With the pandemic dominating all headlines recently, you might have missed the following important crop protection updates.

Ontario pesticide license extension

In Ontario, growers are legally required to pass the Grower Pesticide Safety Course and obtain a certificate to buy, handle, and use crop protection products. These must be renewed every five years.

As a preventative measure to minimize the spread of COVID-19, the Ontario Pesticide Education Program cancelled all classroom courses and in person exams from March 16, 2020. Online course capacity has been expanded, but as of the writing of this article (April 15) the next available online course doesn’t begin until May 4. In the meantime, pesticide safety certifications will expire for more than 1,400 of Ontario’s growers and vendors by the end of April. 

To ensure that Ontario growers can continue to farm, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks announced that growers and vendors whose certification expires on or after January 1, 2020, will have their certification extended until December 31, 2020. This extension will allow Ontario’s growers to continue to purchase and use the products they need for the 2020 growing season.

Other provinces that require grower certification may be doing similar extensions. Contact your local provincial staff for more information.

Ontario aligns with federal classifications

As covered in the December 2019 Crop Protection Column, Ontario has had a separate classification system for crop protection products compared to the federal government. In addition to what is already required by the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), a company wishing to register a new product in Ontario must first apply to have its product classified provincially. 

The consequences of Ontario’s duplicative system are slow integration of new federally registered products within the provincial regulations. These products have already met all requirements for human health and the environment during their PMRA review. Growers in Ontario have been unable to access new crop protection products already approved nationally because the provincial process is not completed. When this delay happens just before or during the growing season, growers can miss out on an entire season of use that would be available in any other province.

Ontario Bill 132, Better for People, Smarter for Business Act, 2019, introduced in the legislature when the government resumed last fall, included important amendments in the regulation of crop protection products. The amendments included the elimination of Ontario’s duplicate and inefficient classification system. Ontario would follow all other provinces and adopt the federal classifications. No application to approve a product in Ontario would be required, it would simply automatically be processed following along the federal system.

The Bill received Royal Assent in December. However, proclamation was required from the Lieutenant Governor to establish a date to come into force for these changes. The Lieutenant Governor of Ontario has now proclaimed these changes into force on May 1, 2020. This should fully eliminate product accessibility delays for Ontario growers in the very near future.

What’s happening with Minor Use?

The Minor Use Pesticides Program in Canada is an important mechanism for generating new crop protection registrations for horticultural crop uses. Run by the Pest Management Centre of Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada (AAFC-PMC), the goal is to address pest management issues for crops aside from the major field crops.

The Minor Use program runs on a priority basis, with growers and the Provincial Minor Use Coordinators (PMUCs) choosing which priorities AAFC-PMC will focus on. Priority projects are then pursued for further research to establish efficacy, crop safety, and/or residue information to support a future registration of a crop protection product.

The program has capacity to conduct 36 projects from the priorities selected this year. The limited number of slots does make this process a bit competitive. In order to facilitate this selection, a Canadian Minor Use Pesticides Priority Setting Workshop has been held annually since the program first started in 2003. The 2020 version of the priority setting meeting was scheduled to take place March 24-26 in Gatineau, Quebec. This was of course cancelled following the outbreak of COVID-19. So what now?

The first round of selections, the “C” priorities have now been chosen in consultation with growers and staff from the individual provinces via conference call and email. The total number of priorities after the first round of selection is 512 (not a typo) – with room for only 36 projects at the end. Needless to say, there is some work to do yet!

The next step is the selection of a far lower number of “B” priorities. Again this is being conducted by the PMUCs in association with provincial grower representatives. Eventually, this final list will need to get pared down to the 36 “A” priority projects to move forward. 

While more difficult and slower to do remotely, Minor Use is making progress this year and there will be priority projects happening at some point from 2020. If you are wondering what might be happening with the process in your province, contact your PMUC.