Various agencies and researchers may have information, but Canada doesn’t have a central pesticide website like the United States
Finding data on pesticides in water can be a gruelling task in Canada.
Scott Teed, a scientist and risk assessment specialist with Intrinsik, an environmental consultancy, checks with a number of sources to cobble together data on pesticide concentrations.
He speaks with Environment Canada scientists, university re-searchers and provincial experts to see if anyone has relevant data.
“You basically have to hit all these people and hope that whatever pesticide or contaminant you’re looking at might be found in those databases.”
Read Also
Land crash warning rejected
A technical analyst believes that Saskatchewan land values could be due for a correction, but land owners and FCC say supply/demand fundamentals drive land prices – not mathematical models
Teed, who used to work at Environment Canada, has to contact five to 10 people because the federal government doesn’t have a national monitoring program for pesticides in water.
And whatever data it does produce, from irregular programs to monitor certain pesticides in specific regions, isn’t published on a government website.
In comparison, the U.S. Geological Service operates a national testing program for pesticides and publishes data on a tidy website at water.usgs.gov/nawqa/.
The USGS website includes maps, which illustrate changes in pesticide use and concentration in rivers over time.
Teed said U.S. data is much more open than Canadian information.
“The big contrast is that it’s nationally funded and the U.S. has laws in place that requires anything that’s taxpayer funded to be available to the taxpayers, which makes complete sense.”
Allan Cessna, a retired Environment Canada scientist who lives in Saskatoon, said the U.S. does much more monitoring of water for pesticides than Canada.
Sean Backus, section chief with Environment Canada for water quality monitoring in Burlington, Ont., takes issue with that assessment.
“I think our data is, in some ways, just as rich of a data set as the USGS.”
Backus said all Canadians, in-cluding environmental groups and private companies, can make a request to Environment Canada for data on pesticide concentrations.
The department will provide that data within 30 days.
However, responding to requests isn’t the same as sharing data from publicly funded research on a public website.
An Environment Canada spokesperson said the government does publish fresh water quality data on a website called open.canada.ca, but it doesn’t include data on pesticides.
Backus said government is taking steps to make its pesticide data more available.
