Ottawa Citizen October 20, 2005 OP-ED: WEAK CASE FOR PESTICIDE BAN 'Better safe than sorry" is a weak basis for public policy, yet it's the standard that city council seems ready to apply in pursuit of a ban on cosmetic pesticides. City staff and many councillors, plus Mayor Bob Chiarelli, are backing a bylaw that would force Ottawans to stop using insecticides and weed killer. The bylaw will be discussed at committee today. If it passes there, Ottawa's full city council is likely to place it on the agenda for its Wednesday meeting. A major public-relations campaign hasn't convinced a majority of Ottawans that pesticides are dangerous: city staff's own figures show that a three-year effort has reduced the number of Ottawa households using pesticides from 54 per cent to 53 per cent. Thus comes the hammer: a bylaw. There's plenty of evidence that pesticides are harmful if misused. Pesticides, like paint-thinner and gasoline and even seawater, can be dangerous if you immerse yourself in them or drink them or spend a lot of time working with them without protection. But there's simply no hard scientific proof emanating from Health Canada's pesticide experts -- no evidence beyond intuition and anecdotes -- that small quantities of legal pesticides, used judiciously, hurt humans or pets. If people are spraying pesticides carelessly, that's a different problem with a different solution. Lacking scientific support from Health Canada's experts, both the city's medical officer of health, Dr. Robert Cushman, and his counterpart at the provincial level, Dr. Sheela Basrur, invoke the "precautionary principle" to advocate banning the cosmetic use of pesticides in urban areas entirely. That's the better-safe-than-sorry idea. It holds that unless a substance can be definitively proven safe, it should be banned. What the doctors are saying is that they wouldn't use pesticides on their own lawns. That's fine. But it's an unacceptable leap to say that nobody else should, either. In the absence of proof, citizens must be allowed to draw their own conclusions and do their own risk- benefit calculations. The precautionary principle contrasts with the "harm principle." That principle prompts Health Canada to test chemical pesticides and ban some and restrict others. Theoretically one could apply the precautionary principle to anything and everything that poses a potential risk. Swimming pools, vehicles and staircases all represent a certain risk. We can't ban them all. The proposed bylaw doesn't make internal sense. If the precautionary principle is in play, there's no defensible reason to exempt rural Ottawa from the ban -- people in West Carleton might get hurt by pesticides just as much as someone in Beacon Hill. And there's no excuse for exempting golf courses, whose entire function is recreational. City council has no scientific expertise it can substitute for Health Canada's. Its only justification for the policy is the precautionary principle. Councillors must come to their senses before they vote. Copyright The Ottawa Citizen 2005