The pesticide issue
The Canadian Nursery Landscape Association and all provincial associations recently received a copy of the report from the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. This report was presented to the House of Commons in May and has recommended the total ban of pesticide for non-essential use.

     Since that date, the World Health Organization publicly stated that their agenda is to ban the use of all pesticides in all agriculture- and horticulture-related industries.

CNLA has met with the executive directors of each provincial association by conference call on a regular basis since April to discuss this matter and to coordinate an offensive front against these bans.

     To take on this project and to calm the reaction of government officials to the incomplete information fed to them by the activists will require the hiring of a professional lobby firm. A decision was recently made to do this, and while the costs are fairly high, it will be a necessary factor in this lobby.

     A copy of the CNLA Pesticides position was sent to all Federal MPs across Canada, including Ministers Andersen (Environment), Rock (Health) and Vanclief (Agriculture).


NOMULE
You are aware of our NOMULE committee. This acronym stands for National Ornamental Minor Use Label Expansion, and includes representatives from Nursery, Floriculture, Forestry and Turf industries and provincial and federal government. Its mandate was to develop a more streamlined method of obtaining label expansion for pesticides already registered in Canada that would be beneficial to member industries. It has received many accolades from the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), the regulatory body, as well as from the IR4 Group in the U.S. The IR4 Group, established in the 1960s, is a very powerful group that performs the same tasks as NOMULE. Joint meetings are part of the agenda to keep both groups informed and develop joint registration and site tests.

     NOMULE meets periodically by conference call to discuss the progress of submitted pesticides as well as the work in progress. The work can be done anywhere in Canada, with the workload shared between the provinces. Following in this report is a list of registrations to date as well as those that are "works in progress."

     The IR4 Group will meet later this year at an annual meeting where NOMULE will endeavour to have the federal government send one staff member to sit on the NOMULE committee.