Quebec's Pesticide Code: A North American Challenge to Pesticide Profiteering

by Medha Chandra

Michel Gaudet lives in a community of 50,000 people in the Canadian province of Quebec. Since 1999 he has been involved in an uphill struggle to protect the children of his community from “cosmetic” pesticides that were routinely used by residents as part of their summer gardening routine. The struggles of thousands of grassroots activists like Michel across the province bore fruit this spring. The third and final phase of the Pesticide Code of Quebec (first introduced in March 2003) came into effect on April 3, 2006.

This landmark legislation was designed to avoid and reduce the impacts of pesticides on public health and the environment and to minimize cosmetic pesticide use. It specifically bans twenty pesticide ingredients for sale and use on lawns across Quebec. As a result, 210 lawn-care products have been removed from the market in Quebec, giving the province the toughest standards in North America. Last year only two permits to apply pesticides on lawns were granted by Michel's city, and the law's provisions have become a focus point for pesticide industry attacks.

It all started in 1991 with the tiny town of Hudson (then population 4,786), near Montreal, Quebec. [1] A group of local residents convinced the Hudson City Council that the health and environmental risks of pesticides outweigh the largely cosmetic benefits of using pesticide on lawns. The probable link between use of lawn-care pesticides and rising rates of asthma in children, rising allergy and spiraling cancer rates had aroused these activists to eliminate unnecessary pesticide use from their community. The Hudson City Council passed a bylaw banning the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes.

With that first ban, the movement for eliminating the use of pesticides for gardening and lawn-care took off. Lawn-care pesticide use became a hotly debated topic in city after city. Slowly, a people's movement was born in Quebec. In 1999, the Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (CAP) was formed by a group of people affected by pesticide sprayings. [2] Within a few years, bylaw campaigns were underway in towns and cities from British Columbia to Nova Scotia.

The activists had to face a lot of resistance from the lawn-care and pesticide industries. Corporate representatives took municipalities to court, lobbied city council members and tried to influence the media. Even now, since the pesticide Code came into force in Quebec, the Canadian pesticide industry continues in its attempts to discredit the law and prevent other provinces from following suit. Trade association and corporate tactics include challenging the legality of local pesticide bylaws and stressing the “necessity” of pesticides for lawn care. The Urban Pest Management Council (UPMC), an industry mouthpiece, was formed especially to fight local pesticide regulations. [3]

If the vast majority of pesticides are sold for agricultural use, why is the agrichemical industry so intent on preventing a movement to reduce use of lawn and garden pesticides in Canada? Simply put, because for more than a decade, around the world, agricultural pesticide profits and growth have been basically stagnant, non-crop pesticide sales have become the growing profit center. [4] As personal incomes increase, sales of landscape pesticides increase. As a recent television pesticide ad asks, “what could be better than a healthy lawn?” Quebec 's Code strikes at one key to the future of the multinational pesticide industry.

A few committed politicians, including Quebec's ex-Ministers of Environment, André Bosclair and Thomas Mulcair, were crucial in supporting the provincial pesticide code when it was first under attack from industry. Despite the threat of a lawsuit by the U.S.-based pesticide industry against Quebec in 2002 under the North America Free Trade Agreement, these ministers refused to back down on the Pesticide Code. Minister Boisclair likened pesticide company tactics at that time to those of the tobacco industry, which had funded research for years suggesting that the link between lung cancer and cigarettes had not been proven. [5]

The Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, World Wildlife Fund and Sierra Club Canada are among the prominent supporters of Quebec 's Pesticide Code. The Cancer Society stated that the evidence linking pesticides to cancer is growing, and “s ince ornamental use of pesticides has no countervailing health benefit and has the potential to cause harm, we call for a ban on the use of pesticides on lawns and gardens”. [6] The ban is especially important to protect children, they declared, since they are very susceptible to the toxins within pesticides.

Despite its success, the hard-won pesticide code remains in danger, as the commercial lawn-care industry is still trying to get exemptions for some key pesticides like the herbicide 2,4-D. In 2005, the Canadian lawn-care industry announced that it would make every effort to get 2,4-D off the list of pesticides banned in Quebec.

The most commonly used weed killer on Canadian lawns and gardens, 2,4-D is “persuasively linked” to cancer, neurological impairment and reproductive problems, according to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics and Child Health. [7] “2,4-D is far from safe. It can affect women's ability to bear healthy children, and epidemiological studies show strong links between use of 2,4-D products and cancer,” notes Dr. Susan Kegley, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America. Any exemption for 2,4-D will considerably weaken the Pesticide Code of Quebec.

The pesticide-free municipality movement continues to spread to other provinces. To date, ninety-five municipalities have passed pesticide regulations. These include large cities like Toronto [8] and Halifax, and the pesticide bylaw campaigns are gaining momentum in provinces like New Brunswick.

Several municipalities, including Toronto, are trying to spread awareness about non-chemical methods of lawn-care. They recommend steps that people can take to keep their lawns healthy without using pesticides, such as hand weeding, watering their lawns properly, raising the height of their lawn-mower, aerating to allow moisture and nutrients to reach the roots of the grass, and de-thatching their lawns. [9] [10]

The Pesticide Code of Quebec has already begun to have a demonstrable positive impact on indicators of people's health. Recently, the Quebec government studied the body burden of chemicals that children in the province carry. [11] Though 98% of all children tested were found to have pesticides from food, water and air in their bodies, the tests did not find any lawn-care herbicides in the bodies of children living in municipalities with a ban. In municipalities without a ban, these lawn-care herbicides were found in children's bodies in addition to the other pesticides.

In a bold move to scale up the provincial bylaw, Pat Martin, a member of the Canadian parliament, introduced a bill in April 2006 that would impose a national moratorium on cosmetic use of potentially unhealthy chemicals. Advocating the precautionary principle, this bill would put the onus on pesticide manufacturers to prove that their products are safe. [12]

It has long been established that the use of lawn and garden pesticides is unnecessary, and the increasing body of evidence of the long-term impacts of these chemicals on our health and the environment cannot be ignored. It is time that all of us across North America took serious note of the success and the challenges to the pesticide-free landscape movement in Canada. It is time we focus on our health and that of future generations instead of the misleading marketing of chemical landscape products.

Dr. Medha Chandra is International Campaigner and Staff Editor at PANNA. She works on international pesticide campaigns in collaboration with the other PAN Regional Centers and PAN Affiliates.

References

1. Rickman, A. 2004. Canadian Activists Win Pesticide Bylaws. Global Pesticide Campaigner, vol 14, no.2.

2. CAP-Quebec. 2006. Mission and Objectives. Accessed at http://www.cap-quebec.com/mission.php?Lang=en

3. Urban Pest Management Council of Canada. Who We Are. http://www.urbanpestmanagement.ca/english/whoweare.cfm

4. Parker, R. June 2005. The rise and rise of non-crop pesticides, Pesticide News, no. 68.

5. Dougherty, K. July 06, 2002. Agri-toxics Giant Threatens to Sue Quebec over Pesticide Ban. The Montreal Gazette.

6. Canadian Cancer Society. January 2006. Ornamental Use of pesticides on lawns and gardens. Accessed on http://www.cancer.ca/ccs/internet/standard/0,3182,3278_335143__langId-en,00.html

7. Sears, M. et.al. April 2006. Pesticide assessment: Protecting public health on the home turf. Pediatrics and Child Health, Vol 11 no.4: 229-234.

8. Toronto Globe and Mail. May 15, 2005. City wins legal battle on controversial pesticide law.

9. Canadian Cancer Society. March 2004. How to keep your lawns healthy without pesticides. Accessed at http://www.cancer.ca/ccs/internet/standard/0,2939,3172_372059_266304_langId-en,00.html.

10. City of Toronto. August 2004. Pesticide Free- a Guide to Natural Lawn and Garden Care. Accessed at http://www.toronto.ca/health/pesticides/pdf/natural_lawn_guide.pdf

11. Valcke, M. et.al. 2004. Characterization of the exposure to residential-use pesticides in children aged 3 to 7 years in Quebec. National Institute of Public Health, Quebec.

12. Canadian Press. April 24, 2006. New Democrat MP wants total ban on non-essential pesticide use. Accessed at http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=301994da-bdb1-44f3-92e2-8054fbdb9feb&k=95332