WINNIPEG — Federal agriculture minister Heath MacDonald is urging the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency to speed up their decision making.
During a media scrum at the federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers conference in Winnipeg, MacDonald said he’s pushing the federal agencies to do better.
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Taking a decade to assess the safety of glufosinate-ammonium, a herbicide branded as Liberty that has been used by farmers for years, embodies what’s wrong with Canada’s regulatory system, BASF said.
“We need a stable regulatory environment. We need an even playing field with the countries that we trade with. We need to expedite those (regulatory) decisions much more quickly and much more effectively,” MacDonald said Sept. 9, inside a hotel ballroom in downtown Winnipeg.
“We’re starting to see a change in that. We’ve seen in presentations, here, today (by) CFIA. We’ve seen a change in them. But we need to keep pushing that.”
For some time, agricultural associations and companies have complained that decisions on pesticide safety and approvals for new agri-technologies were bogged down in Ottawa.
Global investors and agri-tech firms had noticed the problems in Canada.
“Companies are getting the impression that Canada is a very difficult place for the regulatory registration process … we’re getting a really bad reputation,” said Scott Day, a Manitoban who works for Fall Line Capital, a California company that invests in farmland and ag technology.
Day made his comments in November 2023.
In Winnipeg, MacDonald was asked if Canadian farmers and the ag industry are at a disadvantage, compared to other countries, because of the regulatory burden in Canada.
“We may have been,” he said. “It’s economics. We can’t have our farmers at a disadvantage … (It’s) the timing and speed that we (need) to adjust. That’s a cause for concern, sometimes.”
The federal bureaucracy has responded to MacDonald and Prime Minister Mark Carney, who called on all federal departments to look at their regulations and cut “red tape” July 9.
The departments had 60 days to complete their reviews. Health Canada, which oversees the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, released its report on red tape reduction Sept. 9.
In an email, Health Canada said it will make multiple changes at the PMRA and how it regulates pesticides, including:
- More joint reviews, with trusted foreign regulators, to avoid duplicate assessments of pesticide safety and give the PMRA a head start in its evaluations
- Exempting low-risk products from renewals
MacDonald and provincial agriculture ministers met with PMRA reps at their meeting in Winnipeg.
“Kudos to them for coming here and showing us how they’re adapting,” MacDonald said. “I think we’re seeing advances at (the) CFIA and PMRA. And we hope that continues.”
Challenging the regulatory approach in Ottawa is crucial because Canadian farmers must be competitive on the global stage, said Alberta’s minister of agriculture, RJ Sigurdson.
He was encouraged by the tone at the Winnipeg meeting and what he heard regarding federal regulations.
“We’ve seen some indications that we just haven’t seen in the past. We do see some movement. I will say, it needs to move faster.”
