Subject: Your "Registered' POISONS Are In The Canadian News-----
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2000 00:58:27 -0500
From: Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State
of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation
Dear Mr. Helliker, I thought you might like to read
interesting comments from The Gazette (Montreal) - Mon 04 Dec 2000 - A8
-HEADLINE: `Every Canadian has been exposed'.
``Tainted blood is going to be a blip on the screen when
this hits the fan, because every Canadian has been exposed to pesticides. And
when Canadians understand what these products have been doing to them all
these years, they will immediately say, `Why didn't the government ban them?'
''
- Merryl Hammond, West Island resident who founded
Citizens for Alternatives to Pesticides.
- - -
``For my son and all the children of Quebec and Canada
and the whole planet, I say please do stop this poison. It's useless poison
that we are spraying on our lawns.''
- Monique Levesque, mother of cancer survivor
Jean-Dominique Levesque-Rene.
- - -
``I was very polite with him. I knocked on his door and I
asked him: `Please don't do this, because it makes me sick every time.' He
slammed the door in my face.''
- Jean-Dominique Levesque-Rene recounts a neighbour's
reaction to being asked to stop spraying his lawn with pesticides.
- - -
``Pesticides are known to play, or are suspected of
playing, a role in a myriad of diseases and developmental abnormalities,
including cancer (brain, breast, stomach, prostate and testicles), childhood
leukemia, reduced fertility, damage to the thyroid and pituitary glands,
lowered immunity, developmental abnormalities and behavioural problems.
However, pesticides that might cause harm, but that have not been proven to do
so on a weight of evidence basis, are not likely to be pulled off the market
or refused registration. It is therefore critical that research be undertaken
to provide that degree of scientific certainty needed to support precautionary
action.''
** - Commons Committee Report on Pesticides - Making the
Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment, May 2000.
- - -
** ``I assure you that Health Canada takes very seriously
its responsibilities as the federal agency charged with regulation of
pesticides. The ministry's scientists are very aware that the decisions they
make daily have repercussions on the health and safety of Canadians, including
their own children.''
- Health Minister Allan Rock in a letter to
Jean-Dominique Levesque-Rene dated Oct. 16, 2000.
- - -
``We believe that municipalities have the right to
protect the health of the people within their boundaries. Municipalities can
ban or restrict smoking in the name of protecting health, so the same right
should be in the grasp of municipalities when it comes to pesticides.''
- Angela Rickman, deputy director of the Sierra Club of
Canada.
- - -
``More than 7,000 pesticides are registered for use in
Canada, many of which contain active ingredients that have not been
re-evaluated for years. In fact, of the 500 active ingredients contained in
registered products, over 300 were approved before 1981 and over 150 before
1960.''
- Commons Committee Report on Pesticides
______________________________
Monday 4
December 2000 - Pesticide fight heads for top court - Lawn-care firms
challenging municipal ban on controversial chemicals - MICHELLE LALONDE - The
Montreal Gazette
MARCOS TOWNSEND, GAZETTE / Jean-Dominique Levesque-Rene
made headlines six years ago at the age of 11 when he forced the city of
Montreal to admit it was using pesticides.
When Jean-Dominique Levesque-Rene first stood up at Montreal city hall
five years ago and politely asked if the city used pesticides in public parks,
he was only 11 years old and he had cancer.
The mayor reassured the boy that the city did not use
chemical pesticides, only to be forced to recant several weeks later.
The city did - and, indeed, still does - routinely use at
least 16 different chemical products to control weeds, fungi, insects, rats
and other pests on city property.
The boy's question and the mayor's mistake sparked
concern about pesticide use in the Montreal area. Over the past decade,
similar dramas have been unfolding at city halls and school boards across
Canada.
That spark of concern is about to be reignited in Ottawa
on Thursday, when the Supreme Court will hear an appeal by two lawn-care
companies against a nine-year-old anti-pesticide bylaw in Hudson.
Levesque-Rene, now 17, has become a national spokesman
against the cosmetic use of pesticides in cities and suburbs, where no
agricultural crops are threatened by pests or weeds.
"I am 100-per-cent sure that pesticides gave me
cancer. They made me sick when I was young and they continue to make me
sick," said Levesque-Rene, who still lives on Ile Bizard, just off
Montreal Island.
"Each spring when people spray, I get stomachaches,
I get very tired, I get headaches. I know it's related to that."
It is still not known if Levesque-Rene has beaten his
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but he said he will not give up the fight for a
federal ban on pesticides.
Levesque-Rene suffered through 11 months of chemotherapy,
missed two years of primary school and lost a good chunk of his childhood to
cancer. He now knows that the common herbicide 2,4-D had been sprayed on the
grass surrounding his home every summer from the time he was a toddler.
He also now knows this product had been linked to
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in farmers.
With one more year of tests to undergo before his cancer
can officially be considered in remission, Levesque-Rene is hopeful that he is
cured.
But like thousands of Canadians, he is still plagued by
multiple chemical sensitivity, a chronic condition with symptoms that recur in
response to low levels of exposure to multiple unrelated chemicals.
That's why he spends as much time as his high-school
schedule and his health permit lobbying for local, provincial and federal
legislation to reduce pesticide use.
D D D
In recent years, dozens of communities across the
country, mostly in Ontario and Quebec, have passed bylaws to ban or reduce the
use of pesticides, as evidence of possible and proven health risks has
mounted. Hundreds of other city and town councils have spent the past decade
holding off concerned citizens and environmental groups by saying they don't
know if they have the legal power to ban lawn chemicals.
They'll know soon. The anti-pesticide bylaw in Hudson was
upheld by Quebec Superior Court in 1993 and by the Quebec Court of Appeal in
1998; this week the country's highest court will begin hearing the case.
The court will not rule on the safety or necessity of
pesticides; only on whether a municipality has the power and jurisdiction to
enact a bylaw banning or restricting their use. The court's decision is
expected by June, at the height of spraying season.
Environmental groups believe the decision will have a
profound effect on the use of lawn chemicals across the country. If the town
of Hudson wins, many other jurisdictions that have been poised to act on the
issue will go ahead and enact bylaws. If Chemlawn (now called Greenspace
Services Ltd.) and Spraytech, the two lawn-care companies that are challenging
the bylaw, win this third and final appeal, the resulting legal chill will
force the anti-pesticide movement to abandon local efforts and focus on higher
levels of government.
Theresa McClenaghan, a lawyer with the Canadian
Environmental Law Association, will represent about a dozen interveners in the
case, mainly environmental groups from Ontario.
"A lot of community groups have asked their councils
for bans or restrictions and the councils have been reluctant because their
legal departments fear they would be challenged, so the case is being
carefully watched," McClenaghan said.
If the court upholds the Hudson bylaw, she added, there
could be major implications for other kinds of environmental bylaws, like
those against idling engines and smoking in public.
Either way, attention drawn to the issue by the Supreme
Court case might push the federal government to amend the 30-year-old Pest
Control Products Act. That act was strongly criticized as inadequate in a
House of Commons environment-committee report in May.
"Given what is known or suspected about the harmful
effects of these products and given the purely esthetic purposes they serve,
the committee favours a ban on the use of pesticides for cosmetic
purposes," reads the executive summary of the report, Pesticides - Making
the Right Choice for the Protection of Health and the Environment.
But the report goes on to say that it is
"questionable whether the Canadian public would accept a country-wide ban
at this time. It is therefore essential to enlist public co-operation by
sensitizing people to the risks of pesticides through an aggressive education
campaign. Hopefully, the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes will become
as frowned-on as smoking cigarettes in public, thus making a full moratorium a
more socially acceptable solution."
The committee did recommend that a new act disallow all
new registrations of such chemicals for cosmetic uses and at the same time
disallow registration renewals for those currently on the market, once their
registration certificates have expired. This would amount to a phasing out,
over five years, of pesticides for cosmetic purposes.
Environmental groups cheered the report, but their cheers
subsided when the government responded to it in October. The response, the
activists say, was mainly a defence of current practices of Health Canada's
Pest Management Regulatory Agency, and assurances that further research would
be undertaken and the Pest Control Products Act would eventually be amended.
"It was as though the response was written by the
chemical producers; it as really discouraging," said Angela Rickman,
deputy director of the Sierra Club of Canada, a national environmental group
and an intervener in the Hudson case.
Last month, federal Health Minister Allan Rock did
announce an Action Plan for Urban Use of Pesticides, as a first step in
response to the Commons panel report.
The minister promised to "work closely with the
provinces and territories to help homeowners reduce their reliance on
pesticides," mainly by developing educational materials, including a Web
site (http;//www.healthylawns.net). He also promised "priority
re-evaluations" of some common chemicals in lawn-care pesticides (diazinon,
malathion, carbaryl, 2,4-D, MCPA, dicamba and mecoprop), a project targeted
for completion in 2001.
"Whoop-dee-doo," Rickman said. "They have
been promising to re-evaluate 2,4-D for 10 years now."
D D D
Ray Sharits is tired of being painted as a villain in the
pesticide wars.
Sharits is senior vice-president (operations) for
Greenspace Services Ltd., a "lawn-care service provider" that has
its headquarters in Toronto. He runs the Laval operation; the company also has
branches in Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City.
"I have no ties with the chemical companies,"
he said, adding that if the federal government outlawed chemical pesticides
tomorrow, he would be happy to work with purely organic products.
It's not his responsibility to determine the health
effects of pesticides, he said; he just wants the right to do a job that the
provincial and federal government both explicitly allow in their laws.
"We have the right to work. Can a municipality have
the authority to ignore provincial and federal law and become their own
enclave?" Sharits asked.
The mish-mash of municipal bylaws is creating a kind of
chaos for pesticide users and is not necessarily protecting anyone's health,
or the environment, he said. For example, some municipalities on Montreal
Island allow spraying only on certain sides of streets on certain days. Others
allow use only from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. (when youngsters
are in school). Others allow it in the spring and fall but ban pesticide use
all summer.
"If you have a bylaw that says you can't spray after
the 20th of June, we get clients who call the week before and say they want
the whole lawn done. Maybe the year before they would only call us to treat a
spot problem sometime during the summer. So we end up putting a lot more
product down because of the bylaws," Sharits said.
He also doubts that local bylaws are being enforced. He
noted that lawn-care pesticides are still selling well in a Hudson hardware
store: "I know the local store still sells (pesticides) and people still
have weed-free lawns."
In fact, the town of Hudson called Sharits's company this
past summer to treat a poison-ivy problem at some of the town's bus stops and
parks. (Hudson's bylaw exempts golf courses and allows pesticide use for any
infestation that threatens human health. Residents can also get permits from
the town to use pesticides if they can get a professional like Sharits to
certify that they have an infestation.)
Sharits said he would welcome clear federal legislation
that sets out exactly what, when and how pesticides should be used, as well as
by whom. Like all members of the Association of Horticultural Service
Companies of Quebec, he advocates what is called integrated pest management,
which means putting the emphasis on pest prevention and using reduced-risk
products.
His company offers organic methods, but they are less
effective, more labour-intensive and therefore more expensive for his clients,
Sharits said. Unless there are clear rules for lawn-care companies, the public
will always opt for the quicker, cheaper route of using stronger chemical
pesticides, he said.
Lawyer Gerard Dugre, who represents Chemlawn and
Spraytech in the case, said he expects to win the appeal, which is based on
the argument that Hudson overstepped its regulatory powers by adopting the
bylaw.
- - -
Anti-pesticide activist Merryl Hammond says going the
municipal-bylaw route to fight for bans has its pros and cons.
A nurse with a doctorate in community health and a West
Island resident who founded Citizens for Alternatives to Pesticides, Hammond
has sold about 1,000 copies of her self-published book, Pesticide Bylaws: Why
We Need Them and How to Get Them, across Canada. She is the only individual
intervening in the Supreme Court case.
She said the federal government is overly influenced by
the economic clout of the chemical companies. It is harder for the
pro-pesticide lobbyists to influence each and every town or city councillor to
stop a ban, just as it is difficult work for environmentalists to go town by
town trying to win bans, Hammond said.
But a combination of local legislation and, more
important, public education has proven to be very effective in reducing
pesticide use, she said.
She believes the court case will "put fire in the
bellies of people who will say, 'If they can do it there, we should do it
here.'
"I think it will be amazing. Then maybe someone at
the federal level will say, 'Why not save everybody the agony and enact
federal legislation?' " to ban cosmetic use of the chemicals in cities
and suburbs.
- - -
People are beginning to make a link between health and
the environment, between soaring childhood cancer and asthma rates over the
past 20 years and the sheer number of chemicals to which children are exposed
every day in food, water, air, soil and grass.
"Most people believe toxins in the environment have
a negative impact on health," said Rickman of the Sierra Club. "If
they realize they are deliberately exposing themselves to something that is
toxic and they can stop, they will."
The Commons committee report made it clear that the Pest
Management Regulatory Agency's testing procedures for pesticides are
inadequate, she said.
"We do the testing by looking at exposure to one
chemical at a time, or two or three. But that's not taking into consideration
that there are pesticides on the lawn, that your workplace got sprayed for
cockroaches, that you ate an apple or drank juice that had been exposed to
pesticides in the fields and maybe a fungicide in the warehouse where it was
stored for six months.
"That combined exposure isn't considered, and until
it is, we don't know if it is safe. So we say, be logical and stop exposing
yourself to chemicals to get rid of dandelions. It's just dumb."
Meanwhile, back in Hudson, the doctor who got the ball
rolling on the town's pesticide ban said it doesn't really matter whether
Hudson wins or loses at the Supreme Court.
What matters, said Joan Irwin, is that the case will
bring public attention to what she calls a scandal.
"Whichever way it goes, it should be the beginning
of a public inquiry into our own contamination by pesticide products. This is
a scandal bigger than tobacco. There should be a public inquiry."
Source url: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/001204/4985889.html
________________________________
The Gazette (Montreal) - Mon 04 Dec 2000 - PAGE NUMBER A8
- by Michelle Lalonde
HEADLINE: Sales top $1 billion: More than 7,000
registered pesticides in Canada
Canadian farmers, institutional landowners and homeowners
have grown very dependent on pesticides, which are defined as any substance
intended to control, destroy, repel or attract a pest.
The word pesticide refers to herbicides (to control
weeds); insecticides; fungicides (for moulds and fungi); algicides (for algae
in swimming pools); fumigants (gases or vapours used to destroy insects,
fungi, bacteria or rodents); repellents; and other such substances.
There are more than 7,000 registered pesticides in
Canada. There are no firm data on total product sales in Canada, as there is
no national database of pesticide sales, something activists are calling for.
But according to a survey of its members, the Crop
Protection Institute of Canada estimates that pesticide-industry sales for
1997 totaled $1.4 billion. Of course, the lion's share, about 80 per cent, is
sold for agricultural use. In 1997, sales of non-agricultural pest-management
products totaled $121 million.
Lawn-Care Products
Of pesticides sold for non-agricultural uses, 56.5 per
cent are for domestic products.
A Universite Laval study estimated that $45 million was
spent in 1995 on lawn-care products in Quebec. There are about 260 lawn-care
businesses in the province, employing approximately 2,600 people.
According to the Quebec government's annual report on
pesticide sales, 289,124 kilograms of pesticides and 416 different products
were sold to the public in 1997.
``This vast choice for users who are uninitiated to the
potential dangers most of these products pose constitutes a risk for handlers,
their families and those around them,'' the report notes.
``Quebec's poison-control centre shows that each year 68
per cent of its registered calls for exposures and intoxifications are related
to domestic pesticides.''
Increased Sales
All types of pesticides showed increased sales in 1997
over 1996 in Quebec, the most recent years reported. Sales of herbicides in
particular rose 132 per cent that year, although their sales are down slightly
from the early 1990s.
The city of Montreal, which has been strongly criticized
for using pesticides in its parks and public green spaces, says it has reduced
its reliance on pesticides.
According to Claudette Lalonde, of the city's parks,
gardens and green spaces department, the city spent $26,160 of a $51-million
parks-maintenance budget on pesticides in 1999. She could not provide figures
for previous years.
Employees are authorized to use 16 different products,
which the city describes as low-risk. One of those products, Carbaryl, has
been identified for ``priority re-evaluation'' by the federal Pest Management
Regulatory Agency. Other products can be used, with special permission from a
supervisor, for particular infestations.
Many local environmentalists are concerned about what
will happen to local anti-pesticide bylaws if the island's municipalities
merge. As in Toronto and Ottawa, two cities that have undergone or are
undergoing mergers, local bylaws will probably apply until a transition
committee can set bylaws for the new megacity.
Mike Christie
(613) 228-7499 / bus.
(613) 228-7487 / fax.
mikechristie@home.com / e-mail
The Laws of Ecology: "All things are interconnected.
Everything goes somewhere. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats
last." by Ernest Callenbach.
Well Mr. Helliker,
Someday the contaminated people of the world will ask you and other
"regulators" the same question:
"Why didn't you protect us from all of this needless
"registered" CONTAMINATION?"
What will be your answer then?
Respectfully, Stephen
L. Tvedten
Click Here to Add Comment