responsibilities and tightened restrictions on pesticides for environmental and health reasons.
Finally, the legislative reform process had involved consultations with, and the cooperation of
key stakeholders such as industry, environmental groups, and health organizations—a significant
departure from the more closed policy making processes of the past (see VanNijnatten 1999).
Yet all this federal activity on pesticides policy reform was arguably the less significant
development in pesticides politics in Canada during the 1990s and early 2000s. By the time the
Pest Control Products Act passed in 2002, over fifty municipalities throughout Canada had
passed bylaws banning or restricting “non-essential” uses of lawn and garden chemicals on
public and private property. The municipal bylaw movement, unlike the federal activity on
pesticides, was highly public and conflict-ridden; the relatively polite conversations in federal
pesticides advisory committees (which included industry and environmentalists) were supplanted
at the local level by often heated debates in front of city councils. And for good reason: at the
local level, the industry was facing the possibility of outright bans of its products, rather than
statements about their relative risks. And while the bylaw movement began small, it spread
rather rapidly. Large cities as well as small towns joined the bylaw bandwagon: in 2000, Halifax
became the largest municipality to pass a bylaw, and the cities of Montreal, Vancouver, and
Toronto followed. In 2002, Quebec Province restricted the use of lawn and garden pesticides
on
public and private land throughout the province, signifying the potential for the movement to
“trickle up” to higher levels of government.
This paper examines the municipal pesticide bylaws campaign in Canada from an
agenda-setting perspective. How did the issue of lawn and garden pesticides get on the agendas
of local municipalities? What accounts for the success of the movement? The analysis focuses on
strategies of issue definition and venue shopping, key components of Baumgartner and Jones’
1
I use the term “pesticides” generically to refer to chemical compounds used to kill unwanted plants or animals.
Pesticides include herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, and fungicides.
3
Convention