The Cosmetic Pesticide Ban is making its way through the Ontario provincial legislature. Normally such would proceed with all the speed of cold molasses. Here, politicians and their bureaucratic accessories are moving with all the enthusiasm of dung beetles heading for an open sewer.
The matter has caught the attention and apparently the support of the province’s hoi polloi. But why the speed and desire for enactment from McGuinty’s government? This was, after all, the selfsame government that spent months dithering while 50,000 university students were denied their education by a strike.
Weird and wonderous are the ways of governments and green enthusiasts, however. The pesticides that are to be banned from home gardening attempts to raise vegetables and fruit are deemed perfectly safe to be applied on farm and forest.
And while the legislation is labelled as a cosmetic ban it will not prevent golf courses from applying same pesticides claimed hazardous to use on lawns and gardens.
'The regulations are aggressive, extreme, unfair, insensitive and illogical,'
Insecticides that are verboten to qualified specialist use by the garden maintenance industry are to be approved for wafting over the urban landscape by untrained householders. It would have done Lucrezia Borgia proud.
In a fit of draconian devilment, the gnomes of Queen’s Park have decreed there will be no phase-in period for the new regulations. The moment they become promulgated, they will be the law of the land. What happens to investments already made for the coming season by businesses, or contracts previously signed, worries not Ontario’s elected representatives or their minions. Strangely, previously under similar circumstances such phase-in periods have been the norm.
“The regulations are aggressive, extreme, unfair, insensitive and illogical,” says Tony DiGiovanni, Executive Director of the trade group Landscape Ontario (LO).
But not everyone has viewed the new regime as such. In fact, there are outright advantages to banning the dreaded chemicals some claim. The city of Halifax was the first major metropolitan area to ban pesticides. As a consequence, according to a report late last year in the Toronto Sun, employment by lawn and garden maintenance operators was said to have risen by 25 per cent.
Elsewhere, even prior to legislation being proposed, some in the lawncare industry were already offering their clients the option of a pesticide-free program. Phil Bull reports in Revolution Review, a newsletter for professionals ( [url=http://www.turfrevolution.com]http://www.turfrevolution.com[/url]), that this has been a great success for such businesses – even in municipalities that have yet to legislate a pesticide ban. Change is inevitable in any industry, writes Bull. Without change an industry stagnates and begins to diminish, he says. Don’t believe him? Then he suggests keep buying GM stock – apparently it’s a real bargain these days.
Many others in the lawncare industry have campaigned for better, professional use of pesticides. According to DiGiovanni, there are approximately 1,300 companies that currently hold operator’s licenses in Ontario. They employ approximately 15,000 licensed exterminators. There are 5,000 pesticide technicians. These could and should be permitted to use low-risk products to control infestations for which no other solution is possible.
Wrote Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, Virginia: “After forty years and billions of dollars in research, scientists are still looking for the first victim of pesticide residues.”
More recently, Thomas Fuller pointed out in The New York Times: “The mosquito responsible for the transmission of malaria is still endemic in the United States. But modern housing, better access to health care and the use of insecticides have virtually eradicated the disease in wealthier countries.” Nevertheless, the polls are persuasive when it comes politicians’ decisions.
Queen’s Park, seat of the Ontario government, is built on a formerly marshy, mosquito-infested tract. In colonial Upper Canada they suffered from the ‘ague.’ One can only wonder what the response would be if provincial politicians and their bureaucrat employees became thus infected. Would they continue to be so eager to ban effective control of the vector?
More: details of the Cosmetic Pesticide Ban may be seen at [url=http://www.ebr.gov.on.ca]http://www.ebr.gov.on.ca[/url] registry number 010-5080
