Just a week after Prime Minister Mark Carney shared his government’s strategy to build food security in this country, the Liberals quietly snuck through a bill that will radically change how pesticides are regulated, or rather, deregulated.
Bill C-30, passed just before Parliament rose for the summer last week, amends Canada’s Pest Control Products Act to give cabinet ministers the power to allow the use of banned pesticides, if doing so supports “national economic security.”
Cabinet can make this decision even if scientists in Canada’s own health ministry have decided a requested pesticide will cause unacceptable harm to human health and the environment. And once a product has been accepted into the pesticide market, it’s there for good. Gone are the mandatory 15-year reviews of products.
Unsurprisingly, the government did not seek out a second opinion from scientists, public health and environmental experts before passing this bill. But in a letter written to the Standing Committee on Finance when it was studying the bill, scientists from 13 universities urged this overhaul be reconsidered. Among their concerns was that this bill will reduce public trust in “scientific evidence-based decision-making.”
The Carney government sure is banking on public trust these days. It just published an AI strategy that is lacking in any concrete regulations of the industry, but still asks the public to trust the government will protect Canadians from the harms associated with the technology. The passing of Bill C-30 is no different. It says elected politicians, not scientists, will hold the power when deciding what pesticides can be used.
The bill upholds “national economic security” 14 times as the benchmark by which a pesticide’s use should be permitted, but does nothing to further define said security. In absence of any details to help Canadians understand in what cases highly toxic pesticides would strengthen national security, it’s not a stretch to conclude that this government is now putting the economy ahead of not only the environment, which Mark Carney has done from day one in office, but also human health.
According to the Toronto Star, CropLife Canada CEO Pierre Petelle said while the industry did ask that Health Canada consider economic benefits of a requested product when making a decision as to whether to permit it, it did not ask that cabinet be able to overrule the agency’s final decision or that the review process be ditched.
What this bill is saying is that scientific fact can be trumped, not because the underlying science has evolved or the resulting policies have been revealed to be flawed, but simply because it is currently inconvenient to adhere to them. The Liberals took a significant step forward in supporting this country’s food systems so that Canadians can better feed themselves, but at what cost? The National Food Security Strategy alluded to making it easier for farmers to access critical inputs. It seems this legislation may have been one piece of that ambiguous promise.
The identification of a single threat to our country in the form of the Trump administration is what propelled the current government to power and has been its defining cause ever since. Canadians have given the Carney government ample wiggle room in its mission to bolster Canada’s sovereignty, accepting that some short-term sacrifices might be necessary to secure new trade and security arrangements.
This government made a decisive shift to the right to win power, and seems to have found a home there, offering no indications it intends to circle back and rescue some longstanding, hard won policies it has thrown overboard, in particular those protecting the environment and human health.
