Over 40 years ago, in the early 1980s, I co-led a major report on “Our Chemical Society” for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health.
In it, we sought to step back from what we called the “chemical of the day” problem — so many chemicals of concern, so many requests to look at them, one by one — to take a broader and more in-depth look at the systemic challenges of living in a society literally perfused with human-made chemicals.
We also raised concerns about the relationship between government regulators and the chemical industry.
I vividly recall, on more than one occasion, commenting that Health Canada’s Health Protection Branch should be re-named the Industry Protection Branch, because it seemed more focused on protecting the chemical industry than protecting public health.
What brought this decades-old report back to my mind was the recent exposé by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson in Canada’s National Observer of the unethical shenanigans at Health Canada’s Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency.
In a series of articles in recent weeks, and as far back as a year ago, he has documented the agency’s failings, noting: “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.”
Specifically, in an Oct. 17 article, he reported that the Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency “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.”
That agrochemical giant was Bayer, which in 2021 had proposed a doubling of the allowable limit of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide, in some food products, a request that the Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency accepted.
But as professors Marc-André Gagnon and Marie-Hélène Bacon noted in a November 2023 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the basis for that decision was shrouded in secrecy, under the guise of confidential business information.
Clearly, it is still the case that Health Canada and its Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency see industry and its trade secrets as more worthy of protection than the health of Canadians and their environment.
That was very clear to Parliament’s Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development in its comprehensive report on pesticides in 2000.
The committee stated it was “seriously concerned about the divergent goals of the PMRA” to both promote the agricultural industry and to safeguard health and the environment, noting that “To a certain extent, the PMRA is already a captive of the pesticide industry.”
You would think that report might have led to some significant changes — and you would be wrong.
Almost a quarter of a century later, in June 2023, Bruce Lanphear — a distinguished environmental health scientist at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health — resigned as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency.
In his resignation letter, he wrote: “Should industry representatives — who have a clear and undeniable financial conflict of interest — be allowed to serve on the Pest Management Advisory Council? Absolutely not… . I worry that the Scientific Advisory Committee — and my role as a co-chair — provides a false sense of security that the PMRA is protecting Canadians from toxic pesticides. Based on my experience over the past year, I cannot provide that assurance.”
It seems to me there is something rotten in the state of the Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency.
Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg, symptomatic of a far wider problem — the close and unhealthy ties between industries that harm health and the environment and the federal and provincial governments.
Whether it be the chemical, plastics, fossil fuel, agriculture or extractive industries, they exert an undue influence over public policy, extracting counter-productive subsidies, tax breaks and other benefits, while hiding behind “confidential business information,” and in the process undermining democracy.
At a time when we are crossing six of nine key planetary boundaries, we really need to look at and work to change the way those ties operate.
Perhaps it is time for a Senate or parliamentary inquiry, or at the very least, a complaint to the Integrity Commissioner.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
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