Canada’s food workers union is taking Health Canada to court over what it calls a failure to protect agricultural workers by not enforcing pesticide safety data sheets (SDSs) regulations.
The lawsuit was launched in Leamington Sunday by the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada and Ecojustice Canada. The area is known to have a high population of migrant agricultural workers.
Safety Data Sheets (SDSs) are summary documents that provide information about the hazards of a product and advice about safety precautions.
Laura Bowman is a lawyer at Ecojustice.
Bowman told AM800's The Shift with Patty Handysides that since the regulations were brought into force in 2006, Health Canada has been treating them as voluntary.
"What that means is that instead of making it a condition of pesticide registration, to require a safety data sheet to be provided to workplaces, which is what the act requires, Health Canada has been telling pesticide companies that making a safety data sheet is voluntary," said Bowman.
Bowman says this means exposed workers are not getting the information they require to advocate for themselves.
"That stops them from being able to take adequate steps to protect themselves in the workplace, it stops them from being able to report their pesticide symptoms to Health Canada as a poisoning incident, and it prevents them from working with their healthcare providers on treatment," she said.
Bowman says there's lack of enforcement of the regulations that are in place, however it goes one step further, because she says Ontario has partial exemptions for farms as the province did not want to overstep on family-owned businesses.
She says they want officials to close the gaps and enforce the regulations.
"So that workers at farms, some of whom are using multiple pesticides every day, are being exposed to multiple pesticides every day, will have the tools they need to protect themselves, to object to unsafe work conditions, to be able to report poisoning incidents to Health Canada, because they'll know that their symptoms are related to the pesticide use," Bowman said.
AM800 News reached out to Health Canada for comment.
"As the litigation is pending, Health Canada is unable to comment at this time," said Mark Johnson, spokesperson for Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.