Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Scott Kirby, director general of the environmental assessment directorate at Health Canada's pest management regulatory agency (PMRA). We are the federal regulator of pesticides and so we are very interested in all potential impacts of agricultur

Agriculture committee  Thank you for your question. To speak to the issue of the decrease in the number of incidents over the last couple of years, I think you're right. I think it's not a single factor that's attributed to that. I think it has been unprecedented, the amount of collaboration and co-

Agriculture committee  —but suffice it to say that it's within their jurisdiction to do this.

Agriculture committee  Sure. Thank you for the question. With respect to bee health writ large, I really can't speak to that. I can speak to the issue in Ontario and the link to corn and soy. Beginning in 2012 we started to receive a large number of incident reports indicating bee mortalities at bee

Agriculture committee  That's definitely a possibility. Our work doesn't look specifically at those linkages. We're looking at impacts of pesticides on bees directly. This new framework that was put in place earlier in 2013 to look at the impact of pesticides on bees is helping us do a better job of lo

Agriculture committee  I'm the one who would be answering that question. The answer to that question is that at this stage we don't know. Right now, we're doing a targeted re-evaluation of all three Canadian neonicotinoids. We released our preliminary assessment on imidacloprid just this past January.

Agriculture committee  With respect to the water monitoring data, all the water monitoring data was considered. We received quite an extensive amount from across the country, more than we would normally have for a normal re-evaluation. Much of the information was lacking what we call ancillary data, wh

Agriculture committee  Absolutely, because—

Agriculture committee  The thresholds are set based on the available data. Over the course of time, since imidacloprid has been registered, there have been many toxicity studies conducted that feed the information to develop thresholds. The more, what we call, “toxicity end points” you have, the more t

Agriculture committee  Sorry...?

Agriculture committee  It depends on what you're talking about. With respect to the PMRA's benchmark that we're using for our risk assessment, our threshold is set at 0.04 micrograms per litre, I believe, for chronic effects. That is the benchmark we use for our risk assessment. There are other thre

Agriculture committee  The Environment Canada threshold was developed basically over a decade ago, I think, and it was based on a limited amount of information, so that threshold is no longer relevant.

Agriculture committee  No. We actually consulted with Environment Canada ahead of our decision. We shared our risk assessment with them. They went through it. They concurred with our approach. We also consulted with the Department of Agriculture ahead of time to discuss where we were at.

Agriculture committee  We have no real-world data in terms of impacts actually in the environment. We virtually never do. That's not something we normally receive. The information that we have is what we're basing our assessment on. I just want to make sure we understand that the onus is on the regist

Agriculture committee  I'd just like to make it clear that the decision was not political. The decision was driven by science. That's how we make our decisions. As Mr. Aucoin pointed out with the pollinator assessments, there was a lot of pressure to deregister the chemical based on the impacts on po