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On the subject of information, we must urgently unlock the stranglehold on pesticide information. It's treated as confidential business information. This is especially silly because much of this data is freely available in the United States. I think an independent legal opinion on whether this is legitimate under the Access to Information Act, given the health and public interest nature of the information, would be worth having. We certainly haven't sought it ourselves, but it would be worth having. As the environmental commissioner pointed out, pesticide information is not collected by the federal government, unlike most OECD countries. We have to abandoned this closed door approach to pesticide information, and we have to make provisions in legislation for clear access. In our opinion pesticide use data—in other words, where it's used, why it's used, how it's used, and how much of it is used—should be a condition of registration. Basically it would mean no data, no registration.
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