Good evening councillors and guests.  My name is Christina McDowell.  I am speaking on behalf of the environmental group Sierra Club of Canada’s Winnipeg chapter on the topic of today’s hearing, whether or not to allow non-essential pesticide use to continue in Winnipeg.    I would also like to say this is my first time speaking at a public hearing so please forgive any nervousness, however this is an important topic for my family and I so I’m glad to be here.  I’d like to say thank you for hearing the public’s opinion today.

I would first like to point out that although this meeting is on lawn care products, it is the opinion of the Sierra Club that there is no such thing as an essential pesticide, whether it is pesticides used on our food or sprayed in the air for mosquitoes.   As I will provide clarification of in a few minutes, because the pesticides in our country are not managed well and because scientists and doctors alike are proving that they cause harm, and because there are less harmful and non-toxic alternatives, the definition of essential should not be paired with pesticide.  Please note it is therefore our opinion that we believe all pesticide use should be severely limited or banned.

Thank you for hearing my statement on this matter.  Now on to the topic of lawn care usage.

I’d like to start by giving you a personal example of what I as a new mother of a beautiful 2 ½ year old girl have experienced in this city.  I took my daughter on a warm sunny day to the park.  I lay down on a little hill while my daughter ran in the grass.  As I was lying there, I thought to myself, wow, this is a really green field.  And then I thought, that was odd.  Where are the flowers, clovers, and dandelions?  Did they spray this whole field with pesticide?  And with that thought, I worried about my daughter’s health and I was no longer enjoying the field as much as I had a moment ago.  I was wondering about whether or not I should keep her in my own yard to play and avoid the city parks.  Or whether or not moving to a more progressive Canadian city where they no longer spray pesticides was a solution.

And this is what it boils down to doesn’t it?  The health of our citizens or those little yellow flowers.  You might say I’m talking like a hippy, a radical, or someone with an unkempt yard. But I’m not.   I am a young homeowner and I absolutely love spending time outside in the garden and our city parks.  I spend significant effort in making my lawn and garden fruitful and presentable.  I am only talking as our scientists, environmental government agencies, and doctors.  I am talking the talk of progressive Canadian cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, part of the 127 municipalities in Canada in total as of April 28, 2007 that have put into effect pesticide by-laws.
(from Statistics Canada community profiles 2006) Cities that have decided it is not necessary to put questionable substances on our parks and playgrounds, near our pets, children, wildlife, and us simply for cosmetic purposes.

Now why is it that we feel these pesticides are questionable?  There is now a report from the Ontario College of Family Physicians that looked at pesticide studies done since 1992 in an effort to establish chronic long-term effects of pesticide exposure.   The summary of this project said: “the results of the systematic review do not help indicate which pesticides are particularly harmful.  Exposure to all the commonly used pesticides has shown positive associations with adverse health effects.  The literature does not support the concept that some pesticides are safer than others, it simply points to different health effects with different latency periods for different classes.  Triazine herbicides increased breast cancer risk. Carbamate and phenoxyherbicide exposure increased lung cancer risk. Spraying of an organophosphate during pregnancy cased deterioration in placentas.  Indoor use of insecticides was associated with brain cancer and acute lymphocytic leukemia in children.  Six pesticides, including 2,4-D and Dicamba (used in our city’s weed control program according to recent public notice May 14, 2007) were associated with increased time to pregnancy.  Fungicide exposure had positive associations with dermatitis.  Some more surprising positive associations were found for pesticides that are considered less toxic in acute poisoning settings.  For example, pyrethrins were associated with chronic psychiatric effects, chromosome aberrations, rashes in licensed pet groomers and intrauterine growth retardation, which is a major determinant of health in the first year of life.  The herbicides glyphosate and glufosinate (also used by the city) had associations with congenital malformations.  Parental preconception exposure to glyphosate was associated with late abortion.

“Given the wide range of commonly used home and garden products associated with health effects, our message to patients should focus on reduction of exposure to all pesticides rather than targeting specific pesticides or classes.  “

So we should avoid all.  Why doesn’t the government manage these pesticides?  Well, they do in theory.  The Pest Management Regulatory Agency is in charge of that.  But according to the Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to the House of Commons on Managing the Safety and Accessibility of Pesticides done in 2003 (the latest report) there were many instances where they were not doing their job.  In the interest of time, I have noted in the transcript paragraph numbers, and will read the main chapter headings “Progress on re-evaluations (on older pesticides) has been very slow (1.54 – 1.60); Some pesticides are approved based on inadequate information (1.36 to 1.39); Key assumptions are not tested and some are not correct (1.40 – 1.45); Overall, the agency is not ensuring that pesticides meet current standards (1.61 – 1.62); The agency does not consistently apply its evaluation framework (1.46 – 1.50)  The agency does not know  to what extent users are complying with pesticide labels (1.79 to 1.82) Planned performance gains have not been achieved (1.69 – 1.71)    The list goes on and on.  There are tick marks throughout saying the pmra has read and will work on fixing these problems or rely on another country’s government assessment efforts (1.62) but as yet there has been no other report to date to tell us if this is so.  Are we to believe them like the first time they said they would do their job in protecting us and testing properly?   Proper and regulated testing of chemicals is incredibly important, have we learned nothing from asbestos, ddt, and leaded gasoline? 

I looked up in the city’s public notice of pesticides they use in weed control. In the interest of time, I won’t go over each chemical and their hazards.  What I will do however, is show you what the material safety data sheets say to do to apply chemicals:  (dress appropriately app. 20 seconds) They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  How many people in your neighbourhood dress like this applying lawn care chemicals?  Or their neighbours as they walk across the over spray onto the sidewalk or lawn?  How many children, squirrels, birds, pets, how many of you dress like this?  I personally have never seen anyone wear this kind of protection at all, let alone around the secondary by-products many chemicals break down into?  What of run off?  When it spills, the MSDS sheets say, “Contain the spill to prevent from spreading or contaminating soil or from entering sewage and drainage systems or any body of water”.  Now I know lawn applications are not a spill.  But when you consider how many people use this unwittingly how much of it runs off into our sewer?  We have almost 700,000 people in this city, what happens when it rains?    What about the containers?  The MSDS says to bring empty containers to the hazardous waste department?  Who does that?  Why are we putting hazardous waste near us anyway?

So, if we don’t use pesticides what hope is there for our lawns?  This is hard because monocultures such as a lawn do not exist in nature.  We can get away from them a bit and have more naturalization areas such as by my house in omand’s creek, a popular trail and bridge.  How awesome to drive by and see flowers on boulevards, fruit bushes and wildlife instead of just grass, much more interesting.  That being said, of course lawns won’t ever disappear entirely.  But we are becoming educated and so are companies, there is hope.  Instead of seeing the keep your kids and pets off the grass I walked past a store front lawn the other day that was using an organic plus lawn care system and didn’t have to put up a warning. It is a new system that does not use any man made pesticides or synthetic ingredients, it used natural seaweed/kelp extracts, composts, organic type fertilizers, beet or corn extracts. It used integrated pest management, like predatory nematodes for certain bug controls so bugs don’t become resistant to pesticides.  In a home renovations store I saw a free magazine telling how to take care of yourself and your yard organically.  The store I bought my step on dandelion digger at said I got the last one, they are selling out faster than they can bring them in.  At the library there are information series on how to take care of your lawn naturally. Health Canada online has a link to how to take care of bugs without pesticides.  The list goes on.  This is becoming the future of our cities, we are becoming educated on how cost effective, easy, and safe it is to be green and we want it.  Environment is top on the voters concern list.  So if our citizens, our companies, our doctors and our scientists are saying it’s essential to be green, what is holding us back, our representatives? 

Because of the lack of protection at the federal and provincial level, it is up to you our city representatives to make this happen.  Many people have a blind faith in Canada as being a great country and believe that in Canada, our government will not put anything on the shelves or on our parks that is bad for us.  Unfortunately, that is not the case. In closing, I’d like to point out that we are debating something called NON ESSENTIAL.  We have already titled it as being not needed and still have to decide if we need to use the non-needed substances.  Why are we risking our health, environment and families for this?

Thank you for your time this evening.

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