Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for the opportunity to appear before you in your statutory review of the Pest Control Products Act.

My name is Lara Tessaro. I am a staff lawyer with Ecojustice Canada. With me is my colleague Tanya Nayler, also an Ecojustice staff lawyer. Not with us today is our senior staff scientist, Dr. Elaine MacDonald. She is our scientific expert on pesticides and environmental health.

I should give a few quick words about Ecojustice. We are Canada's largest public interest environmental law organization. We have offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and also here in Ottawa at the University of Ottawa. We are dedicated to defending Canadians' right to a healthy environment, and we do that by regularly advocating in court. We also work outside the courtroom to promote stronger environmental laws that protect the environment. Tanya and I also have the privilege of working with some of Canada's leading environmental groups on pesticides. I should note that our clients on federal pesticides matters include the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, the David Suzuki Foundation, and Équiterre.

I will note a few of the things we worked on together. We brought successful litigation against the agency in Federal Court, which forced the agency to comply with its duties to initiate 23 special reviews of active ingredients that are banned in the European Union for health or environmental reasons but are allowed and registered here. Those reviews are under way. As a second example, we jointly submitted a notice of objection with the Canadian Environmental Law Association objecting to the continued registration of clothianidin products. Mr. Bennett of the Sierra Club is involved in that as well. As he's already referred to it, I'll try not to repeat his remarks.

Overall, in our view this act is sound and is valuable. If the act were actually implemented properly by the agency, if it were implemented in a precautionary manner, then we think the act could achieve its primary objective. As I'm sure you all know, there is just one primary objective in this act: preventing unacceptable risks to people and the environment from pesticide use.

The Sierra Club has put before you some recommendations for legislative amendments. Generally we don't disagree with them—we think they're generally good recommendations—but Ecojustice's basic position is that at the present juncture, no significant or major amendments are actually required to this law. That being said, I don't want to suggest that the act is working as it should be working. It is not working as well as it should be working. Therefore, to assist the committee, we've identified three areas where we think some minor amendments may improve implementation and better protect Canadians' health.

I'll just run through those three areas, which are, I should note, in our written brief. We did not have it translated in time. We have it here in English, so I assume the brief will be provided to you in English and in French in the coming day or two.

The three areas that we would propose for minor amendment are conditional registrations, which you've heard something about, public consultation, and transparency.

l would like to illustrate our concerns with an example, which is in our brief as well. As I noted, we have made an objection to the renewed conditional registration of clothianidin products due to concerns that these products may significantly harm bee populations. You might understand our surprise, then, when we learned that after receiving our objection, the agency has, in a non-public manner, continued to register entirely new uses of those same clothianidin products that are under objection. They did that with no public notice and with no opportunity for public comment. We only learned of those new uses because the agency indirectly referenced them in a document proposing new maximum residue limits for the newly registered uses of those products.

I want to be clear that clothianidin is perhaps the most controversial pesticide in Canada right now. So while it's under objection, wide objection, the agency, as you heard from Mr. Bennett, is delaying its response to those objections—it's a year and a half now—and yet it is nonetheless secretly, and quite widely, expanding the use of the pesticide under objection.

With that example in mind, I'll turn to our three recommendations.

The first issue we'd like you to consider is the agency's overreliance, as we'd characterize it, on conditional registration. As you know, section 12 of the act—quite appropriately, actually, in my submission—allows the agency, as a condition of a product's registration, to require registrants to produce more information. lt's a really common-sense provision, but it's been heavily overused. That was the finding in a 2008 audit by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, which found that the agency had made, and this is its term, “unsatisfactory” progress in remedying its heavy use of conditional registrations.

It's an especially overused practice for neonicotinoids. As of 2014, the majority of conditional registrations in Canada are for products containing three notorious neonic ingredients: clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam. For neonic products containing these three ingredients, the agency's widespread practice, as you've heard, is to allow them to be registered despite expressly acknowledging that there are critical data gaps on bee health. That is the definition of not precautionary.

The Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. has also been audited over similar concerns with conditional registration. As a result, the EPA now publicly tracks conditional registrations online. The EPA reports conditional data requirements. It reports when the data that is missing is due, when it's been received, and whether conditions are being complied with. Canada, in contrast to the U.S., does not publicly track conditional registrations.

Our first, I'd say, quite modest recommendation is that section 42, regarding a public repository of information, should be amended to require that the electronic public registry include the same information about conditionally registered pesticides that is publicly accessible in the United States.

The second issue we hope the committee will consider is a need to improve and increase public notice and consultation, under section 28. In theory, section 28 is a good provision. In theory, it requires the public to be notified of and consulted on many pesticide registration decisions, but in practice the agency excludes the vast majority of registrations and the vast majority of amendments to registrations from any public notice or consultation. How does the agency justify this? The problem is not with the act. The problem is with sections 14, 15, and 16 of the pest control product regulations. In general, those three sections purport to exempt most conditional registrations and most amendments to conditional registrations from three things: public notice and consultation, the right of the public to file any objection, and certain transparency obligations.

The second reason for this practice of conditional registrations has to do with an agency policy. It's a submissions policy. The agency policy deems certain categories of registration applications to be minor, and you heard the executive director very carefully refer to how broadly they consult on major applications. The majority of applications are deemed by this policy to be minor applications, and the policy then purports to exempt from public consultation and notice all allegedly minor registration decisions. It does this without any regard for the particular pesticide at issue and how risky it might be.

Our second recommendation is simple: The committee should recommend repealing sections 14, 15, and 16 of the pest control products regulations.

The third issue we'd ask you to consider is one you've already heard a lot about this afternoon and that is the transparency and accessibility of the electronic public registry. Section 42 of the act requires the agency to include certain information in the electronic public registry. In practice, the information required to be there is not always there, and when it is there, it is extremely difficult, as Mr. Bennett noted, to search. It's a very difficult tool for the public to use. I would actually encourage—maybe it's better to say I'd dare—you members of this committee or your staff to try to use the electronic public registry. Try to use it to answer a question you have about a pesticide regulation or a general practice. I have a couple of examples of that, but in the interest of time, I'll leave them for any questions people may have.

Our third recommendation, which is a modest one, is that you add a provision to the act simply requiring the agency to audit the accessibility and completeness of its electronic public registry.

In closing, I will emphasize again that this act has strong potential to protect Canadians' health and to protect our environment. It needs to be implemented in a precautionary and transparent way, and we hope that message comes through in the committee's report.

Thank you, all, for your attention.

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