Health Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2015

[Gord Kurbis]

No. You'd be surprised. Those sorts of risks can't be easily insured.

The difficulty here is that if there were a legitimate tolerance put in place that was evidence-based and you were non-compliant with it, well, your non-compliance would be your own fault, so you would lose some money. That's not an easy thing to accept but that would be the reality.

If you're going to a country that is operating on a zero tolerance just because they're 18 months away, let's say, from when they will finally have a tolerance in place, and you have any detectable residue and you get a boatload of that value rejected for that reason, it would be hard to describe that as a science-based rejection. That's the risk we're describing.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

You have to burn it.

[Gord Kurbis]

In that case, the regulator can order the cargo to be destroyed or to be redirected. These things go out compliant with Canadian tolerance levels, and there are other countries around the world that would have similar tolerance levels.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

That's very helpful. Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thanks very much.

The next round of questions is going to be in French. We'll do a test of the interpretation, because we don't want to cut into Ms. Moore's time.

Give me the thumbs up if it's working.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Can everyone who needs it hear the simultaneous interpretation?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Okay? Good.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you.

If you want to take notes, I am going to ask three questions, one after the other. These are three elements I haven't found anywhere in the Pest Control Products Act.

My first question is about the simultaneous use of two pest control products that might come from different manufacturers. It has been shown that the products are harmless or present few risks when used on their own. However, I would like to know who is responsible for ensuring the safety of two products used at the same time.

How does that work? Do you think provisions should be added to the act to address the combined use of two products?

I see that the act's mandate talks about promoting sustainable pest management, but it does not explicitly state that the Pest Management Regulatory Agency has a mandate to provide independent advice on the best products to use. Practically speaking, how does a person go about choosing the best pest control product? Perhaps Ms. Dyer and Mr. Loessin could answer that question.

When we are told that a product is the most appropriate, and it is recommended to us, or when we are told which products are available, how can we ensure that this advice is independent?

In addition, I don't see any mention in the act about what should be done when there is potential resistance to certain products. Would it be appropriate to state at what point there would be an obligation to report potential resistance and who would be responsible for doing so?

Should the agency be required to establish an action plan as soon as there is potential resistance, in order to try to nip it in the bud?

I would appreciate your comments on this.

[Pierre Petelle]

With regard to your first question on when two products are used together, I think you're talking about whether it's mixed at the same time and who would be responsible if something were to go wrong. Generally, the label covers what is allowed or not allowed. If a label specifically says that this product is not to be mixed with any other herbicides or whatever, then it would be an infraction of the law to do so. If it's silent on that, then the user needs to check and find out from the registrants if there are any issues with mixing the two products.

In terms of the safety, the assessment that PMRA does is based on the active ingredients and whether that product can pose a safety risk or an environment risk on its own. Any product that has a similar mode of action is also taken into account. For example, when they do their risk assessment for what you're consuming, it does take into account similar modes of action. It may not be the same type of product, but if it acts the same way on your nervous system or there are any potential health issues, the impacts of those other types of products are also taken into account.

It's not a mystery in terms of when products are mixed. It's quite often done for resistance management, for example, to make sure that you're not selecting for a weed that can develop resistance. That's a fairly common thing that the act would easily be covering.

I'll leave the mission statement to whomever provides independent advice to my colleagues here. But in terms of what to do about resistance, in fact there is quite a bit on resistance. It may not be in the act, but it may be more in the regulations. All of the products have a mode of action, a group. For example, herbicides fall into different groups in terms of their mode of action, and that's on the label. A farmer knows. Even though he may be rotating from brand A to brand B, if they both have the same group 2 indication on there, he knows he's not really rotating chemistry, and that's not a good thing. He could be selecting for resistance. That resistance labelling is on all of the products.

In addition, many of the labels will have additional use instructions, for example, “use only once per year”, or “rotate with another different mode of action on an annual basis”. There are some specific resistance prevention measures required on a label for growers.

[Corey Loessin]

Mr. Chair, I could address the second and the third question.

The second question about choosing the best product is quite a complex decision, which ultimately is the farmer's decision, based on a book that is about an inch and a half thick and is updated annually. That's a list of all of the registered products in Canada. That would be a starting point, basically. But primarily it's a long-range planning activity that you do in order to choose the best product for that particular year, which will control the pests you have, and which is safe to use, economical, and that you've had good experience with.

More, and increasingly, it's a matter of planning for years hence; in other words, keeping track of whether there's a soil residue to be concerned with in the year after, or the year after that. That's something else that you consider when you're choosing the product you use. As Pierre mentioned, I think foremost in a lot of the grower's minds now is planning herbicide or chemical rotation so that you are not repeatedly using the same groups year after year and fostering a resistant population in your fields. It really is a complex planning equation, and I would say that most growers are planning four and five years, and longer, in advance, in terms of what's going to be used on certain fields and in what year.

The advent of resistant populations is something that is increasingly catching the attention of growers. We're becoming more educated about it and devising strategies to become more diverse in terms of cropping and in terms of products we use to alleviate that risk from developing.

That would be some of the thinking as far as choosing products that are used on our farms. The other thing is that we don't always do something; we would rather not. Particularly, when an insect population starts to arise in a crop, it doesn't necessarily mean that we control it. Farmers are fairly skilled in evaluating the level of risk from that insect, and if the population is not high enough to warrant a control measure, we don't do it because it costs us money. I think as time goes on, farmers are getting better and better in terms of making accurate decisions on whether something is required or not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Lizon.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Thank you very much, and thank you to all the witnesses for coming here this afternoon.

Like my colleague Terence, I also represent an urban riding but I grew up on a farm. I'm not familiar with much of the stuff you mentioned here; technology has changed over the years.

Mr. Loessin and Mr. Kurbis, you mentioned here and in news releases in the past that Canadian exporters navigate a difficult system, a Byzantine system, of regulations. You're moving your products to about 150 countries and you face these difficulties. On the practical side, I don't think this will ever disappear because there will be new products for farmers in Canada and in other countries. It will always be a two-way street. How would you suggest we find the best way to deal with it? Going back to your example of that shipment worth $40 million that was stopped. Probably someone knew before you sent that shipment that the person who was receiving it had a zero tolerance. Therefore, in that particular case, did someone just take a chance that it would pass?

If there's a new product here, some countries would not have standards. How do you deal with this? If you're sending products to 150 countries, and let's say some had higher standards than here, what would you do? Would you have a select number of farmers growing a crop that would go to those select countries and keeping their standards high? How do you deal with that? You mentioned custom unions. There's one in the European Union. Russia is trying to put together another one. It's not going very well. There may be others. Then you have big countries that have their own regulations. How do you propose to best deal with these situations so that you don't take the chance on one side, and so that whoever, whether farmers or the people who buy products from them, are not hit with a loss?

[Gord Kurbis]

That's a great question. At the risk of offending my elect director, who employs me, I'll tell you a story.

Earlier this year in California at a global harmonization workshop, which a bunch of grower groups attended, one of the representatives of one of the horticulture crop groups from California said, “Do you know what? Four years ago our growers didn't even know what an MRL was.” I would say that four or five years ago, many growers in western Canada didn't know what an MRL was either.

This is a relatively new thing to discover, that there are these tolerances in place globally that are not harmonized. If we have a four and someone else has a five, or there's an eight there and a 10 here, we can deal with all that. The real concern for us is when somebody has a zero in place. In fact, we did some analysis after that lentil incident, because we didn't know, as the national association, where else we had potentially zero tolerances being applied. In some cases it's very difficult to determine. Countries don't have any defined default policy. We don't have a tolerance in place. What will we apply if we find a detectable residue? Will it be that the sky's the limit? Will it be a zero? Will it be the tolerance that is from another taxonomically similar crop or some chemical limit of detection?

There are reasons it's not always possible to know what you need to comply with on, let's say, 30 or 40 registered products on four or five crops going into 150-plus countries. How would we propose to deal with this? This is an emerging problem that's being increasingly recognized by multiple grower groups.

We have some suggestions. One actually brings us back to the request we made to make sure the PMRA is fully resourced in its efforts to bring resolution to this, and that is participation by more countries in global joint reviews, which bring regulators from around the world together to review the same data packages and come up with more harmonized tolerances. It doesn't require any regulator to give up its sovereignty; it's just looking at it together.

We now have better systems in place. We put out grower advisories every year to say, “Look, you really don't have the freedom to operate you might think.” Just because a product has been fully reviewed and is legal for use in Canada, we need to be careful about international tolerances that may not be in place. We're in our third year of putting out an advisory to growers every summer, and we have five markets by six different desiccants or harvest management products on four crops. In about 20% of these cases, we have inadequate international tolerances.

We think part of the solution in the future is some form of recognition of other jurisdictions' tolerances, only as interims, on a voluntary basis. Let me give you an example of a couple of countries that do something like this. Panama, for example, uses Codex MRLs generated by risk assessments from the World Health Organization. But if Codex doesn't have an MRL in place, they will say that they will use the U.S. MRL. If there's both no Codex and no U.S. MRL, then they'll use the European Union's MRL. This is the sort of country where we would never face a zero tolerance because of that. Someone will have gone through that assessment process.

I think it's safe to say that the problem will get more challenging before it gets better. We need to use all the solutions that are going to be available to us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thank you.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Is there no more time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

It was time a couple of minutes ago, but your generous chair allowed you to carry on.

Next up is Mr. Kellway.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And through you to the witnesses today, thank you for coming. It's been a very interesting conversation today.

I wonder if I detect some regional divides in the conversation. Like Mr. Young, I represent an urban riding, and my constituents are alive to the bee and neonics issue. I was asked to attend a grade 4 class at a local elementary school recently because the kids had a petition to give me to present in the House of Commons on this very subject of pollinators and the neonics. Each of them had written letters for the minister; some of them painted bee stripes on the back of their letters. I split them between the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Health, and have asked for a response on the issue. When I go to the farmers' markets in the summer, people also stop and talk about this issue a lot.

I think all of you touched on the issue of public confidence in the act, and I think Mr. Petelle, you talked about certain groups undermining confidence. But one of the interesting things about the neonic thing and the bees and the pollinator issue more generally is that although the claim has been made that this is a very rigorous science-based regulatory process, different jurisdictions looking at the same science have reacted very differently. I want to use the neonic thing as just a case in point. It's even within Canada. Ontario just recently has restricted the use of neonics on 80% of, I think, soybean and corn crops.

Do you guys detect a lack of public confidence or trust in this regulatory system, and if so, to what do you attribute that?

[Pierre Petelle]

I can understand why constituents, especially in urban centres, would be forgiven for their belief that there is a dire crisis for bees. The statistics don't support that. Nevertheless, when we looked at the issue of potential exposure of our products to bees, we took that very seriously, and I talked about some of the measures that were put into place. Insecticides will kill insects, and bees are insects. We've never denied that. The issue is trying to keep the bees and the pesticides apart.

When those seed treatments were brought to the market, it was an innovation heralded even by some of the very groups that are countering them now, because you were now taking a very small amount of pesticide and putting it on a very small surface and putting it in the soil. There was no more spraying; there were no more granular products. It's a revolutionary way of delivering a product exactly where it needs to be, and we still maintain that's the case.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

But on the statistics.... The Ontario Beekeepers' Association is calling for a moratorium on the use of neonics, and the Province of Ontario has a big website dedicated to the health of pollinators and human health. They look at all the statistics, and they've come to the conclusion that there should be a major restriction on the use, etc.

I don't want to look at the particular issue of the bees, whether they are dying or not, or this issue between statistics. But for the claim that this is a science-based process, it doesn't seem very predictable, because the confidence, I think, comes out of predictability. Yet jurisdictions around the world.... The European Union has looked at the statistics, and the same science.

Mr. Kurbis, you mentioned about having the same data packages and hoping that the tolerance levels looked like they came out of the same galaxy. This seems to be an issue here. Everybody is looking at the same science, but the outcome, the regulatory response, isn't very predictable. That's my point.

What's responsible for that?

[Pierre Petelle]

I would argue that if you look at all the jurisdictions that are focused on the neonics or the pollinator issue, there is consistency. PMRA is joined with the U.S. EPA and California DPR, arguably the biggest regulators in the world, and they're going through the re-evaluation process. They haven't had any knee-jerk reaction to the issue. They are continuing that process.

Ontario has proposed a decision and we're not sure where that's going to end up. They don't have the 300 scientists that PMRA does, so we're not sure. When we asked what information they had that PMRA doesn't, they didn't have any additional information. We're not sure how they came to this conclusion.

With regard to Europe, that would be a whole other discussion to have. They have a different structure there. In fact, the data that led them to their decision to put a moratorium on some products with neonics was based on a protocol that wasn't even adopted yet. In fact, if you take that protocol and you put any chemistry through it, whether it's a herbicide, fungicide, or insecticide, today none of them would pass that screening.

No one is arguing that all pesticides should be banned or put on a moratorium, even in Europe. This issue is very complex, and there is a lot of misinformation out there unfortunately. The issue has become emotionally charged and it's very difficult to have a rational discussion, which is why when we have a science-based system like the Pest Control Products Act and scientists review those data, they can set aside the emotion and look at the core science and what the information is telling us. To date, the information is telling them that restrictions aren't necessary.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

So—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Mr. Kellway, we are over but you will have the opportunity for another round.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Kurbis had a quick response I think, if that's okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Sure.

[Gord Kurbis]

I'll be quick.

When we look at a generation of international tolerances, it really does seem as though there are very few products that regulators don't agree on or come up with different approaches on. It seems to me that it's analogous to the pharmaceutical system, in which there really are very few drugs that are controversial in terms of their effects on humans. I don't know if the neonicotinoid issue is representative of the broader package of products that are registered for crops.