Mr. Chair and members of the committee, I want to thank you for this opportunity to address you and talk about the Pest Control Products Act and more specifically, about the Pest Management Regulatory Agency that operates the act.
First, just a bit about the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is a foundation. It is part of the oldest environmental organization in the world, dating back to 1892. We have been working in Canada to preserve and protect the natural environment for more than 50 years.
I'm the national program director, based here in Ottawa.
We believe that fundamental to all good environmental policy is transparency and public involvement in decisions that impact us all. To that end, I reviewed Mr. Aucoin's testimony before this committee last week. I wouldn't say he misled you, but I would certainly say that the reality is much different from the way he described it.
He made a point of telling you about the consultations that they do on their decisions about a whole bunch of things. What he didn't tell you was that they have 30 consultations a year. But their consultations don't come until after the decisions are made and you aren't allowed to see what kind of scientific basis those decisions were made from. When you're offered an opportunity to comment, you can't really comment effectively because you can't review the science that the PMRA reviewed in order to come to its decision.
It's not a real consultation in any sense of the word. It's a public relations exercise in order to put a check mark on the box at the end of the day that, well, we had comments.
He also told you that you could inspect all the scientific data that the PMRA uses to make its decisions. What he didn't say was that if you want to inspect the data, you have to go to Heron and Riverside, in person, to the library and look at the data on a very antique set of computers and a really hard database to read. It's there if you can go, that's true, but it's not in a format that is of any use to the researchers who might need that data or for us trying to determine whether or not decisions were made. Also, you're not allowed to see the most important documents, which are what they call data evaluation records. This is the record of the data and what process they used to come to the decisions that they came to.
They're approving pesticides and these are poisons and toxins, but you're not allowed to understand how that decision was arrived at and that's a really important point because you cannot effectively comment on a decision if you don't know how that decision was arrived at and you aren't allowed to see the same data as the government people.
Then he also mentioned that if there's a decision that any member of the public doesn't like, they can ask for a review. That's true. In September 2013, that's over 15 months ago, Sierra Club Canada and a number of other environmental organizations filed a notice of objection, asking for a review of the decision to re-licence clothianidin, which is one of the neonicotinoid pesticides. That's 15 months ago and we still haven't got a review. What we have got, after a press release and a press conference last March, was a letter from them saying we'll give you an answer in June. In June we got a letter saying we'll give you an answer in the fall and we haven't heard anything since.
That's 15 months and in that 15 months four more neonicotinoid pesticides have been registered. There's lots of time and staff to provide services to the pesticide industry to register pesticides, but there's no one and no time to actually give us that review that we have the right to. That's a really critical point.
That brings us back to the registry. He talked about the fact there's an online registry of all the pesticide information. Well, it's just a big list. It's not searchable. You cannot easily find any information unless you know exactly what to look for, exactly when it happened. You can't find it. I asked my staff last summer to look in the registry and determine how many neonicotinoid pesticides were on the market on a conditional licence. A conditional licence is yes, you can go ahead and sell it, but we'd like further scientific information, which is a whole other issue, but we'll get to that.
When we found it, we had to reprogram the database, download it all and reprogram it so that we could actually determine that information that should have been easily obtainable. What we found was that 55 of these pesticides have been on the market on conditional licences.
We wrote to the PMRA and asked them for a copy of the science that was a condition of the licence. Were those conditions met? When were they met? What we got back was a letter—and there's a copy of it in the presentation—telling us that everything is fine, that rigorous science is used by the PMRA, and we did not need to worry, but no mention of giving us any science or any indication of the dates when that science arrived.
Then, last week I was invited here. Last Thursday, I was invited here, and last Friday morning, I received another email from the PMRA. Now they're telling me that they're in fact going to provide that science. Do I have a right to it or don't I have a right to it? Do I have to appear before a parliamentary committee in order to see science from a government agency?
I think the last point I want to make before I go to our recommendations is that we're talking about licensing poisons and toxins. The decisions are of a critical importance, and we should be using the precautionary principle while we make those decisions. The precautionary principle says to us that if there's any possibility that something could go wrong if we allow this on the market, then we shouldn't do it. But that's not what happens with our Pest Management Regulatory Agency. It says we're not sure about a whole bunch of stuff, so we'll give you a conditional licence. You know, some of those conditional licences go back to 2004, so some products have been on the market for 10 years on a conditional licence waiting for more science. According to the latest communications from the PMRA, they've got all the science now, but they still haven't made it public. We should really have a system in place where the precaution and the onus is on the manufacturers to prove it absolutely isn't a problem—not on the public to prove that it is a problem after something bad has happened, like we've seen across the world in terms of neonicotinoid pesticides. There are studies from all around the world indicating that these pesticides need to have greater restrictions, yet we're not seeing any movement in that direction in Canada outside of the province of Ontario.
That brings me to our five simple recommendations.
The precautionary principle should be in the act. It should say that we don't do things unless we're absolutely sure, and if there's any question, we don't do them.
The act should be amended to ensure that not only do you have to prove that a pesticide is safe, but you should also have to prove that it's actually needed. There are 7,000 pesticide compounds registered in Canada. I think we've got most of it covered, and if we're going to put a new one on, shouldn't we be taking an old one off? Will we just keep adding them?
All qualified requests for a reconsideration of a PMRA decision should result in a mandatory review, to be held within a specified period. Now, a few years ago, Parliament saw fit to change the Environmental Assessment Act to limit the amount of time taken to assess a major project to two years. We're 15 months into a request for a hearing on one pesticide—15 months.
The public should be informed at the beginning of the process, not at the end. The only way we know when a pesticide is registered is if somebody is watching the PMRA website, or watching for the ads from the pesticide companies. We need to be informed at the beginning.
We should build into the act a citizen review committee with some experts to review PMRA decisions, policies, and practices, and advise the minister. Right now, the only advice about the workings of the PMRA to the minister is coming from the PMRA. We think that there should be some outside overview of that, so that the PMRA can be brought up to date. It insists that it has rigorous science. It has rigorous science but its rigorous science is 20 years old. There are much more effective means of studying the impacts of a pesticide in the environment than the system used presently by the PMRA. We need a systematic approach to determine the effects of a pesticide. We don't do that in Canada.
Thank you very much, and I'll be glad to answer questions later on.