To: Minister of Agriculture, BC, Honourable Ms Lana Popham,
AGR.Minister@gov.bc.ca
Dated: Thursday, October 5, 2017
Subject: Request to see you regarding banning of glyphosate from British Columbian agriculture
Minister Popham,
Greetings.
This is a follow up on the earlier email sent to you on the 28th of August, 2017, on this subject, which started a petition initiated by me on change.org, to request your government to ban glyphosate from British Columbian agriculture. The reasons for the petition were covered in that letter, but I shall take the liberty of mentioning three most important of them. These are
1)
Ottawa has registered glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture forty years ago. Yet, till date, safety documents that are supposed to prove the biocide to be harmless to us have not been disclosed. By safety documents I mean results of actual tests done on animals exposed to glyphosate and their health parameters measured, over their lifetime, and compared against identical animals living identical lifestyle and eating identical foods but without glyphosate. Study of this comparison is what constitutes actual evidence if the biocide is harmful or harmless to higher mammals. Instead of this document, we are constantly dumped with reports on third party opinions of who said what and where, about glyphosate. All these third party views are just noise.
According to our understanding of the law, it is illegal to allow release of a product while withholding documents that prove its safety.
Also, without such safety data, any maximum residue limit (MRL) set by the government with regard to glyphosate contamination in food is unsubstantiated, and in our view, also illegal.
2)
My analysis of near 8,000 foods collected in Canada and tested by CFIA (titled Poison Foods of North America) shows how industrially grown seed based foods produced in North America contain by far the highest concentration of glyphosate in the world, and how food samples collected in Western Canada proved to contain higher concentration of glyphosate than even foods collected elsewhere in Canada.
3)
Repeated attempts from my end to get the Ottawa government, both under PM Harper and now under PM Trudeau, to get Health Canada, to disclose hitherto hidden safety documents on glyphosate have failed or is going through a slow motion dragging of feet spanning multiple years of frustratingly endless chain of correspondence. Support from a handful of sympathetic MPs, all of then NDP, has failed to nudge Ottawa out of its studied stupor on this issue.
All this makes this petition not just a casual matter or health concern, but a life and death issue for the long term well being of the people.
A month has passed since this petition was created, and as of today, it has 16,585 supporters. People from 55 countries have supported the idea of British Columbia banning glyphosate from agriculture. Out of these, Canadians alone constitute 97%.
Within Canada, support came from all provinces, of which the top four are British Columbia with 6,614, Ontario with 4,940, Quebec with 1,626 and Alberta with 1,394 supporters. Many of them are waiting to see if BC succeeds so that they can take take a page out of this effort and hope to repeat it in their provinces.
I request that you grant us an hour to see you at your office, to present all the details of the petition, its list of supporters, their comments and all the textual and video updates made on the petition on a DVD disk to you.
I also request you to consider allowing me to bring a small delegation, of say six notable persons that may give their views on the matter, people such as retired Agriculture Canada scientists, or committed campaigners against Canadians being exposed to synthetic biocides.
We consider this unbelievable concentration of glyphosate in our food to be the front and centre most alarming of all the myriad problems that mankind faces across the world and in Canada today, and we are not going to give up our efforts to push back at what we consider to be an illegally approved clandestine slow poisoning of the masses, especially those that are uninformed or too poor to afford organic foods.
If you need assistance from the people to explore or initiate steps to restrict glyphosate from our food, you will not find more dedicated helpers than us.
If you agree, please indicate a date and time when we might present our petition and our views to you.
This letter is being sent as an email. It will also be printed, signed and physically mailed to you. Finally, this letter will also be read live on camera, as an update to the petition itself, and will be included in the DVD disk to be prepared for you.
Thanking you
Tony Mitra
10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada
Book: POISON FOODS OF NORTH AMERICA
A four year old file picture of then opposition MLA Lana Popham, with “No GMO please” Tony Mitra