Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Dr. Meg Sears of Prevent Cancer Now talks about the regulatory flip -flop that led to a pesticide banned in the EU remaining on the market in Canada.
Speaker: Environmental and health organizations backed by university scientists are calling on Canada's Ministry of Health to intervene after a regulatory flip -flop has left an insecticide on the market.
Speaker: A ban proposed in 2018 concerned imidaclobrid and two other related pesticides used on corn, soybeans, potatoes and other crops. Imidaclobrid is a neonicotinoid insecticide that has been banned in the European Union since 2018.
Speaker: Neonicotinoids are linked to harms in human health. They're also significant contributors to global declines in pollinator and bird populations. Dr. Meg Sears is chair of Prevent Cancer Now.
Speaker: She trained in biochemical engineering and applied chemistry. Her interests include environmental and public health, and least -toxic approaches for law and policy. And Meg Sears joins me today to talk about why Amy Dacke -Labrid is still permitted for use in Canada.
Speaker: Hello, Meg. Hello. Thank you so much for the kind invitation. Oh, we're very happy to have you on the show. How is this pesticide used in agriculture? Well, I think you pretty much summed it up in your introduction. It's used on quite a few crops. It's sprayed to kill insects, but certainly there's a lot of commonality in the biochemistry between insects and amphibians and us. So,
Speaker: when they use these neurotoxic, that's the mode of action is that it affects the nervous system. And then this chemistry is given slight tweaks to make kind of chemical cousins. And so this family of chemicals have overlapping concerns. So I guess if it's actually sprayed onto crops and fields, then it's very easy for it to get into the water, into the ecosystem generally.
Speaker: Certainly. And it can be sprayed quite often pretty early on so that nothing eats the seeds and that kind of thing. And it's also used in turf to kill grubs and so on. And how prevalent is its use in Canada?
Speaker: It's one of the insecticides that's very commonly used when it was first introduced. Everybody said, oh, this is great. It's the greatest things in sliced bread because it's not as persistent as DDT. But over the years, we realized that something that is neurotoxic because most of these insecticides are also affect hormone systems. And as the knowledge grows, you realize, oh, the chemical of today is really not very good. And then something else comes along, and it goes through the same kind of cycle. So we had these very persistent insecticides during World War II. And we realize now that they're
Speaker: very bad. And this is one of the future generations after those. And so now we have collected evidence, they've been in commerce long enough for us to realize that there are some very serious downsides of these neonicotinoids as well. So what are some of the concerns about the health and the environmental effects of Amy Dacrobert that led to a proposed ban in Canada several years ago?
Speaker: One of the major concerns actually was that it affects so severely the insect populations that bird declines are very strongly linked to the use of these insecticides. So basically you spray it early in the springtime and then all of these insectivores which are nesting and trying to feed their babies during the springtime, they don't have their food. So the birds are starving and dying off and we've seen major declines in bird populations. And it's kind of ironic because basically we're shooting our friends because the birds, if they're there, they can eat an awful lot of the insect pests as well.
Speaker: How much research has been done into its prevalence in the environment in Canada? Well, not a heck of a lot, but certainly Dr. Christy Morrissey was in the news because she had found that there were very high levels in small shallow waters, ephemeral water bodies, they call them. They're sort of springtime when all of these insects are coming along. They may dry up later, but they're there when they're needed. So she's done a lot of work, and it was on the basis of Christy Morrissey's work.
Speaker: that it was being proposed that this chemical actually be banned in Canada. It's banned in the EU. So then the pesticide companies came in and they said, oh, but you know, um we have to reinterpret all of this. And so they bent the ear of the regulator, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency at Health Canada,
Speaker: And Health Canada, the PMRA, they reversed. And so now we realize that they were not acting appropriately and that really this chemical and probably the family of chemicals should be banned.
Speaker: Now, I mentioned the letter um in my introduction and in the signatories of of which you are one, ah requesting that the minister put safeguards in place to ensure that pest management regulatory agency scientists can do their job in the public interest. And elsewhere in the letter, you use the term regulatory capture. Could you spell out for me exactly what your concerns are about that?
Speaker: Well, Prevent Cancer Now and some of the other signatories on this letter, we have taken a great deal of time over the years to examine not only the data that's publicly available, we have looked at confidential test data, and we've also had disclosure in court cases, and certainly the lead on this, EcoJustice, they have done a lot of that. And when you go through the confidential test data,
Speaker: I have seen where test data that was very strong was misinterpreted for various pesticides. And we see in the disclosure before court cases that there have been all sorts of meetings between the regulator and the pesticide companies that have resulted in the PMRA completely reversing its position and reinterpreting the science.
Speaker: So that's one concern. And we also have a concern that upfront, they are not even really properly assessing the science in Canada. They're simply accepting what has been done elsewhere. And that was in the context of another pesticide. But certainly, we feel that the PMRA scientists are not in a position to really do their job. In fact, for one pesticide that I looked at, they did not even have a proper spreadsheet, a large spreadsheet of data. All it was was an image. So they could not verify, and they did not verify, the conclusions of the pesticide company when they were submitting their application for registration.
Speaker: Now, you mentioned the work of Christy Morrissey. She's a Canadian ecologist and a University of Saskatchewan professor, and she filed two objections to the reevaluation of Imidaclobrid in 2021. What was the basis for those objections?
Speaker: She had done some very careful work measuring this chemical and breakdown products in water bodies close to crops. She works with a large group that have examined this problem with bird populations and insecticide use. So that was really the basis of it, that the water concentrations were higher than were considered to be safe in the evaluation.
Speaker: So it's running off and it's killing insects. It's killing insects that the birds need to eat and our bird populations are going down. And there's a pretty direct line there. And yet the PMRA that is supposed to be protecting the birds and protecting human health and so on, simply is taking the word of the pesticide companies that it's not appropriate to be looking at anything other than permanent water bodies in this case.
Speaker: which is ridiculous. We know in the springtime, we have all sorts of mosquitoes that come out of these ephemeral water bodies. All the things that eat those mosquitoes and those frogs and so on, they need that ephemeral water body. That's part of our ecology. And yet the PMRA agreed with the industry that they would only consider analyses from these permanent water bodies. What happened to those objections that she filed three years ago?
Speaker: Good question. I think that they're under a big pile of dust because we have not seen any evidence of them so much as cracking the spine on them. They are supposed to be evaluated and either a response given or a reevaluation conducted. And so far it's been silence. So they're not doing their job. So what are you asking the health minister to do about Imidactrobrid?
Speaker: Well, we're saying that this is a very serious problem. It should be banned like in the EU and along with its chemical cousins, the other ones, and that the PMRA should be investigated. It was published on November the 29th. that there are deep links between Canada's pesticide regulator and the industry lobby groups because actually the heads of several industry lobby groups used to work at the PMRA. So CropLife is an international organization and it Canadian president
Speaker: used to work with five years as a senior policy analyst at the PMRA. Several other ones are as well. So they're they're going into the PMRA and basically sitting down with their work colleagues from past lives. And there's not really any cooling off period. And somehow this friendship seems to override protection of human and environmental health.
Speaker: So you're hoping for some kind of independent review of this chemical? Yes, it must be independent. There's no way that the PMRA can re -evaluate this and be impartial. The other thing is that they've taken a very long time.
Speaker: Right now we have this strange situation where the PMRA makes a decision and then somebody objects to it and then the PMRA has to decide themselves whether the objection to their own decision has merit.
Speaker: So, so far we have not found that they've ever decided that they made a mistake themselves. So we need to have an independent body looking at notices of objection that are not already invested in the original decision. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Meg. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I've been speaking with Dr. Meg Sears Chair of Prevent Cancer Now, and one of the signatories of the Open Letter to Minister of Health, Mark Holland.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio dot .org slash redeye.
