Health Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Mr. Warawa.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

I'm going to give my time to Mr. Lunney.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

I want to pick up on the issue of harmonization. I was headed that way in the last round and we ran out of time. I think you mentioned the challenges and opportunities for our products, which are presented for us first as an exporting nation. I think we all recognize how extremely important that is for our great farmers who not only put food on our table but also help to feed other nations.

However, there are challenges and opportunities there, and I think there is a lot of fear of the unknown, and the realm of the unknown is where misinformation can sometimes proliferate because of that vacuum of information. We certainly see that in other areas. You mentioned, for example, arsenic in food. That would raise the alarm. Nobody wants to be eating arsenic, but we have it in our drinking water. That takes us to discussions, which I want to head into in a moment, about the new testing procedures that can detect parts per trillion. You can detect almost anything anywhere under those circumstances.

The first thing I wanted to mention in this regard is the work that the PMRA is doing with, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States on a pollinator science risk assessment framework. We're working on understanding those types of questions, because I think we're all concerned about pollinators. Those of us who live on little hobby farms have our mason bees out there. My neighbour grows bees. We want to encourage and we value the bees for our fruit trees, and so on, even though we're not commercial producers. I think people are emotionally attached to those issues.

With regard to the OECD, I see that PMRA is working with Europe on looking at ecosystem guidance documents and harmonized international guidance for the use of pesticides. Our ecosystems aren't the same. I think our agricultural practices across Canada are different, which is what led to this concern about neonicotinoids and their use on different sizes of plants and different types and sizes of seeds. We have to adapt our technology, and we think that's a responsible response by regulators and industry.

We talk about a product we have lost in Canada, which was exported for years, and that was asbestos. We thought that was being used safely as long as it was handled and used properly. But in other parts of the world where they didn't manage the products properly, because they don't have the same standards we have, it became a huge problem in creating illness elsewhere, as well as practices here that weren't in place.

Mr. Loessin, you mentioned that changes in technology are happening very rapidly and new products are coming out rapidly, and it's a huge challenge to communicate what we're actually dealing with and to manage those risks because some real risks were anticipated. I just wanted you to comment on the international efforts and how important that type of engagement is. I think you mentioned it earlier, but I think we're beginning to understand that it's pretty important that we engage with our international community on advancing these issues of understanding crop management and product management.

[Gord Kurbis]

Fair enough. One of the focus areas for our industry has been trying to work within the Codex system to come up with a more robust international reference point for setting these tolerances. A large majority of the countries that we export pulses to are countries that don't have the kind of regulatory capacity that Canada has. Consequently, they don't have a PMRA, they use Codex, the World Health Organization, to set their tolerances.

The more countries we see moving towards their own custom national approaches, the greater the need to make sure that we have a functioning Codex, which has some capacity problems. We're trying to work internationally, and PMRA has shown great leadership in trying to make sure that they have fewer delays.

In general, it's a challenging problem. There are two problems that I think we've touched on today. One is the lack of harmonized tolerances when regulators go through the process of doing the risk assessments. That might become serious for our industry someday, but it's not today. It's really the absence of tolerances, so it's the lack of harmonized timing and the zero, or near zero, tolerances that we could be subject to in a parts per trillion environment.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

I think that's where we lost a shipment, or at least it was rejected, because of testing at parts per trillion. I can think of other examples in Canada with products because there's zero tolerance. You could detect with new devices today the presence of almost anything anywhere in trace amounts, which creates a real challenge I'm sure.

You mentioned that there's a whole different range of standards in some countries. You use numbers four, six, five, eight—a range you can adjust to—but zero is hard to manage. I guess there's no simple answer on what the tolerance levels are without being more specific in the crop type and what the product is.

I wanted to ask another question related to emergency provisions under the act for PMRA and how there can be a request for an emergency approval.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

We are over time there, again. Sorry.

Okay, Mr. Rankin.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Yes, thank you. I appreciate this.

My first question is to Mr. Petelle of CropLife Canada. You talked about the precautionary principle during your testimony, and I totally agree with you about how that can be used and abused as a concept. It's found in section 20 in the act, as you say. I wasn't clear where you were going with it. Are you suggesting any change in the legislation? Are you just saying we should be more vigilant about how we apply the principle? After all, the Supreme Court of Canada in the Spraytech case told us we had to in this very field, so I wasn't quite clear where you were going.

[Pierre Petelle]

What I was saying is that you may hear from other witnesses who raise this and we constantly hear this in our circles. It was more of an ask to recognize that the system is already very precautionary, that the actual principle is embedded in the current act, and that we don't go down a path that takes us to where we use it as a blocking tool.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

My next question builds on what Dr. Lunney has been asking about on the neonicotinoids, and of course, Mr. Young and others have raised this as well.

I'm going to focus though on the legislation, which is after all what we're trying to review here. There are so many pesticides that are conditionally registered and they come back to the well over and over again. Sometimes, I'm told, in the context of the neonicotinoids—maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong—that the registration stays conditional even though chronic toxicity studies are still outstanding. They say, okay, we're going to let you register it for another year, but you better get that study in, and that goes on and on. Sometimes it's years until that's done. Is the legislation deficient in allowing this lagging failure to really bite the bullet, allowing us to conditionally register pesticides that often don't have the full data package before them?

I guess I'd ask Mr. Petelle that question first, and then invite anyone else to comment.

[Pierre Petelle]

In terms of the conditional registration, it's very clear when that can be used. The data to conduct a risk assessment, both for human health and for the environment, has to be sufficient for the PMRA to be able to conduct their full risk assessment without those data that are conditional. It's not that there is missing data that they're guessing at on the risk elements. It's that they have enough data to make their risk assessment decision from both a health and an environmental perspective.

What the conditional registration often does is give them the ability to request additional data. Maybe it's confirmatory data or maybe it's on a bigger scale than what was submitted during the evaluation. It's to confirm that the assumptions and the risk assessment they've made are indeed what it is. This has been used for a number of products.

In fact, it's used for bee health products, for products used in a beehive. There's one that's very commonly used by beekeepers that has a conditional registration currently. It's a fairly common practice, and it should not be perceived as a data gap. It is confirmatory data, and I think the PMRA has explained that to the Senate committee on pollinator health in good detail.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Well, I'm told that the PMRA itself has referred to the lack of chronic toxicity study in bees as a critical data gap, yet they've given continual conditional registrations for neonics year after year. It seems to me that if you have a chronic toxicity study of neonics effects on bees that's been outstanding since the first registration in 2003—that's over a decade ago—there seems to be a real problem in the legislation. That's my assertion. It's not me saying this. It's the PMRA that says there's a critical data gap. That's problematic.

[Pierre Petelle]

My understanding.... I mean, this is now an active ingredient-specific case, which we typically wouldn't get into a discussion on. My understanding in that particular example is that the conditions have actually been satisfied over that decade. They're not the same conditions that were in place a decade ago. What's happened is that the PMRA asked for a set of data, those were provided, and they're being assessed or they were assessed. In the meantime, they've asked for additional conditions as part of that registration, so they've kept it on a conditional registration status.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

So you don't—and I'd ask others to chime in if they will—consider it problematic that we can have outstanding important data gaps identified by the PMRA year after year, thanks to the conditional registration system, and nothing's done about it in such a sensitive area? It strikes many critics as a huge gap, and you don't see that. Is there anybody else who has a problem with this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to ask a couple of questions here if that's okay. I'm going to take the opposite approach to what Mr. Rankin asked. Wouldn't it be worse if the PMRA never asked for any additional information? I would look at that and say that if they approved it in 2003, 2004, and then walked away and never looked at it again, that would be the failing, but in fact what they're doing is asking for additional information as time passes on. Is that it or am I looking at it the wrong way?

[Pierre Petelle]

Absolutely, and if you look at the requirements for insecticides moving forward, you see that it's going to be much more time-consuming and costly to get those products registered because of the additional data requirements that will now become more standard.

It goes back to my precautions discussion. If you take precautions to the extreme, you can always ask for more and more data, never actually register the product, and never actually have the tools for farmers to use. That's the ultimate use of that precautionary language, which is why I mentioned it in my opening remarks. What the system under the current act gives the PMRA and the minister is the ability to call in data any time they want, and it also forces them to look at any data generated by anybody anywhere in the world and take it into account in their decision-making process.

The last component is that the products have to be re-evaluated on a 15-year cycle, so you don't get products that are registered for 20, 30, or 40 years with the same data. Every 15 years at the maximum, the PMRA will look at all the data, including any new data that have been generated in that 15-year period, and make a new decision on that product. It's a very robust system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

I have one other question, if time will allow.

Certainly in my riding there is a tremendous number of rivers and creeks and streams that are fed from drain from farms. There are certainly systematic drainage systems in almost every field now and of course out through the lake; in my case, Lake Huron. One of the minister's responsibilities in this act is to prevent a risk to the environment, obviously. Can you briefly explain how that process works? How do you demonstrate, when registering a product, that the residuals, the pesticides, through a heavy rain after a planting don't end up in a river and into the lake?

[Pierre Petelle]

That's a great question, Mr. Chair.

Regulatory data is designed to show the extreme scenario. When we talk about the half-life of a product—I'll use neonics as a good example—we often hear that products can last three years or more in the soil. The reason you're hearing that statistic is that when the regulatory data is generated for these products, it has to be under worst-case conditions. With no microbial activity, no sunlight, how long will that product sit in a soil column before it breaks down? That's the extreme end so that the regulator can know what the absolute maximum is. When you actually start to do field studies with the products, you then get a more realistic half-life. That's when you get more of the three, six, or nine months that we're seeing with many of these products.

It's the same with its mobility. We know the properties of the product. We know how mobile it is in water. We know whether it adsorbs to soil and becomes unavailable. All of that data is provided to PMRA so that they can do a risk assessment on the environment and determine the things you've just talked about. Based on the application rate, what is the likelihood of that product moving into the soil, moving into the water, or ending up in streams? What residues would that leave? Would that be toxic to aquatic life?

All of that is part of the data package that is evaluated by PMRA under the act.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Okay. We've had a great discussion today. We do have a little bit of time left over if anyone has any other questions.

I see one hand. Does anyone else have any more questions? Okay. I'll just go through the list here. We have a Conservative slot. I used one of them, so we have a Conservative member who can ask and then certainly next on the list is a Liberal.

From the Conservatives, who would like to ask some questions?

Go ahead, Mr. Lunney.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

Are there pest products that your industry used in the past that are no longer approved for use, and can you give us examples? What products are you no longer able to use, and what effect has this had on the industry? Did you lose products through the process, products that were once in use and were replaced by better products, or were there problems with products that took them off the market?

[Corey Loessin]

I can comment briefly. There have been examples of products that have been taken off. I recall one insecticide that we used years ago that was discontinued and actually replaced by the seed treatments we've been talking about. Our perspective in western Canada is that the way seed treatments go down with canola seed has as close to zero impact that you could have. There is no dust. There is no seed on top of the soil. It's all injected into the soil. So as far as safety goes, it appears—to me, at least—that it is a safe system to use.

Alternatively...and we've seen it; years ago we used to have canola fields completely eaten off by flea beetles, which is what the neonics are controlling. In their absence, our only alternative would be to overspray with a topical application, which is far more environmentally impactful. So that has occurred.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Could you repeat what you called those beetles?

[Corey Loessin]

Flea beetles.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Are they in the soil, or...?

[Corey Loessin]

No, they fly around. When the canola is just little, that's the time they attack it, about two weeks into its life. They will turn a field from green to completely black in a matter of a few days, really.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

That was a question I'd wanted to ask, and you've answered it for me. Thank you.

The other comment I'll just throw out there again is that I think the very fact that we have so many different soil types here.... Even canola is grown in a range of ecosystems across the country. Ontario is quite different from western Canada in some regards in terms of terrain.

I guess when you're dealing with this internationally, the variations and the unknowns are multiplied in some other countries where they don't have the established practices and procedures that we have. I guess it only underscores the need as to why we have to continue with international collaborative efforts—to have a better understanding of the ecosystem applications.

Do you have any examples or comments from your long-time experience, Mr. Loessin, in pulse crops in particular?