Health Canada’s decision to make pesticide safety data sheet access voluntary puts agricultural workers at risk, say advocacy groups.
“By making it optional for pesticide producers to provide safety data sheets, Health Canada is leaving agricultural workers, who are often migrant workers, without access to critical information about the chemicals they are handling and increasing the risk that they may face on-the-job health harms without knowing it,” said Ian Miron, Ecojustice lawyer, in a press release.
Why it matters: The Pest Control Products Act changes regarding safety data sheets coincide with the federal government’s attempts to pass the largest pesticide protection overhaul in Canada in a generation through budget bills C-30 and C-31.
Before the decision — which was passed as an order in council dated May 28 — the Pest Control Products Act had mandated Health Canada to ensure pesticide registrants specifically provide material safety data sheets (MSDS) to workplaces where pest control products are either used or made.
MSDS follow international standards and provide essential information on a chemical’s toxic properties, first aid and potential health impacts resulting from its use.
The amended act calls instead for “product safety information” to be provided in workplaces where pest control products are made, handled, stored or used, without specifying MSDS.
Advocacy groups are raising the alarm regarding agricultural worker safety, particularly temporary foreign workers, following Health Canada’s decision to make it voluntary for pesticide producers to provide safety data sheets. PHOTO: FILE
The government of Canada’s approval to make it voluntary for pesticide producers to provide MSDS came three weeks before Ecojustice and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Canada’s legal challenge of the move was to be heard in court.
Given the current changes to the Pest Control Products Act, the advocacy groups dropped the legal challenge in favour of exploring “other avenues to continue to push for protections for agricultural workers.”
“Health Canada had an easy option on the table: enforce the existing provisions under the PCPA and ensure agricultural workers exposed to workplace hazards are afforded the same protections as those in other sectors,” Miron said. “But it chose the opposite.”
Barry Sawyer, national president of UFCW Canada, said he’s disappointed with Health Canada’s decision.
The union said it has spent decades fighting to improve working conditions for migrant agricultural workers, but Health Canada’s move exposes those vulnerable workers to unnecessary risk.
“Worker information requirements for dangerous chemicals are standard in every industry except for agriculture,” Sawyer said in a release. “Where farm workers are continuously exposed to hazardous and dangerous chemicals in the workplace without adequate training or protection.”
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