Canada’s oilsands alliance is facing a formal greenwashing complaint. Ontario is set to lower the bar for a steel mill that already had permission to pollute. And on the West Coast, one island community is fighting climate change by feeding everyone.
This week, I’m talking about secrets — specifically, the kind of information companies want to keep under wraps so they have an edge over their competitors. No business wants to give away the key to its success, but as my colleague Marc Fawcett-Atkinson reports, companies can label pretty much anything they share with the federal government as “confidential business information” — and Ottawa will keep it away from the public.
Read on to learn more about what Marc had to say on the subject and how it might affect our health, our planet and our right to know.
As always, you can let me know what you think of this newsletter at [email protected].
Have a great weekend and take care!
— Dana Filek-Gibson
Looking for more CNO reads? You can find them at the bottom of this email.
Digging for data
Let’s say you have a beautiful rose garden. But one day, your neighbour starts spraying pesticides on his lawn, and those chemicals take out every last one of your prized plants. You start to wonder: if this stuff is killing my flowers, what’s it doing to me?
Maybe you hop online to find out what you can from Google. You look up a few things on Health Canada’s public registry of pesticides, maybe check out its pesticide product information database, but neither of those turn up any answers. What you really want is information about the health risks of a chemical like, say, glyphosate. If it’s legal to sell in Canada, you figure, the government must know something about it.
Of course, that’s true. Health Canada requires companies to provide detailed information on pesticides and any other toxic chemicals sold in the country. But good luck getting your hands on it — if a company labels that data as “confidential business information,” the federal government takes the claim at face value and shields it from the public. That makes it next to impossible for the average person to find out how these chemicals might affect their health or the environment, unless they’re willing to send away for encrypted data (or fly to Ottawa to see it) and sign an affidavit that forbids you from speaking publicly about what you learn.
“Pretty much anyone who has tried to access pesticide data in Canada has faced this issue, so it comes up repeatedly in interviews,” Marc tells me.
“The barriers are big enough that some organizations have entire teams trying to keep track of which pesticides are being reviewed, so they can request the data, obtain it and analyze it fast enough to comment in public consultations.”
To be clear, this secrecy doesn’t necessarily mean a pesticide or chemical is harmful. But it does raise questions about why health and environmental data are so difficult to access. When Marc brought this up with Health Canada, the department pointed him to its public pesticide database and a list of decision documents. People can file access-to-information requests to learn more, too, but any confidential business information will be redacted. And if you’re a freedom-of-information fan, you know Canadian governments have a reputation for responding to these inquiries with entirely redacted pages, a couple hundred blank pieces of paper or a promise to get back to you in, say, 80 years.
Read Marc’s full story here to find out who might benefit from these restrictions, why they exist in the first place and how the information-sharing rules around toxic chemicals — except pesticides — could change soon.
More CNO reads
Fighting climate change with food. Anyone can “shop” for ingredients that would otherwise go to waste thanks to this small island’s food recovery program, Rochelle Baker reports.
Out in space. “I used to say that the members of the Conservative Party live on a different planet than the voters of the Conservative Party,” Conservative strategist Ken Boessenkool tells Max Fawcett on this week’s episode of Maxed Out. “But what I say today is that the members of conservative parties in Canada live in a different solar system than the voters of the Conservative Party.”
Permission to pollute. Algoma Steel already releases more cancer-causing pollutants into the air than most companies in Ontario. But no one realized just how much was coming from the steel mill — and once they did, the Ontario government cut the company a deal, Dax D’Orazio reports.
Shipping container farms yield fresh veggies all year. In remote places where the growing season can be as short as two months, a startup is helping farmers feed their communities, Isaac Phan Nay reports.
Oilsands giants made barrels of bucks last year — and here’s what they did with it. Natasha Bulowski breaks down where the money went and where taxpayers are being asked to chip in.
Newcomers struggle to separate truth from fiction in Canadian politics. Abdul Matin Sarfraz unpacks why experts say navigating a new country, culture and sometimes language can make people more vulnerable to disinformation.
Canada’s oil and gas industry is its own worst enemy. Companies like to blame environmentalists and the federal government for their inability to build more pipelines. But as the latest oilsands spill shows, the industry’s biggest adversary is itself, writes columnist Max Fawcett.
Time to clear the air. Greenpeace is urging Canada’s competition bureau to investigate an alliance of oilsands companies over “misrepresentations” of their climate progress, John Woodside reports.
B.C.’s premier is “troubled” by allegations of election interference. David Eby has asked Canada’s intelligence agency for a briefing on alleged election interference involving the Chinese consulate.