Evidence of meeting #33 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was product.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:25 p.m.
Bloc
Jean-Yves Roy Bloc Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC
Mr. Chair, I would like to have the documents.
12:25 p.m.
Bloc
Jean-Yves Roy Bloc Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC
I would like to have the documents that have been referred to. Is this clear?
12:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Paul Steckle
So you have the documents, but you don't have them here. Do you want them tabled?
12:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
It's not our information. It's from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, because it's their responsibility to monitor products. I know that it's publicly available.
12:25 p.m.
Bloc
Jean-Yves Roy Bloc Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC
It doesn’t matter because the documents are available.
12:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Paul Steckle
We can seek those documents for the committee.
Mr. Benoit wants in on this. It's a procedural thing. The paperwork hasn't been done for you to be at the table, but I want you to be able to ask questions. I need concurrence of this group.
12:25 p.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Leon Benoit Conservative Vegreville—Wainwright, AB
Good afternoon, Dr. Dodds and Mr. Aucoin. Thank you very much for being here.
Dr. Dodds, you said the goal of the PMRA is to minimize the number of times we take away one tool without another tool being available. That's exactly what the PMRA has done with the 2% liquid strychnine, which is the only effective control for Richardson's ground squirrels or gophers.
Furthermore, it's shocking to find out that there was no evaluation of the dollar value of losses to crops that farmers have suffered due to having this product taken away. I have heard estimates of $200 million a year. From what's been happening in the last couple of years, I believe that would be low. It's a huge issue for farmers. The number of letters I get, and no doubt the number of letters you get, from farmers and people from municipalities would back that up.
This product was removed some time ago. In 1998 I put a motion before the House for the production of papers. The motion read:
That an Order of the House do issue for copies of all documents, reports, minutes of meetings, notes, memos and correspondence regarding all aspects of the government's ban of the 2% and 5% solutions of strychnine.
That motion passed. It was sent to the PMRA, and I received a roughly 200-page document that is supposed to include all of those papers. Going through those papers, it was shocking that there was no information in there that should have led to the 2% strychnine being taken from farmers and this great cost being imposed on farmers.
Furthermore, in 2005 the PMRA did a couple of reports on strychnine. One was on the re-evaluation of strychnine and its proposed acceptability for continuing registration. I went through those reports, and there was no good reason for this product to be taken away. I found it quite shocking.
Where is this issue now? Will the 2% liquid solution, which was so successfully used by farmers for such a long time, be returned to farmers in the near future, at least on a pilot project, so it can be returned fully as time goes on? If not, where is the appropriate replacement product?
December 12th, 2006 / 12:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
Thank you for the question.
The registration of strychnine was cancelled in 1992 due to concerns about its high acute toxicity and the high potential for non-target poisoning.
I understand that farmers are interested in using it to control Richardson's ground squirrel, but a lot of other species were also exposed to strychnine, consumed it, and were killed unintentionally.
Obviously we have a responsibility--it is clear under our new act--to look at environmental impact and non-target species.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Leon Benoit Conservative Vegreville—Wainwright, AB
If that's the case, then why was the information that you base that statement on never provided for me on production of these papers?
The requirement of the motion was that the PMRA provide all of the information leading to this decision. And that was never provided.
I don't believe it's there. I've seen nothing, no indication from anything I've ever received, that backs up the statement you just made.
12:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
In our re-evaluation, which specifically looked at the ready-to-use bait, which is a diluted and formulated fashion of strychnine, there were still concerns about the effects of that level of strychnine both on human health and on non-target species. If a 0.4% ready-to-use bait presents challenges, I think it's pretty clear that a concentrated form of strychnine presents even higher levels of concern for human health and the environment.
There is discussion--and we've had discussion with the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities--about presenting an alternative aluminum phosphide known as Phostoxin as an alternative.
I know that there have been some concerns raised about the effectiveness of the strychnine ready-to-use bait, so we've been working with farmers and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan on alternatives. This one, Phostoxin or aluminum phosphide, has been presented as an alternative, and I think there's interest in looking at it.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Leon Benoit Conservative Vegreville—Wainwright, AB
That's fine once that's been demonstrated to be effective. It has not. Until that time, the only effective control is to have the farmers themselves mix the 2% strychnine solution.
I've read both of the documents involved, which came from the study you did in 2005, or at least presented in 2005. The statements you made about that, again, are simply not backed up by what's in the report.
This product has been taken away from farmers, costing possibly $200 million, or possibly more, per year, and again there simply aren't any good reasons. This is something that's been done without proper consideration and without evidence that would indicate that it should have been done. It was a bad decision, costing farmers a lot of money when they clearly can't afford that.
12:30 p.m.
Executive Director, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
I can say a couple of things.
Certainly most developed countries have also prohibited the use of concentrated strychnine as a pest control product now. So Canada wasn't alone.
In 1992, when the decision was made, it was the responsibility of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
One of the tools the new act does give--and I certainly can't make a commitment to deal with things that are from 14 to 15 years ago--is going forward, and our new act gives us a tool. The new act has a new definition of value. In re-evaluations, this is one of the situations in which value has been used by our colleagues in the United States to look at the economic impact on a certain sector of the tool and to use it to refine the permitted uses going forward, if you need to restrict use, to make sure you're restricting use to where the product is of high value and that there aren't alternatives.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Paul Steckle
Your time has expired, Mr. Benoit.
Dr. Bennett, do you have any further questions?
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
I'm just hoping you will take the opportunity presented by the new cancer control agency to endeavour to work together with them as they put their structure in place. I hope we will be able to track these things in a geographic way.
And I guess--Dr. Dodds and I have had this conversation before--you could look at the nuclear waste organization and its best practice in terms of citizen engagement. When this is as worrying as it seems to be to Canadians--and it is a big concern in terms of urban-rural differences--we should do whatever we can to find a citizen engagement tool that will not only help with the education but also communicate the science around these things. I really hope you'll move forward and bring the science and citizens together.
12:30 p.m.
Executive Director, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
We've started those discussions, or at least I myself had some discussions on that. I was in B.C. in the spring, both right around Vancouver, in the southern mainland, but also in the Okanagan Valley, and you can see around Kelowna orchards and vineyards interspersed with suburbia. In P.E.I., again, you see that agriculture and urban and suburban folks are increasingly interrelated.
So both at our federal, provincial, and territorial meeting and at our Pest Management Advisory Council meeting, the current concern about use of pesticides in an urban situation obviously presents challenges for other users. Pesticides are critical tools for many sectors, agriculture clearly being one, forestry being another, and lumber being another, and you want to be able to have a discussion about what are the issues and what are the concerns that folks have and work to resolve those issues in advance.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Alex Atamanenko NDP British Columbia Southern Interior, BC
In all fairness, not having been here at the presentation, if somebody else would like to take my time, I'd be very happy to allow that.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
I'd like to follow up, actually, on Leon's statements. He's right. You made some statements here today that this has a high potential for this and concerns for that, but there's no scientific basis for it.
Our folks out there use the stronger solution. They've used it effectively. I would actually argue that the diluted bait is probably more of an environmental hazard than the stronger solution was, because you have to use so much more of it and it's spread all over the ground. Farmers were able to mix the other stuff, put it in small amounts down the gopher holes, and were able to do the job with that.
We were left without anything. It was a huge issue in my riding last fall. There were pictures in The Western Producer—I don't know if you saw them—of the gophers down the road. There were hundreds of them in the space of a quarter mile.
We had ranchers call about the fact that they were eating off entire quarter sections with the drought that's taking place in southwest Saskatchewan. So we need something. This has been taken away, and I'm even more concerned when I hear that there is no scientific rationale for taking it away. You can't provide it; it wasn't there in the first place and it can't be provided now. I think we need to take another look at this situation.
12:35 p.m.
Chief Registrar, Pest Management Regulatory Agency
I have a little bit of history around the strychnine issue. My understanding is that the reason it was taken away in 1992 was at least twofold. First, you had a very highly toxic liquid product that in itself posed some inherent hazards. Second, there was a significant amount of information during that period of time with respect to non-target poisoning incidents, a frequent series of information notes from western provinces with respect to dog poisonings, as an example, where the assessment was clearly that it was strychnine that had been used to poison dogs.
Those were the kinds of reports we were receiving. Some information from police forces in that region, for example, were recommending that we move away from that. It was an Agriculture Canada decision at the time. I'm quite confident from the information that I have that it was based on those two factors: a highly toxic liquid substance and these dog poisoning incidents.
With respect to other products available, even in those early 1990s there were ready-to-use products available, but they were not effective for a whole series of reasons. Later on, we tried to address that. The manufacturers worked with us to address that issue by producing a ready-to-use bait that could be manufactured quickly and delivered on time so that there were fresh products available to producers, certainly at a higher cost, I'm sure.
The re-evaluation of strychnine itself has concluded that even the existing ready-to-use products do have significant environmental issues with them that we need to address.
So there is significant information there that would have prompted those decisions.