The National Farmers Union wants federal agriculture minister Marie-Claude Bibeau to fire the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The NFU and other organizations, including the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network and Greenpeace Canada, say they have lost faith in the independence of the CFIA because the name of a CropLife Canada employee appeared on a document sent out by the CFIA.
The NFU says this shows there is an “inappropriate collaboration between our public regulator and the private corporations whose products it regulates, to the point that it appears CropLife is effectively directing the CFIA.”
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The document was a summary of the CFIA’s proposal to regulate plant breeding innovations, such as gene-edited crops. Gene editing is a new plant breeding tool, which scientists use to precisely change the genome of plants to achieve a desired trait, such as higher oil content in a soybean or increased resistance to disease.
In September, Radio Canada published a story on the document, saying that Jennifer Hubert, executive director of plant biotechnology with CropLife, was the author of the summary.
Both CropLife Canada and the CFIA have said that Hubert provided comments on the CFIA proposal. She didn’t author the document.
“The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the minister of agriculture have clearly stated … that a glitch occurred when (handling) a document from CropLife Canada … which resulted in CropLife Canada’s staff person’s name being imbedded in the meta-data of the document,” said Ian Affleck, vice-president of plant biotechnology at CropLife.
In a La Presse article, a CFIA spokesperson confirmed that the agency authored the paper and said the CFIA sent the document to industry groups. One of the copies that came back had “metadata associated with Jennifer Hubert.”
The CFIA looked at that copy and “subsequently circulated it to a broader group of stakeholders.”
As for the metadata, Affleck explained that Word documents have something called Properties. When a user clicks on Properties, it lists the details of the document — the author, when it was last saved, the revision number and so forth.
“They (the CFIA) circulated a document to a wide variety of stakeholders. We provided comments on the document …. When they saved that back into the agency’s (CFIA) computer systems, it tracked it as being authored by my employee,” Affleck said.
“The claim (by the NFU) was that she was now the ‘author’ of the policy.”
In the La Presse article, the CFIA spokesperson said “external parties, including industry associations, are not the authors of CFIA documents.”
Despite that explanation, published in September, the NFU insists the CFIA must change its leadership.
In a letter to Bibeau, NFU president Katie Ward said the organization has lost confidence in the CFIA’s ability “to protect the public interest.”
“The revelation that a document summarizing the CFIA’s regulatory proposal was produced on a computer owned by Jennifer Hubert (the CropLife employee) is a wake-up call regarding CFIA’s improper collaboration with CropLife and its sister lobby groups, Seeds Canada and the Canada Grains Council,” Ward wrote in a letter dated Oct. 14.
“The CFIA shows a long-standing pattern of deference to the regulated parties …. We therefore ask that the president of the CFIA be replaced with a new leader.”
Affleck noted that CropLife was one of many organizations, including groups that oppose gene editing technology, that provided feedback on the proposed CFIA regulations.
“It’s unfortunate that some groups are using a technical glitch to distract from the critical work underway to create a clear, predictable, science-based regulatory system that will provide Canadian farmers with the tools that they need.”
In May, Health Canada modernized its plant breeding regulations, deciding that gene-edited plants will be regulated similarly to crops developed through traditional plant breeding and in most cases will not require a pre-market safety assessment.
“Gene-edited plants are just as safe as conventionally bred counterparts,” Health Canada representatives said in May 18 technical briefing.
The NFU disagrees with Health Canada’s position on gene-edited crops. It says the safety of gene editing is unproven and independent safety assessments should be done on every variety of soybean, canola, wheat and any crop developed with gene editing.
Organic agriculture groups also oppose the government’s approach to gene-edited crops but provincial and national organic groups didn’t sign the NFU letter that was sent to Bibeau.
