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Updates on Glyphosate Petition

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Hello friends,

It has been an exhilarating time since I opened two separate channels for my Government, in Ottawa, Canada, to address the issue of rising use and presence of the weed killer RoundUp and in particular the chemical Glyphosate in our environment, and the fact that the people do not have either access to information on how much of the toxic chemical is in our food, water and soil, or access to the safety test that is supposed to prove that the chemical and the formulation is actually safe for people or for the environment.

This matter has now reached a turning point since Canada is now having a lot of labs accessible to the public that will test our food for Glyphosate, something that was not the case a few years ago, and something on which I had already butted head with the previous Government under Harper, and where my letter was carried by the then MP Mr. Atamanenko to the then Health Minister Ms Rona Ambrose, to respond to. This is a good sign that labs are now beginning to offer this service.

One of my current multi-channel dialogue with the Government included an application to Health Canada, which is Canada’s way of describing the Ministry of Health, to disclose to me if it actually has seen safety test data on Glyphosate, and if so, to disclose to me all such data and reports. This application was made through the official system known as “Access To Information” act of the Government of Canada. Similar acts are also known as “Freedom of Information” act or “Right to Information” act elsewhere, such as in Canadian provincial Governments or elsewhere in the world.

Another parallel effort was the creation of an online petition for Canadians to support a motion, for our Government to disclose all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate or RoundUp, to the Canadian people, so that people can independently verify if the product is safe and if the Canadian Government has been diligent in its study and analysis. Further, it is the right of the Canadian people to see such documents and it is in effect be illegal to deny public access to such data.

Why exhilarating? Well, first of all, the correspondence that generated from the “Access to information” act appeal, confirmed a few things,

  • that the Canadian Government has in fact seen a lot of safety test data and documents
  • that they are in possession of over 130,000 pages of such material
  • that I indeed have a right, as a citizen of Canada, to see such data

And in spite of that, the Government has unfortunately been dragging its feet, citing reasons why it needs more time to provide me with the information requested. One of the reason is that they need to cross check with the parties that conducted that safety test, if the details may be divulged to me and under what condition.

The very facts that the Canadian Government acknowledges it has the data, and that I have a right to it, are positive development. That I cannot see it yet unless third parties that provided the data agree to the arrangement – is in my view illegal. If such data cannot be shown to the people, then the product (Glyphosate) cannot be approved for use among the people either. That is how I read the law.

The second part – the petition, has 30 updates so far, has generated almost 23,000 support, over 98% of them being Canadian. This is far and away more support than I had anticipated. For a country with a very small population of 35 million, this is an unprecedented level of support on a subject not so easy to understand and one that has not been covered by the mainstream media at all. The sheer volume of support, I suspect, has influenced my MP Carla Qualtrough, who also happens to be a federal minister, to agree to see me on April 27th for 45 minutes, so I can hand over all the documentation on the petition, which runs to over 1,000 pages, to her in a CD or a flash drive, to be taken to Ottawa and handed over the Health minister.

I asked if I might bring a delegation of six other persons, to which the Minister Qualtrough’s office that I may. The petition itself can be visited by clicking on the image below.

It has many interesting updates. One of which is a comment by India’s noted supreme court advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan, who is representing petitioner Ms Aruna Rodrigues in her public interest litigation against the Government of India on account of GMO, where legal precedence is already set, that obliges the Government to disclose biosafety data of transgenic products to the people before the product is to be approved for release. In other words, intellectual property rights, or agreement on Confidentiality or or non-disclosure clauses cannot be used to trump public safety. Click below for that video.

My request to the Honourable minister is going to be in three parts, of which one would be to personally carry the petition documents to Ottawa and hand over same to Health Canada and to ask them to respond. The second is to have a personal talk with Prime Minister Trudeau, requesting him to drop in at the secretarial office of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, located in the same home turf of the Prime Minister, in Montreal, and to ask the staff in that office about how Canada is doing in comparison with the rest of the world with regard to Cartagena Protocol. The third is to look into ways to kick start testing of local foods in Delta, her constituency, for presence of Glyphosate.

[youtube d5TQHzroqDs]

 I have added information on a few UN platforms for Canadians in the latest update. These are:

There is also an effort on my part to convert a condensed form of the petition material and references into an interactive e-book on Apples’s iTune store and/or Amazon’s Kindle for around $3 in the next few weeks.

There are perhaps a few more updates that will go into the petition before it is closed. These might include:

  • A talk with the president of the Canadian Farmers Union
  • How to engage citizens into coaxing our Municipalities to start testing local food, water and soil, for presence of Glyphosate and to make the data public.
  • An update on the coming meeting with Minister Carla Qualtrough about this petition.

Stay tunes and feel free to add your comments below.

Thank you.

Tony

Did Canada include Glyphosate in its study of Environmental Chemicals?

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To a few scientist friends
+++++++++++++++++++
Dear friends,

I trouble you again in search of some truths or information from three reports that Health Canada (ministry of health, Canada) has published of studies on various harmful manmade environmental chemicals and how much of each has been found in humans. The studies started in 2007 for the first report, and ended with the publication of the third report in 2015.

Two of these three reports are available from Health Canada web site, and one is available by personal request made to Health Canada. I have all three of them and have been going over them repeatedly, to find if the Government considers Glyphosate to be a harmful environmental chemical (as a herbicide) and if Canadians have been tested for its presence in their body fluids.

I have found mention of other substances such as 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, Atrazine, Dicamba, and many many other pesticides and herbicides, as well as metals such as Uranium, Lead and Arsenic. But I failed to find a single mention of Glyphosate or RoundUp.

There are mentions of organophosphates, but I am unsure if it includes Glyphosate and how much of it has been found in humans.

Ultimately, I decided to pass the three reports, the first (2007-2009), the second (2009-2011) and the third (2012-2013, published 2015) to you for some help in finding if Glyphosate is at all represented in Health Canada’s ten year study on environmental chemicals and human exposure to them.

The three reports are:

1. report-rapport-eng.pdf
2. HumanBiomonitoringReport__EN.pdf
3. chms-ecms-cycle3-eng.pdf

I would very much appreciate if any of you can advise me if these three definitive reports by Health Canada on Canadian citizen’s exposure to environmental chemicals does or does not include Glyphosate.

I wished to also pass some of these to Nancy Swanson, but since she changed her email, I am out of touch with her. Perhaps one of you will pass this to her, in case she might offer to help.

The reason I ask this is – I intend to do something about it in case Health Canada has neglected to test Glyphosate in Canadians. I do not know yet what I would do, but that would depend on if and how much these reports have or have not covered Glyphosate.

By the way, the first and the second report covers the generic topic of “pesticide” and the third, the most recent one, does not.

I apologize again for troubling you all.
I do not know where else I could go.

Thanks and best wishes
Tony Mitra

For readers – please feel free to add your comment. If you have a Facebook account, you can use that to identify yourself. No anonymous posts please.

Activist’s handbook on RoundUp resistance

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Glyphosate and RoundUp are with us for a generation. And yet, their safety test records are kept hidden from the people. As I understand law, this hiding of safety data is illegal.

So, I have one Access To Information Act ongoing with the Canadian Government, to show to me all safety test data that is should have studied before approving the use of Glyphosate in Canadian agriculture. From correspondence generated through that, I have noted that the Government acknowledges my right to see such documents and yet drags its feet on disclosing them.

I have a separate petition on change.org, to ask Health Canada and the Prime Minister to release all safety test data on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, because hiding it would be illegal if the chemical itself is in our environment.

That petition has garnered 22,000 supporters, 98% of which are Canadians. I have since written to my MP, who also happens to be a cabinet minister in our federal Government, hon Carla Qualtrough, minister of sports and disabled persons.

She agreed to see me at the end of this month and carry the documents to be handed over to our Ministry of Health.

The petition itself has many updates, and the total package would take over 1,500 pages of printed matter, not including many audio and video files. The entire collection will be given to the Minister in a Disk.

Meanwhile, the petition, its updates and comments on the updates, have been converted into an interactive audio book, which can be found in the iTunes stores. The name of the book is still Glyphosate Petition. I think it might benefit from a change of name, to something like “An activist’s handbook to RoundUp resistance.”
The link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1098801707

Further, I made a video with my 13 minute rant on the subject, which you can see here.

[youtube IMb7iHCXRVU]

This book is for activists and those that want to make a difference with our Government.

  1. It is not for agro-industry scientists that wish to push voodoo science to the public without allowing independent verification of their claim.
  2. It is not for people that wish to promote the idea that all food should belong to patent holding corporations and their investors.
  3. It is not for those that wish to hang out with anti-GMO talking heads, who will speak about how bad the technology is, but will leave to us the unenviable task of confronting and challenging our Government, who allows these toxins into our food web.

It is for those of us that have done enough listening, and wish to directly involve in doing something, anything, within our means, to push back at our government.

Thanks.

A letter to a mayor

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Apr 2, 2016 — To: The Mayor Ms Luis Jackson,
Delta Corporation
April 1st, 2016 (not a prank)
Subject : Test Glyphosate in Delta’s water, soil and food.

Mayor Jackson,

Good day.

I write to you, yet again, regarding potential dangers linked with exposure  to Glyphosate for residents of Delta, and what the municipality could do.

Delta has fertile lowlands and farms. Glyphosate is the most used chemical in Canadian food production. Besides, since our town is actually in the delta of the Fraser river, and comprises of tidal mudflats and lowlands, most runoff from farms, as well as from the upland forests go through our midst. Both these regions use glyphosate, in agriculture by farmers and aerially in hilly forests by logging corporations.

In spite of being the most used toxin in Canada and the planet for a generation, safety test records and data of this weed killer are kept hidden from Canadians, possibly illegally, to protect commercial interest of the promoter.

Legal precedence is already being set in some countries, where supreme court has overruled federal Governments about keeping safety documents hidden from the people. Apparently, commercial confidentiality agreements and intellectual property rights cannot trump public safety. So, if a corporation cannot divulge safety records of its product to the public, the product itself may not be approved by the Government either.

I have two different channels of communication ongoing with the Ottawa Government about this. One of them is an online petition through change.org for the Government to disclose all safety test documents, based on which it is supposed to have approved Glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture and environment. Link : https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-health-canada-justin-trudeau-health-canada-prove-glyphosate-is-safe

The petition has generated a large number of follow up updates with input from scientists around the world and other notables, and has over 22,000 supporters, 98% from Canada. The volume of information on the petition has crossed a thousand pages, and MP Carla Qualtrough has agreed to see me so I can present all that to her and request her to hand deliver it to the minister in Health Canada, to either place the safety documents in public domain, or inform Canadians why they do not have a right to these safety documents, or perhaps arrange a debate on the floor of our parliament about if Canadian citizens have, or do not have, a right to see first hand, all safety test data on this herbicide that has been entering our food chain in ever increasing dose for a generation.

Meanwhile for the town of Delta, and perhaps many other towns where concerned Canadians have supported this petition, there are areas where our municipal governments could actively engage, at the bottom tier of our political system, to address this issue in the following manner:
1)
Start having our food, water, and soil, tested for concentration of Glyphosate. This could not even be done just a few years ago since labs did not offer such services, especially about testing our food for Glyphosate. But this can easily be done today. Increasing number of accredited labs are offering a high quality service. And some of the labs are nearby, such as in Burnaby. This testing is legal, and reasonably easy to do for a Municipal corporation. The reason so many labs are now scrambling to offer this service, is because our Government has started a massive effort to test our food, but behind closed doors, more or less from the time World Health Organization decided to reclassify Glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
2)
Start placing these test results online and available for any research student, scholar, scientist or concerned citizen to read, download and follow up on, should they so desire.

3)
Inform all parties, such as farmers, or loggers or nature park managers, that samples will be drawn from their areas after application of the herbicide, or when its concentration is noted to be highest, and also in off season, to get an idea of seasonal variation, and to start tracking the toxic load in regions within Delta.
4)
This data should be available to local hospitals and doctors, to check if reports of skin rashes, gastro-intestinal or auto-immune disorders, especially among children, seem to be following the rise and fall of prevalence of Glyphosate, in which case any research organization would now have some data to start working on, to investigate if some ailments might be linked to Glyphosate exposure. The municipality need not get involved in this research, but can easily and legally offer accumulated data. Why ? Because that aught to be our first line of defence against environment induced ill-health and it aught to be the duty of our town council to ensure the residents are protected from the most used and most controversial agriculture and environmental toxin in Canada.
5)
This data should also be available to wildlife research scientists that are investigating sudden population decline, unexpected mass death, skewring of sex ration in newborns, or disappearance of creatures starting from bees, birds, amphibians, herbivores and even whales.
6)
Invite volunteers to check if recommended limits of dose of glyphosate is followed by those authorized to use it, like farmers and loggers, or exceeded by anybody. I have reason to believe that application of Glyphosate is not supervised by anybody, even if the packaging warns that it is (or may be) relatively safe only if applied according to instructions and within the maximum recommended dosage limits. I believe a municipality has the right to allow citizen volunteers a right to check if such limits are maintained, even if the council cannot afford employing people to do so for them.

This is not the first time I have written to the Delta Corporation on Glyphosate and what I wished the town council to consider engaging in. This is unlikely to be my last. I wish the municipality would take this seriously.
This letter will likely be included in the petition asking Ottawa to place all safety data on Glyphosate in the public domain. The reason this letter, and others written to other politicians, will be included is that battling indiscriminate use of an untested (it remains untested as long as the tests are hidden from people) and potentially hazardous chemical will need to be challenged on multiple fronts and the people would need to engage in it directly, and apply pressure on the politicians. It is my hope that this update, which reaches all 22,000 supporters of the petition across Canada and beyond, will influence a few hundred others to also write to their respective town councils, MPs and MLAs. Even if a single politician or town ends up being the first in initiating a program to track our food, soil, water and environment for glyphosate concentration, that will amount to a kicking in of the door, a pathfinder, and a worthy achievement that others might follow.
Should Delta Corporation have an interest in discussing this further, I shall be more than happy to attend.
Looking forward to a positive response,
With good wishes
Tony Mitra, 10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada

Publishing a few books

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Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Writing is a gift – or is it?

Somewhere down the track where we evolved from apes to hominids with a brain that could handle complex sentences and a language, the basic tools for being a speaker were hardwired in.

I am told that this change essentially distinguishes anatomically modern humans from archaic forms, and that this development is rather recent, perhaps under a hundred thousand years old.

And then, much more recently, a mere five to ten thousand years back, folks started scratching around on the sand, of the walls of their caves, to describe something or other – passing phase of the moon, or the tide, or animals that were around them. And as humans discovered pastoralism and agriculture, experienced perhaps the first population spurt, and started building their own homes and not depend on caves, they managed to figure out how to use those scratchings for record keeping and identification. Written text, or script, was on the way.

And thus, although we have not yet evolved to the point where ability to speak in a language or read and write is hardwired into our genetic construct, and we have come  some distance towards it. A normal child will automatically pick up a language without being expressly tutored, simply by being around others speaking a specific tongue. Writing or reading, unfortunately is something that a human needs to specifically learn. It does not come automatically by hanging around people, or books, or a pencil.

Nonetheless, it is perhaps a fair assumption that a lot of people around the world can read some and write some, in some language. A few fortunate ones are comfortable in two languages, and some in more than two.

And that brings me all the way to my own situation. I had mentioned I knew three languages – Bengali, which is my mother tongue, Hindi, which is India’s national language, and English, which is the language I used in my profession as well as one of the two working languages of my adopted nation – Canada.

The problem these three languages each uses its own distinct script. This means, even if I am conversant in speaking in those languages, I would need to be familiar with three distinct scripts, or letters, to be able to read or write in any of them. This can be better understood if one considers differences between European languages such as English, Spanish and French. They use the same script, with perhaps a small number of special characters in each. If one is proficient in any language, one could more or less read the other, even if he fumbled with the exact meaning of grammar of it. Not so in my case. The three languages use three different scripts. Hindi and Bengali are both derived from a common mother language – Sanskrit and fall in the same language family, and yet their script separated from each other early on, and now one needs to be totally familiar with the different scripts to be able to read a sentence.

Anyhow, I write very little in Hindi, although I did part of my early schooling in that language and my first tentative writings and childhood poems were composed in Hindi.

My later years in a different part of India in a different school system let me lose familiarity with  writing Hindi, while picking up two others – Bengali and English. Today, I can read Hindi and converse in it, but would struggle to write in it.

I type the fastest in english, but that is primarily because the computer keypad is designed for english, and adapting that keypad to other scripts has its hassles, and sometimes I have to press multiple keys to generate a single letter in Bengali, which automatically slows things down and increases chances of mistake. While I can usually type in English without looking at my fingers, I cannot do that easily for Bengali using the same keyboard.

Anyhow, I have a lot of writings done in English and Bengali. And now the time has come I feel, to start publishing some of them since self publication is reasonably easy.

Some years ago, I tried to write a novel, but it turned out to be more a musing of an opinionated immigrant that observed the world around not superficially at the surface, but using What could amount to be a maverick effort at penetration below the surface and check if what we see at the surface is sustainable, or if the root is getting rotten, or in indeed the surface is shiny but is blocking out other parts of our world intending to insert an element of romance, the guy had a Canadian girl with him as they travelled across western Canada. But it was not really up to him to write a romance, and the continuing novella turn out to be a conversation between the two, mostly covering the land, its geological transformation, and evolutionary track of the living world, including man’s involvement is it.

Nonetheless, the total writings might appear to be somewhat curious and did include musings that I believe deserve to be preserved.

Due to sheer bulk of material, the writings needed to be split into multiple volumes. The first volume, covering 133 pages, was put up today. Its sections went as follows :

Captor description : Early writings
Section 1: A vanishing world
Section 2: Missing the world of his father’s paintings
Section 3: Golden
Section 4: An universe for an anchor
Section 5: Quantum mechanics of mass hysteria
Section 6: Storm warning
Section 7: Wish I could write like them
Section 8: Miguel, the Everglades and Lovelock’s warning
Section 9: Eocene Thermal maximum in a bowl of soup
Section 10: When you are right and wrong at the same time
Section 11: Rice in the Vedas
Section 12: Autobiographic blues
Section 13: At the water’s edge
Section 14: How green was my Facebook
Section 15: Suta at the riviera
Section 16: Coffee with a giant rhynoceros
Section 17: Considering Mabel
Section 18: Overload
Section 19: A sunset, mitochondria, peat bog, and a kiss
Section 20: A few pages on a leap year day
Section 21: The ten thousand year old woman
Section 22: The vanishing Y chromosome
Section 23: Cult of Tagore
Section 24: Old woman sacrifices herself.
Section 25: Hello world

And so, I compiled these twenty five blogs into 25 sections of chapter 1 of the book. The book has only one chapter but 25 sections, and is 133 pages long.

And then I converted it into an iBook (epub) format and uploaded it in Apple store.

Next, I exported it to pdf, reimported that for kindle and uploaded it again at Kindle.

Now, I can go have a coffee and plant some more seeds.

Minister Qualtrough agrees to a meeting

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Mar 22, 2016 — Minister Carla Qualtrough has agreed to a 45 minutes meeting about this petition. I am in the process of gathering a small but potent group to to see the Minister.

Here is an email sent to a few, which explains the issue, and should serve as an update.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear friends,

Here is an update on the Glyphosate issue along with a proposal, if one of you feel strongly enough to join me to meet our MP and minister Carla Qualtrough on April 1st afternoon in Delta BC.

In order to explain, I need to give the background.

Glyphosate is a toxic chemical that is the primary ingredient in the commercial weed killer brand named “RoundUp”. It is produced by Monsanto. It is by far the most used herbicide in Canadian agriculture, same as in USA and some other countries. Because it is used in agriculture, this chemical is expected to be in our food, and as such, is being found in various foods such as cereals, packaged food, milk, beef and poultry.

That Glyphosate is safe for us, is supposed to have been verified by Health Canada, before approving its use. In order to verify that, it is expected to see results of safety tests conducted on target animals exposed to this chemical. Health Canada says it has seen that, but in all the 30 years of its use in Canada (and 35 years in USA), no citizen of any country has been allowed to see these safety test data.

I have a communication ongoing with the Ministry of health, Ottawa, through Access To Information Act, demanding that the Government releases any and all safety tests it has seen that is supposed to indicate that Glyphosate is safe for animals, or give me the legal reason why it cannot show me these documents. The Government has acknowledged I have the right (as should any Canadian) to see the safety records, but is dragging its feel and finding excuses to delay the process, which started under the Harper Government and, far as I can tell, is continuing under the Trudeau Government.

Meanwhile, I have a separate online petition, asking the Canadian Govt to release all safety test documents on Glyphosate to the Canadian public. That petition has over 22,000 support signatures, 98% of whom are Canadian. Their comments, my follow up information and the list of all supporters would make over 500 pages of printed matter.


After having a string of email communication with Dr. Seralini of France, I am preparing to open a separate ‘Access To Information’ case with the Government of Canada, to check if it has at all seen any safety tests on the entire formulation of the herbicide “RoundUp” with all its ingredients, which, together, is suspected to be more dangerous than Glyphosate alone by an order of dimension, perhaps hundreds of times more dangerous.

Meanwhile, I wrote to Minister Carla Qualtrough recently about Glyphosate, about the fact that Canadians have not been able to verify if the chemical is safe, and that, according my understanding of the law (Carla is a lawyer), if the safety data of a product cannot be disclosed to the people, the product itself cannot be released either. I then asked her to grant me an audience of a half hour, where I may tell her about this petition and hand over the 500 odd page document with a request to her to consider taking that material to Ottawa and deliver it to the Minister of health, even on the floor of the parliament if need be, and ask her to either respond to the Canadian people’s demand to release the hitherto secret safety documents, or explain why Canadians do not deserve to see these safety records, or perhaps agree to a parliamentary debate over this issue.

I asked Minister Qualtrough to let me know in case she is unwilling to see me, so I can widen my search and find any MP, even an opposition one, who is willing to place this item on the floor of our Parliament for a general debate. I have reason to believe this chemical is also triggering a possible extinction of our flora and fauna through release over our forests from air, by logging companies.

I have been notified by the office of Minister Qualtrough, through email and two separate phone calls, that:
1) I may visit her office for 45 minutes on 1st April.
2) I may bring the 500 odd page document
3) I may bring a few like minded folks, if I wished.

That is the story.

I am in the process of getting a wide-ranging but small group, to come with me. I write this to you to ask if any one person (sorry, no more room) among you might feel passionate enough to accompany me.
have two noted persons that agreed to visit Delta and join me. One is Dr. Thierry Vrain, who should need no introduction here.

The other is Kenneth Young, Canadian Military veteran, advisor on chemical defoliant to Canadian and many other international institutions, Canadian Veteran Advocacy group, and strong advocate on speaker on permanent damage done to veterans through exposure to toxins starting from Agent Orange, and going on to Glyphosate. He has spoken three times at March against Monsanto events in Downtown Vancouver along with me and Thierry, and travels widely across Canada and overseas on this issue. Currently in Ottawa meeting with a Government sponsored committee to contribute in the consultation on possible policy changes needed to deal with toxic exposure and pesticides. He agreed to come to Delta on his own and join me on April 1st in this meeting and lend his voice as needed.

I also have some nature lover and passionate Delta residents wishing to join me for the meeting.

In summary, the primary object of the meeting is to highlight legality of releasing a chemical into our food web while hiding its safety record from the people, and if Canadian citizens have or do not have a right to demand public release of these documents, the volume of which I am advised by Health Canada to go beyond 130,000 pages, all of them kept secret for over a generation.

So, if there is someone here that wishes to join up, let me know. We are in the talking process to figure out how to manage the 45 minutes and who might talk on what. We are also planning a lunch or something on April 1st in Delta, prior to the meeting to iron out any issue and to present a cohesive front.

Thanks and best wishes
Tony Mitra

Material towards the online petition on public demand for disclosure of safety documents have gone so large that I am contemplating converting it all into a future e-Book for record keeping.

Meanwhile, a new blog might me done on the people that are preparing to join me for the meeting. Who they are and what they might do, etc. I will work on this next week.

A letter to my MP, hon. Carla Qualtrough

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Sending a physical mail to my MP and cabinet minister Carla Qualtrough.

It involves disclosure of safety documents on Glyphosate/RoundUp that the ministry of health in Ottawa is supposed to have studied before approval of its use in Canadian agriculture. The safety documents remain outside reach of the Canadian people.

My letter is to request her to grant me a meeting at her constituency office in our home town of Delta, BC, so I could speak to her face to face on this issue, and hand deliver to her the 500 odd pages of documents from my petition, covering over 22,000 signatories, with their comments as well as all updates from me including comments from noted scientists that have worked on this chemical.

If allowed an audience with her, I aim to express my view, and ask her to carry those documents and hand deliver to the minister of health on the floor of the parliament, and request the ministry to respond to my request that the safety data be made available to the people of Canada.

Should she decline to see me, or declines to carry the documents or present it to the ministry of health, I shall then consider myself within my rights to seek another member of parliament, further afield from my riding, including someone in the opposition, who is willing to take the matter to the floor on our parliament, and request an open debate on the topic.

A copy of this mail has also been sent by email to hon. Carla Qualtrough.


———————
To: Honourable Minister Carla Qualtrough
From : Tony Mitra, resident of Delta, BC
Dated: Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Subject: Safety of RoundUp herbicide, the most used toxin in Canadian agriculture

Honourable minister,

I have been involved in trying to bring to light possible toxic effects of widespread use of Monsanto’s herbicide RoundUp, with “glyphosate” as its active ingredient. It is my belief that this chemical is more dangerous in our environment that even DDT was back in the 1960s when it got banned.



However without going into details of that, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the safety test data of this product has been kept hidden from the Canadian people, on grounds that the information is proprietary and confidential. It is my belief that if the safety data of a product cannot be disclosed to the people, then the product itself should not be released either.



I have had some positive exchange with the previous Government over this issue, but it did not go far enough. I now have two different correspondence ongoing with the present Canadian Government. 

One is a “Access to information act” request for Health Canada to disclose to me all raw test data it has so far seen, before approving the use of Glyphosate in Canadian agriculture. I am told that there are over 130,000 pages of such data, but the Government needs to correspond with the groups that did the safety test to check if those data can be divulged to me.



The second is an online petition, for Prime Minister and Minister of Health to disclose all safety data on Glyphosate and help prove to the people of Canada that the substance is safe. It is my belief that the product is damaging for humans as well as a wide swath of living organisms, and that is one of the reasons the data is being kept away from public scrutiny. Over 22,000 people have signed into that petition – over 98% of whom are Canadians. The updates on that petition, the supporting material, comments and names of signatories would go into several hundred pages of printed matter.


Link : https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-health-canada-justin-trudeau-health-canada-prove-glyphosate-is-safe?



I write this letter to request you to grant me a visit where I could meet you at your Delta office, along with some more like minded Delta residents, in order to express our concern directly to you and to request you to carry the hundreds of pages of the petition data to the Minister of Health, in Ottawa.



Should you be disinclined to speak with us on this issue, I would appreciate if I could be notified accordingly, so I can start looking for Members of Parliament further away from Delta, in search of someone who might wish to take this to Ottawa.



I so wish that you would find time to see us, even if Pesticides and Health is not under your care, because status of our eco-system, biodiversity, and health of our children’s future should be everybody’s concern.

Thanking you
Tony Mitra

Ledikeni, Sepoy Mutiny, Nova Scotia, and Glyphosate

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It all started with me looking afresh at the list of 21,000 folks that supported my petition for the Government of Canada, Ministry of Health, to disclose safety test data on the chemical Glyphosate, in herbicide RoundUp and VisionMax, by Monsanto. That lead me to a few places in Canada were apparently named after a Mr. Canning where the petition had a few supporters. I knew the name Canning, as the last name of a noted English high born family of the mid nineteenth century. I remembered a place in India bearing the same name. Further, the name reminded me of a number of mystical water colour paintings of India created more than 150 years ago, by a noble Englishwoman named Charlotte Canning, or Lady Canning, perhaps the most prolific of all major female painters from India till date. Finally, I remembered a local sweet of Bengal that was named after Lady Canning – “ledikeni”. And all of this, somehow, was vaguely related to my effort to raise awareness on the dangers of the synthetic molecule glyphosate.

Charlotte Canning

Lastly, I contemplated covering this tenuous link between seemingly unconnected far flung towns spanning opposite ends of the globe, as a chapter of my never ending book – from the unique perspective of an immigrant from eastern part of India, to settle in the western edge of Canada, who was also involved in finding ways to expose, raise awareness on, and help curb within my means a reckless use of the toxin glyphosate, which I believes to be at the root of not just a global health crisis, but also a symbol of a crisis of civilization where sovereignty of nations were being undermined by corporate power.

Ironically, the first global corporation that emerged, and had enough power to subjugate large nations and even entire continents – is the East India Company, whose seat of power within India was a mere hundred miles from my birth place.

Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The petition allows me to download a list of supporters and their towns, but not their emails of contact details. I was looking at the data to see if I could figure out which provinces and towns had how many people that had reservation about Glyphosate being present in our food or environment, and thus ended up supporting my petition.

In the process I came across two locations in Canada that drew my attention.

I had three supporters from a village named Canning, in Nova Socitia, on the far eastern edge of Canada, and four more from the town of Cannington, Ontario, in the outskirts of Toronto.

Courtesy – Victoria & Albert Museum, London

For me, a visit to the village of Canning, Nova Scotia, if undertaken by road, would involve a 6,000 km drive that would likely take me nine days of driving six hours a day, conducted largely across the border through nine states in USA and then three provinces in Canada, literally a coast to coast journey, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Having been born in in Santiniketan, near Kolkata, India, I could not help but compare it to a hypothetical trip from that eastern town of india, right through the country, then crossing multiple international borders and driving through Pakistan, Iran, Isis controlled regions of Iraq and possibly Syria, then into Turkey and driving right across its length to the edge of Bosphorus straight, to the city of Istanbul.

But of course I was not planning to drive, either to Canning, Nova Scotia or to Istanbul, Turkey. I had already been to Nova Scotia, and might have driven right past Canning on my way to Halifax. And I had already been to Istanbul a long time ago, as a sailor whose ship docked there.

Courtesy – Victoria & Albert Museum, London

But the name of Canning and Cannington, struck a bell. Coming from West Bengal, India, I was aware of a coastal village called Canning, to the south of Kolkata, and a Bengali sweet called “ladikeni” which is derived from an English noble woman of the time, Lady Canning.

I wondered if these names, Canning and Cannington in Canada and Canning in India, halfway across the planet, had any link. And, as I soon found out, they did have a common link – a family name of the British aristocracy, of Earls, a title that, in absence of any living descendant, died out a generation after family was elevated to the rank of Earl.

The village of Canning, Nova Scotia, and the neighbourhood of Cannington, Ontario were named after the British Prime Minister George Canning. The coastal village in India was named after Lord Charles Canning, son of George, who was the Governor General of India during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, later promoted to Viceroy, and the family rank elevated to Earl. He was also the last Canning of his lineage, since he and his wife Charlotte did not leave any descendant, and therefore were the first and the last Canning with the title of an Earl.

Sepoy mutiny was the first and only major nationwide armed rebellion against British rule in India. It was participated mostly by the sepoy, or the Indian rank and file soldiers of the Royal British Army, in which the general population of India did not take part. After a brutal and bloody rebellion, the uprising was eventually subdued, having failed to dislodge the British from power. It did, however, usher in a lot of changes to the nature of the administrative system overseeing the British colony for the next ninety years, till India finally gained independence in 1947.

The mutiny was the first major rebellion in India against British rule, where Indian soldiers actually killed many of their white superior officers as well as European civilians. It was also occasion where Hindu and Muslim soldiers fought side by side against a perceived common enemy, the British. The next time this was to happen would be during the second world war, almost three generations later, when an Indian National Army under Subhash Bose would fight the British on Indian soil in Kohima during the later phase of the second world war.

Images of the Sepoy Mutiny, 1857

The mutiny also signalled the end of rule of a Corporation – British East India Company. From that point on, the British Government under Queen Victoria, took over the reigns of India. The country would thence be a British colony for the next ninety years, till Gandhi and a new generation of Indians took up the movement and spread it to the Indian masses on a platform of non-violence from the inside, and Subhash Bose declared war on Britain by the Indian national army from the outside, developments that eventually resulted in a split subcontinent gaining independence as two separate nations – India and Pakistan, in 1947. Pakistan was to bifurcate again with Bangladesh as an offshoot in 1971.

Images of the Sepoy Mutiny

Meanwhile, Governor General and later viceroy Charles Canning made some significant changes in the way of British policy towards ruling India in the aftermath of the mutiny and the brutal suppression and revenge killing that ensued. Two of the best known measures where conflicting and controversial, and one of them had a long standing historical relevance to this day.

The first was his observation that the success of the mutiny and its brutal effect in killing British and other white people was because the entire Indian solider class fought together without internal friction and hatred, in spite of the historical animosity between the Hindu and Muslim factions. Therefore, the British should adopt a policy of stoking this hatred and keeping the soldiers divided along religious lines, so the soldiers would no more be united, and each would prefer the British to maintain balance of force and each would assist the British in preventing any effort of the other to take over the reins of India. Thus, the Indian soldier should never again pose a unified threat to British Rule. That policy advice and doctrine became a sort of standard British policy all the way to India’s independence, and was critical in triggering the eventual “partition” of the nation along religious lines after a horrific sectarian violence and religious riots – ending up in creation of the nations of a Muslim majority Pakistan as a separate nation alongside a Hindu majority India.

Viscountess Charlotte Canning at right.

The second notable act of Lord Canning was his decision that the British should not indiscriminately punish every Indian soldier that did not fight on alongside the British during the mutiny, and instead, make a distinction between the actual rebels that took up arms against the British and those that abandoned the army in the wake of the turmoil and went back home, to sit out the mutiny. For this act of clemency, against deep rooted and loud protest from other British officials, he was also given the nick name – “Clemency Canning”. His post of Governor General was also elevated to Viceroy. He came to India after Marquess of Dalhousie and he was succeeded by Lord Elgin.

Today, a lot of places around the world has bears the name of Canning, mostly for the father but also the son. Surprisingly, the place “Canning, West Bengal, India” is not listed, or I could not find a reference to it in wikipedia and a few other resources, possibly because no volunteer offered to add that information.

George Canning, FRS, former British Prime Minister

Bengali people like sweets. And one of the enduring sweets is ledikeni – named after Lady Canning. That was Charlotte Canning, or Countess Canning, wife of Lord Charles Canning, Governor General and later Viceroy of India. She reportedly liked that sweet, or might have actually created it or popularized it.

Charlotte Canning was better known around the world as perhaps the best known woman artist of India of the time, and perhaps even till now. Some three hundred and fifty water colour paintings of her can be seen in Victoria and Albert Museum in London, most of them of scenes and people from India. Most of them are in ink, pencil, pastel or water colour wash. Most of them are also exquisite and carries a nostalgic sense of the times a century and half ago.

Earl Charles Canning, former Viceroy of India

Photography was just being invented and popularized around the time, and had arrived in India. So, Lord and Lady Canning also arranged to create and collect a vast number of photographs depicting various regions and people of India, which has left an enduring photographic record of the times.

She died in India a few years after the mutiny, in 1961, at the prime age of 44, from malaria. In that short span, and an even shorter combined tenure in India, she produced some 350 water colours representing the country, and thus left her legacy that has endured perhaps even more than her illustrious husband or father-in-law.

Lady Charlotte Canning

Fast forward to the present and I was looking at the names of three people from a single village of Canning, Nova Scotia, a thinly populated eastern province in Canada signing up on my petition on Glyphosate. This should not come as a surprise – Nova Scotia, along with Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, are often lumped together in calculations of pesticide use,  and has the highest per capita and per acre pesticide load in Canada. The region also enjoys the dubious unenviable record of being a sort of cancer capital for Canada. The region was also being used extensively for aerial spraying of Agent Orange on an experimental basis, before it was used in Vietnam, and for which deformed babies are still a fact of life there, and people in the eastern Canada are still fighting for the Government to accept that people were poisoned during that horrific test by American producers.

That leaves four more people from Cannington on the outskirts of Toronto, Ontario that also signed into the petition. I did speak in Toronto, Ontario, along with Dr. Thierry Vrain, about the dangers associated with allowing glyphosate in our environment. Perhaps some of the people signing up from there had heard me speaking.

Ledikeni

And that leaves the Bengali sweet “ledikeni”, which survives till this day in West Bengal, India. A cheese-based fried sweet, its distinctive features is its molten sugar syrup of lightly flavored cardamom powder. One of the main ingredient of any Indian sweet is of course – sugar. In India, it is made from Sugarcane.

These days, the sugarcane plants is being desiccated with RoundUp, with Glyphosate as a killer poison, in many parts of Bengal, I am told. So, it is more than possible, and very likely that the sweet ledikeni, prepared in Bengal today, contains glyphosate and will bring its share of ill-health to the people of Eastern India, much as any sweet in Canada or USA, coming for sugar beet, also laced with Glyphosate, is bringing ill-health in North America.

Click to go to the petition

And that brings me back to where I am, looking at the list of 21,000 people that supported my petitions, and trying trying to find new ways to resist the approval of this chemical for use in Canadian agriculture on one side, and trying to add a chapter for my book on the other.

And, I so like the paintings of Charlotte Canning.

Paris Talks on Climate – a gathering of liars

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I do not believe the Paris Climate talks will produce any result other than a lot of empty talk and photo shoot. Why do I feel that ? Because the world leaders appear to be allergic to calling a spade a spade, and spend their time on obfuscation that to me looks like deliberate attempt to hide the truth from the people who is responsible for the carbon, or total greenhouse gas emission. And the trick is – total emission by nations, and per capita emission by citizens of nations. If you cannot wrap your head around these two figures, you may fail to get to the bottom of this issue.

Here are a few graphs and sources of what I mean.

The above twin chart was made by me, taking CO2 emission figures from Wikipedia, World Bank, World Resources Institute and COTAP. The left half of the chart is what the major leaders would like to talk about – singling out China as the one polluting the planet. The same figures are also at the right half, but sorted according to per capita emission, or how much each person in these countries are emitting. And here you see a different pattern – the Anglo Saxon world is leading the attack on our environment, leading by far in carbon emission. Since these nations, and in particular USA, gives the impression of being among the best country in the world that others should imitate, they are setting the worst possible example for the rest of the planet. And this is something I would like to hear from Malcolm Turnbull, Barak Obama, or Justin Trudeau, And that is exactly what these leaders will not talk about, and will not accept.

Let us look at some more figures. This one is from Wikipedia

The list is sorted according to total emission of CO2 by nation. China is touted to look like the bad guy, having overtaken USA as the single largest CO2 emitting nation. But the bars at the right, give you the per capita figure. I added the red arrow to single out the greatest polluters on a per capita basis. Again, the Anglo saxons stand out as the worst environmental degraders, along with a few countries with easy access to fossil fuel such as Saudi Arabia, Kazakstan and UAE.

Now let us check a chart of total Green House Gas emission (Carbon Dioxide is not the only GHG) per capita, among the ten largest total emitting nations of the world, by World Resources Institute.

 I added the red and blue dotted horizontal line and the ellipses around USA and Canada. Notice that the world average emission is just over six (tons per person per year), along the dotted line. This means, if the playing field was made level right now, and the world decided not to increase carbon emission any further than what is today, every one will be allowed to emit only around 6 tons per year. Of course that is not what the world likes to aim at. They would like to limit total green house gas emission to what it was back in 1990. That total figure, of around 37 or so giga tons per year, when divided by the current population, of say 9 billion people, comes to, around 4 tons per person per year. That line was superimposed by the fat blue dotted line by me.

So now, let us see what this means. First, why do folks want to go back to the 1990 total, or reduce emission even less than the 1990 total? That is because folks have figured out that the cumulative effects of global warming and climate instability has a lag period in relation to the greenhouse gas emission. This means, even if every human dies today and stops producing any more CO2, the warming effect would continue for a while, before it begins to fall off. And we are not planning to all die off. Far from it. So, it was decided that going back to 1990 level would be a start. Even achieving that would ensure the world climate would change for the worse, up to a point, and then stay that way and not get any worse.

That was the basis for the 1990 emission level. So, now we understand the issue, and that the world average annual emission, based on 1990 total emission and current world population, should be around 4 tons.

This effectively means, if we really wish to make the playing field level, and that every human on earth is allowed have the same limit of GHG emission, then Canada, for example, will have to learn to do with a sixth of its current level of emission, or say 17% of its current level. And USA, the so called leader of the free world, will have to learn to live with a fifth of its current emission level. Can USA, or Canada, or Australia, manage to go back to energy consumption of a century ago? Can anybody imagine it? I do not see any of our leaders even talk about “per capita” emission, let alone setting any limit. And I know no poorer or developing country is going to accept any level that is lower pollution level than what the rich nations now enjoy. So, as long as the rich and the powerful are not willing to call a spade a spade, the rest of the world has every right to tell the leaders to go fly a kite, even if the outcome is environmental destruction that makes the earth’s surface less habitable by large air breathing vertebrate animals.

Meanwhile, how it is going to be for China, if the limit of 4 tons was to be implemented today ? Well, China will have to cut its own per capita emission to almost half. China is of course not at all ready to do that. In fact, China’s understandable argument or accusation has been that it is the west that caused the problem through four centuries of “development”, and damned if China is going to be penalized for that. China has every right, and will exert that right, to catch up with the west.

What does that mean, in terms of total emission ? If china is to catch up with the west, meaning primarily the anglo saxons (USA, Canada, Australia), it can easily double its per capita emission. That would add at least another 10 giga tons of carbon annually, and increase the global total by a fourth. In short, if the Anglo Saxons do not agree to decimate their emission level, China promises to increase global emission by 25%, from the current total level of around 40 to around 50 giga tons. What would that mean, in terms of average rise in temperature ? I do not know, and would appreciate anyone clarifying that.

Now, what about India? If we are to believe what some of the leaders are saying, it is USA, China, India, EU that are the power blocks. India is not high on total or per capita emission levels. But India is being taken seriously because it has the second highest population and is slated to overtake China as the most populous country soon. Not just that, but India is also an emerging nation, meaning it is recording a faster growth rate going over 7% annually, and its fuel consumption, deforestation, and contribution towards GHG emission is expected to climb exponentially for the coming decades.

Interestingly, among the top ten total emitters of today, in the chart above, only two nations, Mexico and India, have a per capita emission that is lower than the current average, while India is the only one that is below the average based on 1990 level too.

So, if India was to jump from its current low emission to the 1990 average level, there would not be a significant rise in global emission. But, if an agreement is not reached, and India too decides to go like China, and catch up with the Anglo Saxons, it can in essence increase its per capita emission ten fold, and national total by almost 20 giga tons, or 50% of the world total as of today. How much would that translate into a climate crisis ? How much would China+India catching up would cost the world in environmental greenhouse effect ?

Do we, as Canadians, have the right to demand that we continue to burn up 20 tons per man per year, and that China stays at 8 and India stays at 2? Will India or China agree to such a demand? Will USA agree to go back to the stone age with regard to fossil fuel consumption ?

Is anybody talking about these issues? I do not see truth coming from any of our leaders, not even second tier leaders. Not even small party leaders like Elizabeth May of the Green Party.

If we check the cumulative effect of CO2 emission since the dawn of the industrial age, from Dennis Silverman’s Southern California Energy blog, again USA stands out as a major villain, along with Germany, Russia, China. Eurasia, comprising of a rather vast region, and a slew of nations, still comes up with far less cumulative emission in the past two and a half century.

Greenhouse gases might be one out of more than one weapon of mass destruction we have unleashed on the planet – a chemical onslaught being at least one other. And since no leader is at all willing to call a spade a spade, I do not see how the higher planetary life can survive. Our leaders are calling a spade a Micky Mouse.

Whats the matter with the Anglo Saxons?

In general the more developed a nation is, more it has been polluting the environment with GHG. But out of them all, Australia, Canada and USA stand out as particular bad apples. Why? Is it something to do with their ethnicity, or culture, or work view or language, or geography? Well, Geography can be discounted since Australia, USA and Canada do not share identical climate geographic region. I shall let experts ponder this one out, but at first glance, the Anglo Saxons seem to be the least likely to provide a way out of this environmental dead end, because, as an ethnic group, it appears to be the most polluting in the entire planet. Unfortunately, the same anglo saxons also often assume they are in fact the leaders of the world, along with UK of course. Time for us to have a paradigm shift in our thinking, if we are going to solve this problem and get out alive as a civilization.

In general, the world is screwed, and human development and technology are, when you cut it to the bone, responsible for this crisis.

May be the solution would not come from humans at all, but from the micro organisms. I doubt man’s destructive “developmental” habits will be able to harm much of the micro-biota of the planet though. Those nitrogen fixing, oxygen breathing or exhaling, Methane eating, biochemically inventive micro-organisms might collectively produce a feedback loop, and begin to address the climate crisis, like in James Lovelock’s gaia hypothesis.

That, is a whole different story.

Rosemary Mason sends a letter

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Rosemary Samson is a British Scientist. I came to know more about her from her article in Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry, this year, the heading of which is in the image below. Clicking on the image should take you to the article itself.

I knew we were in a phase on a major mass extinction. Still, it was both depressing and chilling, to face facts as Rosemary articulated. It forces us to look at the world afresh, and stop accepting business as usual model of existence for our human race. We were hurtling towards a cliff, and it is wholly man made, or more specifically, made by the GDP addicted technologically savvy corporate driven economic model of human development.

Subsequently, I got to speak with her, and even had her read out a section of Tagore’s “Robbery of the soil”, which, a century down the line, still appears so relevant on a global scale.

Anyhow, she did sign my petition, requesting the Canadian Government to disclose to the people what direct safety test data it has seen that indicates glyphosate (RoundUp herbicide) may be good for agriculture. You can find the petition by clicking on the image below.

And since she signed the petition, she started getting emails of my updates. Fast forward to an incidence where one of the persons that signed the petition had an uncomplimentary comment to make about qualifications of Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff and essentially question the wisdom behind the petition. This is a time proven tactic of the pro-Monsanto lobby shills, to divert from the topic at hand, and try to insult scientists or people  that are objecting to the chemical onslaught on Canada through large scale toxicity and endocrine disruption. And me being me, I made an update touching on the subject of Anthony Samsel speaking to me about the sealed Monsanto safety test documents on Glyphosate, first part of which can be seen here:

 

And that prompted a letter from Rosemary Mason. She said:

Dear Tony
Good that you have got Anthony Samsel on board!
You might be interested in this new document I have just sent to the medical worthies in the UK…who as you can see are promoting the corporations.
I am not sure that you are aware that EFSA has approved glyphosate…it claims it has no effects on human health or the environment. But in Chapter 3 on human health page 56, and Chapter 4 Loss of Biodiversity and chemicals in the environment page 72, I am disputing this.
 
We haven’t a hope of winning unless we get the press in the UK to publish, but it becomes increasingly unlikely.
This is my last document!
Warm regards for Christmas.
Rosemary

Her open letter to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of UK can be read by clicking on the image below:


And of course, Rosemary was referring to the last of the papers on Glyphosate so far published by Samsel/Seneff team : Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases IV: cancer and related pathologies, published in Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry 15 (2015) 121–159 Received 5 August 2015; accepted 24 August 2015

. That can be read in full by clicking the image below:

My thanks go to Rosemary Mason of UK. I also hope that the British, and indeed the Europeans, will show sanity and courage in the face of unprecedented pressure from US trade, industry and Government lobby, and will act to save their own land, eco-system and people first, and American commercial interest later.