Photo: Tim Smith / The Narwhal

For 30 years, Gérald Chouinard visited Quebec orchards every week of the growing season, helping apple growers use fewer pesticides. Today, his right hand trembles as he speaks. Medication controls perhaps half of it, the former agronomist and researcher says. Some days, even cooking or walking is hard.

Chouinard was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, at 56. In 2022, Quebec’s administrative labour tribunal ruled that his illness was directly linked to his job, which for 20 years exposed him to more than 40 pesticides sprayed in orchards. His employer, Quebec’s Agriculture Ministry, did not contest the claim. The province’s workplace safety board told him he was the first such case.

Now he is challenging Ottawa. A House of Commons petition he launched closed last week with 21,410 signatures. It targets two federal budget bills: C-30, passed in June, which lets cabinet approve pesticides Health Canada has found too risky for the environment, and C-31, still before Parliament, which would end the requirement that every pesticide be fully re-evaluated at least once every 15 years.

“It’s a complete change of direction,” Chouinard told The Narwhal in French. “For decades, we’ve been going in one direction to reduce the risks, reduce the use of these products. … Now, suddenly, two bills that go the other way.”

These bills arrived as recent studies have documented a link between some pesticides and the risk of health issues like Parkinson’s and cancer, and as the federal government’s own data shows how much is still unresolved about pesticides in Canadian water.

In late October, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development — part of the auditor general’s office — released an audit of Health Canada’s water monitoring program for pesticides. It was largely positive: the program, launched in 2024, works as intended, and its data is already shaping regulatory decisions. But the auditors also found the department “took limited action on higher-risk pesticides.”

In 2024, sampling partners collected nearly 4,000 water samples. Thirty of the 233 pesticides analyzed exceeded levels Health Canada considers safe for aquatic life. Four landed in the highest-risk group, the audit found. Two of the four pesticides Health Canada identified to The Narwhal are what are known as neonicotinoids — insecticides long linked to harm to bees and aquatic insects.

Yet for half of these highest-risk pesticides, the auditors found, Health Canada had not started looking at whether action was needed. The department spokesperson said it is waiting for quality-checked 2025 data, though preliminary results “showed some exceedance patterns.” The audit also found Health Canada has no thresholds for action when pesticides exceed levels that may pose a risk to human health. The department agreed to draft them by June 2027, then consult the public.

The auditors point to an insecticide called clothianidin as an example of the monitoring program doing its job. A neonicotinoid used on corn, potatoes and other field crops, it is known to be harmful to pollinators. In 2024, the report found the clothianidin limit was exceeded 360 times, more than any other pesticide, at sites in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. Health Canada used that data to widen a re-evaluation of the insecticide, under way since 2016, to include its effects on aquatic invertebrates.

“Without the sampling results from the program, Health Canada would not have had the data on clothianidin to support these actions,” the auditors wrote. And even those actions are less drastic than those taken by the European Union, which now bars imported food containing detectable residues of clothianidin — which could impact everything from oranges and potatoes to beans, oil and coffee —  after a three-year transition that ends this year.

That kind of review is exactly what Chouinard fears is now at risk.

The feds and industry say changing pesticide rules helps food security

In June, Parliament passed Bill C-30, which implemented the government’s spring economic update. Tucked inside were amendments to the Pest Control Products Act, the law that governs pesticides in Canada.

The amendments let cabinet authorize a pesticide even after Health Canada concludes its environmental risks are unacceptable, if ministers decide it is needed for economic or food security.

The government fast-tracked the bill, limiting House debate and wrapping up committee study in two hours. The Senate committee that studied the bill concluded changes of this significance “should have warranted a separate study rather than being included in an omnibus bill.”

So far, cabinet has not used its new power to approve a pesticide, the health minister’s press secretary Alexandre Bergeron told The Narwhal.

The government frames the changes as part of a wider push on food security. In June, Ottawa unveiled a $3.2-billion national food security strategy it says was aimed at lowering grocery bills.

Industry welcomed the shift. “Food security is, ultimately, national security,” Darren Anderson, CEO of Canadian pesticide maker Vive Crop Protection, told the Senate agriculture committee in June. He said he had long asked the regulator to consider economic factors in pesticide decisions, and called C-31’s review changes “much more of an efficiency play.”

Most major farm groups agreed. Stéphanie Levasseur of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture told the Senate finance committee the organization would “welcome and support the recognition of economic and food security,” as long as implementation doesn’t add bureaucracy or delays. The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada “strongly supports” the changes, Chris Duyvelshoff, chair of crop protection, said, while insisting food security must not weaken health or environmental protection.

The federal government says changing pesticide rules will help national food security. Many in the agriculture industry say it’s a more efficient way to regulate. But not everyone is convinced. Photo: Tim Smith / The Narwhal

But not all farmers are on the same page. In June, the National Farmers Union asked members of Parliament to scrap the pesticide changes altogether. Cabinet deliberations stay confidential for 20 years, the union noted, so the public would not learn why a pesticide was approved until any effects were irreversible. The union also raised concerns about well-resourced companies lobbying for Health Canada exemptions.

Chouinard doesn’t blame farmers. Climate change has brought warmer temperatures, which in turn bring more insects and more disease, he said, which makes it harder for growers to limit chemical use. “They’re the first victims” of both climate change and pesticide exposure, he said.

Feds will also drop required re-evaluations of pesticides

A second bill, C-31, still before Parliament, would go further. Today, Health Canada must re-evaluate every registered pesticide at least once every 15 years. A re-evaluation can require new studies from the manufacturer or consult the public. C-31 would replace that with an “assessment” of information already available. A full re-evaluation would be required only if the health or environmental risks have “increased significantly.”

A transitional provision would also let the minister end re-evaluations already underway on the same basis.

“The 15-year checkpoint remains in place,” Alexandre Bergeron, press secretary to Health Minister Marjorie Michel, said in an email. “These changes will help reduce backlogs and ensure regulatory resources are focused on higher-risk products and emerging concerns, rather than automatically reviewing products simply because 15 years have passed.”

Backlogs are real: the clothianidin re-evaluation has now run for a decade. Health Canada said it has “no plans” to end it, but did not say how many other ongoing reviews could be affected.

Chouinard saw the effect of re-evaluation in the orchards himself. As part of his work, he tracked the toxicity of all the products applied there, compiling what he calls a “risk index” for the pesticides used. “We could see that the risk index, over the years, was going down,” he said, explaining that “products with high risk indices tend to disappear during re-evaluations. And new products that come on the market tend to have lower risk indices. … So, year after year, the record improves.”

He now fears dangerous products “could stay on the market much longer.” The new criteria, he said, are vague and “subject to outside pressure rather than based on science.”

In 2024, sampling partners collected nearly 4,000 water samples for an audit of Health Canada’s water monitoring program. Thirty of the 233 pesticides analyzed exceeded levels Health Canada considers safe for aquatic life. Four landed in the highest-risk group. Photo: Tim Smith / The Narwhal

Other critics say the government’s economic argument is weak. Pesticides can’t ensure food security, they say, when Canada is the world’s fourth-largest pesticide importer. It imported $3.02 billion worth between September 2025 and August 2026, about 72 per cent of it from the U.S., according to data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

With that dependence, loosening the rules won’t protect Canada’s crops or food supply, according to Pascal Priori, who coordinates a support network for pesticide victims run by the Quebec Public Health Association. “Deregulating does not strengthen our sovereignty or our agricultural competitiveness,” he told the House finance committee on Oct. 8. “On the contrary, it weakens it.”

Trade is also at stake. The European Union’s rules on pesticide residues cover more than one neonicotinoid, which the coalition opposing Canada’s changes warns could put up to $1.4 billion in exports at risk — just as Ottawa tries to diversify trade away from the U.S.

Pushback on pesticide bills spans the country

The pushback isn’t limited to Quebec. In Saanich, B.C., on Vancouver Island, Alena Gavrilenko, a fourth-year political science student at the University of Victoria, runs volunteer workshops on growing and canning organic food. Her neighbourhood recently built a seed library.

When the pesticide changes came up at a workshop this summer, she launched her own House of Commons petition. It has about 2,700 signatures, more than 1,000 of them from Ontario.

The consensus in her community, she said, is that “science should decide whether a pesticide is safe, not cabinet.” She also questions the government’s affordability argument.

“Nobody has shown that this power will even lower grocery prices,” she said. “Food prices are high, farmers need the tools, but I don’t think this is the way to go about it.”

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