The Pest Management Regulatory Agency will have to rely overwhelmingly on American scientific data to review all old pesticides on the Canadian market by 2007, says the acting head of the agency.
However, the agency has not investigated concerns by some United States environmental groups that private labs doing the testing are too closely tied to the chemical industry, Wendy Sexsmith told a New Democratic MP Oct. 23 during a meeting of the House of Commons environment committee.
“No, we would not have ourselves (investigated the complaints),” she said. “That would be something the U.S. government would do.”
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Ontario New Democrat Joe Comartin was not convinced that Canada should be relying on foreign data to evaluate the safety of pesticides, particularly when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency contracts out much of its work.
“There certainly have been concerns over close ties between some of these agencies and the pesticide producers so that any evaluation done by people who are caught in that at-least-appearance of a conflict of interest would be what I would be looking for,” said the MP.
Sexsmith said she would ask the American government if the conflict-of-interest concerns and the competence of the private labs have been investigated.
However, she said the agency has no option but to use American work.
“We are and will be relying on probably 80 percent if not more of the number that’s left,” she said, to complete the review by spring 2007 of all 405 pesticides approved for the market before 1995.
Sexsmith said Canada does not have the budget to do the work itself.
“It’s important to understand that the U.S. has a much larger budget than we do. It’s a much larger country. So our whole program was really premised on the fact that we would be able get the 405 done if we did a number of things,” she said.
“One of those things was to piggyback, work closely, use information from the U.S.”
