Federal pesticide regulators have cost prairie farmers $200 million or more each year by arbitrarily stopping use of a strychnine solution to kill gophers, said Alberta Conservative MP and persistent anti-gopher campaigner Leon Benoit.
Pest Management Regulatory Agency executive director Karen Dodds told the MP at a meeting of the House of Commons agriculture committee that strychnine was banned in 1992 because of evidence that it was killing unintended animals. The agency is not prepared to allow the chemical back as a rodent control tool.
The search continues for safer alternatives, she told Benoit. One possibility discussed with the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities is an aluminum phosphide product called Phostoxin.
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“Certainly, most developed countries have also prohibited the use of concentrated strychnine as a pest control product so Canada wasn’t alone,” she said.
Benoit, a northeastern Alberta MP who has been fighting the battle for a strychnine solution to Richardson’s ground squirrel damage since he was elected in 1993, was not impressed.
He said the product Dodds was promoting has not been proven effective.
Benoit had received hundreds of pages of documents from PMRA on the issue and he said none of them showed the agency argument against allowing farmers to use strychnine against gophers was justified.
“This is something that’s been done without proper consultation and without evidence that would indicate it should have been done. (It was) a bad decision costing farmers a lot of money when they clearly can’t afford that,” he said.
Richard Aucoin, chief registrar for the agency, said Agriculture Canada banned strychnine in 1992 because it was a “very highly toxic liquid product that in itself posed some inherent hazards” and there were reports of poisoning of “non-target” animals including dogs.
Benoit scoffed at that argument.
“Some talk of poisoning dogs,” he said. “Well, guess what? Dogs are being poisoned now with common antifreeze used in cars. Are you going to take that away?”
