The green campaign to ban glyphosate is a global co-ordinated effort, but in Canada the war on the pesticide is led by an organization called Safe Food Matters, backed by the usual suspects: Environmental Defence, Friends of the Earth and the David Suzuki Foundation. The campaign is a well-funded effort involving millions of dollars over several years of legal proceedings.
The ban-glyphosate campaign is now before a Federal Court in Toronto. Since glyphosate products are constantly up for renewal, the new case is crucial for future policy, agriculture production, food prices and science. Use of the chemical keeps costs down and eliminates the need to plow and till fields, which research suggests reduces carbon emissions.
The activist objective is to force a radical transformation of Health Canada’s regulatory regime from a government-controlled science operation into a new system that would transfer pesticide oversight to an outside panel … that would be more open to the ideology-driven science manipulations favored by activists.
The PMRA’s reports, however, aggressively defend its conclusions that glyphosate is safe, including a categorical 2019 dismissal of the activist attempt to overturn a 2017 approval decision. It documented the flaws in the activist approach to glyphosate health risks. The agency said it “left no stone unturned” in its review of the decision. After a thorough scientific review, “we have concluded that the concerns raised by the objectors could not be scientifically supported when considering the entire body of relevant data.”
