On December 12, 2002 a thirty year hiatus in pesticides reform in Canada ended when
the Pest Control Products Act (PCPA) received Royal Assent. The new legislation was the result
of over ten years of effort on the part of government officials, industry representatives, and
public interest organizations to revamp the outdated 1969 federal pesticides law requiring pre-
market testing and registration of pest control products. The reforms were relatively
uncontroversial: both industry and environmental/ health organizations recognized the need for a
new regulatory regime. For industry, the slow pace of pesticide evaluation and review by the
Pest Management Regulatory Agency meant that reduced-risk pest products were unavailable for
agriculture and landscaping purposes. Moreover, the health and safety provisions in the 1969
legislation were hopelessly out of date with the U.S. regulatory framework, particularly since the
passage of the U.S. Food Quality Protection Act in 1996. Given that the United States was
Canada’s largest agricultural trading partner, it was important that the industry achieve better
“harmonization” with U.S. law so as to facilitate trade. For environmental and health groups, the
new legislation offered better protection for children, more attention to the bioaccumulative
affects of pesticides, greater transparency in the regulatory process, and improved data collection
around pesticide use and sales, among other things.
The federal activity around pesticides policy in the 1990s and early 2000s is significant
for several reasons. As noted, these legislative reforms were the first in over three decades.
Moreover, they were passed during an era of federal retrenchment in the area of environmental
regulation generally. Canada, already known for having one of the most decentralized
environmental regulatory regimes of any western country, had devolved additional authority to
the provinces in the 1990s and had de-funded several federal environmental programs (Paehlke
2000). Yet with the passage of the PCPA, the federal government assumed more regulatory
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Convention