take a whack at” (phone interview, 2005). The result was a massive expansion of the pesticides
issue onto municipal agendas throughout Canada. But anti-pesticides groups did not abandon
their work in national venues and focus solely at the municipal level; rather, they added the
pesticides issue to local venues. It would be more accurate to call their strategy “venue adding”
rather than “venue shopping.” Indeed, environmental groups were not necessarily losing at the
national level: while policy reform was slow, pesticides were on the national agenda,
environmental groups were recognized stakeholders in debates over reform, and federal
pesticides law was eventually revamped in ways that recognized the concerns of environmental
and health organizations.
The benefit of “going local” was that the local government could (or
would) take additional regulatory steps that the other levels could not.
The emergence of pesticides issues on the agendas of local governments across Canada
was not in the interest of the pro-pesticide coalition, which consisted of manufacturers,
distributors, and applicators of pesticides products as well as lawn and garden care companies.
Pesticide manufacturers, represented by industry trade associations like CropLife Canada, were
ill prepared to fight battles in hundreds of city councils around the country. This relative lack of
organization at the local level was a byproduct of the structure of the pesticide regulatory regime
in Canada, one that was relatively centralized at the national level. Put differently, the structure
of the organizations representing the pesticides industry reflected Canada’s pesticides regulatory
structure as it existed prior to the 1990s. CropLife Canada was organized and active in federal
venues, and according to one environmental activist, “was way more sophisticated at the federal
level” than at the local level (Cooper, phone interview, 2005).One of the advantages provided to
anti-pesticides activists, then, was that manufacturer’s groups were fairly unorganized at the
23
Katie Albright serves on the Pesticide Management Advisory Council, a group of stakeholders and government
officials who advises the federal government on reform of the Pest Control Products Act. She claimed that the text
of the 2002 reforms “had a lot to do with NGOs” (personal interview, 2005). Membership in the Pesticides Advisory
Council in January 2000 consisted of at least five representatives from environmental and health non-profit
organizations and five industry groups.
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Convention