agricultural chemical companies treated the fee to apply for a license as though it were a licensing fee. And so did senior management of the licensing department.
Check out Shiv Chopra's "Rotten to the Core." He was a government scientist, who took seriously his mandate to protect -- I became aware of his work around Bovine Growth Hormone or rBST, which Chopra's work showed to be bad for cows and bad for consumers of their milk. He also did major work around an antibiotic being fed to cattle that caused pathogen resistance to Cipro, a major antibiotic used for humans.
For a long time, we didn't allow US milk into Canada -- not legally, anyway, although Saputo cheese manufacturers imported rBST-containing "concentrated milk" which the company said wasn't produced in Canada. Around that time, milk producers were dumping milk ... and I couldn't understand why that was not seen as an opportunity to add "concentrated milk" to the milk products our dairy processors make. And then NAFTA was renegotiated ... and we allowed US cheese into our market. Shortly thereafter, we also increased imports of UK and EU cheeses, which do NOT contain rBST.
I don't think he was around any more when Canada began allowing ractopomine in pork and beef feed: it "beefs up" piglets and steers so that they're market-size in 6 months, rather than the previous year-or-so: allowing growers to forego winter feed; much cheaper to produce!
Ractopamine has its downsides for the animals fed, and for consumers of the flesh, as well, though the industry-produced literature claims otherwise. Nothing new there!
But there was no education campaign about it that I am aware of.