VICTORIA, B.C. – Six months of hard lobbying by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture to change the federal government’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency have finally paid off.
Health minister David Dingwall, in charge of the agency that approves the sale and use of pesticides, faxed a letter to the federation’s annual meeting last week highlighting some concessions meant to calm farmers’ fears.
Without endorsing the letter, CFA president Jack Wilkinson said it indicates the government’s willingness to move.
“There’s stuff in here that’s more positive than what was said before,” he said. “He has moved and we’re acknowledging that movement but we know it’s not major and it’s not as much as we want.”
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In the letter, Dingwall said his department would exempt fees for the Own Use Import Program to “allow Canadian farmers to maintain their international competitiveness” and work toward global harmonization of test requirements “leading to reductions in industry costs.”
Dingwall also reassured farmers the agency has no intention of evaluating all products every three to five years, nor of re-evaluating products that have acceptable data to support their safety and effectiveness.
Wilkinson said he’ll meet with the minister to talk about farmers’ problems with the agency.
“We have been fighting back and forth with this department for a number of months,” he said in an interview. “But there still is an attitude that there is a culture in Ottawa from the bureaucrats in charge of these agencies that they really do not want to look at cost recovery in the way that we do.”
David Hobson of the Canadian Horticultural Council said farmers won’t survive if they have to pay a level of cost recovery that is considerably higher than what Americans pay for their chemical registration system.
“Its very offensive to many of us to be told that it will take years to register chemicals that are coming into this country every single day of the year on American produce and then to be told we’re saddled with an expensive bureaucracy that is slow to respond,” Hobson told the meeting.
Same regulations as U.S.
“I really do not understand for the life of me why our regulations for things such as chemical registration do not mirror our trading relations. We have to get a grip on reality here and change some of our other policies to mirror or match these trading relations and we’re just not doing that.”
Agriculture minister Ralph Goodale said while the agency is the health department’s responsibility, Agriculture Canada is interested in lessening the impacts.
