Mr. Speaker, I appreciated listening to my learned friend and to the question from the member for Peterborough. I have had more than 50 years of experience with the use of pesticides, insecticides, herbicides and so on. I appreciate the fact that the 1969 legislation needed to be updated. However I suggest to the House and to the Minister of Health that to make the bill effective and to make it have broader appeal, control and easier to regulate, we have to have a program which will involve a great amount of co-operation between the provinces, the local governments and individuals.
When my learned friend was speaking, I could not help but go back to a time that many people will not remember; the grasshopper plague in western Canada. The hordes of grasshoppers blocked out the sun. In an attempt to control this pest, carloads of sawdust. were brought in. I do not know what they mixed with it, but as a kid I would throw this out. The control was worth two things and that was nothing twice. It really did nothing in the control the grasshoppers.
It is possible that there are millions of acres in western Canada, given the right temperature and amount of sunshine, that could be facing a similar situation to the thirties. Once before we used a spray called dieldrin that really killed the grasshoppers but it was very hard on the operators. It was a very dangerous insecticide.
We have a situation that has developed where we would not have enough pesticides on hand in western Canada and eastern Canada because the grasshopper population could explode over a weekend with the right amount of hatching. Therefore, those areas that are most polluted with grasshoppers right now and if they have any crops growing, they could lose their crops again without adequate supply. Western Canada has not had any crops for two or three years. I lived through that in the sixties and part of the seventies.
When I talk about co-operation, I know what that means. I know what we have to do and I know that a lot of legwork has to be done to make this bill effective. I have seen children who have been hurt by the spray. I have even seen animals, pets running alongside the tractor and the sprayer, that have been hurt by the spray.
We get so excited at times about some things and then we do the wrong thing. For instance, the same area that is likely to explode with a huge grasshopper population is also an area of western Saskatchewan and into Alberta that is polluted with the Richardson's ground squirrel or the gopher. We can now get the proper percentage of pesticide and the farmer must bring the oats or grain in to be spread. I do not necessarily disagree with that.
However what happened to the chap who invented the gophinator? It used the same gas as the farms used for fertilization. Just one shot down the hole and it controlled the spread of gophers in a painless way. However the animal rights people did not see that this was not only valuable as a fertilizer and that the pesticide was controlled. Therefore for some reason or another the patent was disallowed. Now this very thing that is being used is labelled a toxic substance. I am not too sure if we do not move in the wrong direction very often.
I would like to relate another incident that we would not allow today, and we have come a long way.
A church group in town bought three extra lots which were once used for propane storage and delivery. They had a herbicide on the market which sold under the generic name of Spike. It was used mainly around the elevators, so any grass fires would not get up close. However, nobody had properly tested that. Let me give some examples. I said that I would plant trees around the edge of that lot but before I did I noticed that nothing was growing there. I took in a soil sample and was told that nothing would grow in that soil for 25 or 30 years and maybe never.
At one of the schools I was supervising they built a football field with a track around the field. They put this Spike herbicide on the field, which was a good idea, but a heavy rain fell. They put enough on that it ran down corner wise some distance away and killed two big pine trees at the edge of the lot. We have come a long way but in some instances we have not come far enough.
Let me tell members about co-operation. Two years ago I had a double row of a very popular hedge called cotoneaster. Cotoneaster is subject to infestations of what I call pear slugs. They are cone shaped like a pear and if they are not controlled they ruin the whole hedge. They do not kill it but it is nothing to look at for the year.
The most effective insecticide was malathion. Let us talk about co-operation. I would tell the widow lady to the east and the one to the west the day I was going to spray the hedge. The smell still got into the house but I wore a mask when I sprayed. Eventually I took the hedge out. I wanted to do that because I did not want to have bad relations with two friends that I have had for years. That is what I mean by co-operation.
Where I live we have all kinds of empty lots. The town does not have enough money to hire crews to keep these vacant lots properly trimmed and so on. The town is caught in a dreadful squeeze. It does not have enough money to hire a crew to keep up the lots. It only has enough money to spray the lots. Some of these sprays come under the province's noxious weed act. All provinces have noxious weed acts. One can see that the ragweed, the sow thistle, the Canadian thistle and so on are very high.
Here is the catch. If the towns do not go in and spray the ragweed the people who suffer from that pollen will suffer terribly but if the towns do spray then they also suffer. I support the bill but, in all honesty, I think we have to do a fair amount of public relations in order to make it successful.
Let me tell members of another example. When I was farming in Saskatchewan, under the noxious weed act authorities could destroy the weeds on any given piece of land that contained noxious weeds and I would be charged.
Today, however, with the herbicides that have been used it is not difficult to control the weeds. Most spraying is done miles away from another farm or miles away from somebody else and, for the most part, has been mostly controlled.
This is a little off topic but Prince Edward Island developed a genetically modified potato that insects did not chew at the leaves. The excuse customers in the United States used was that they had the right potato but that they were GMO potatoes and that potatoes had to be from Maine first. So the PEI potatoes were banned. PEI went back to growing the original potato. It had a good crop but it had to be sprayed about three times. On that little island the spray comes right up against the schoolyard. They have smaller fields and there is a real problem.
How do we deal with that? How do we deal with taking away the livelihood of an individual and still comply with this particular bill? We need to find ways to make that happen.
I think the government is correct in allowing the municipalities to maintain the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes. I also believe that it will require a great deal of public relations. I believe that one of the things that has to be done with the passage of the bill is that various departments need to co-operate, such as the Department of the Environment and the Department of Health, in putting out a campaign across the country showing the health dangers and also co-operating at the local level with the municipalities and the provinces.
If there is indeed an outbreak of grasshoppers this spring the municipality's responsibility is to spray some of those roadways where most of the eggs are lying at the present time. This is a big problem and perhaps bigger out there where there are so many acres and so many problems that we have, particularly with gophers, grasshoppers and so on.
We believe that proven sound science domestically and so on should be on an ongoing basis for debate so that we can provide the best for those who are growing the products but also the best for our health and in particular the health of children and, as my hon. friend mentioned, pregnant women and so on.
I support the bill. I think we can do great things with the co-operation of the federal government, the provincial governments, the municipalities and the individuals who have to use the products.
