‘No safe levels’: Former federal scientist warns Bill C-30 opens door for more pesticides in already broken regulatory system

By Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer Four months after resigning as co-chair of the science advisory committee to Canada’s national pesticide regulator in 2023, Bruce Lanphear went to a Warrior Monk Retreat on Bainbridge Island, where after a predawn meditation session, a monk asked participants to write down what they were feeling. What emerged on the paper was a poem he titled ‘Confessions of a Toxicologist’. The monk then asked Lanphear to read it aloud: “I am guilty. I believed, as many of us did, that a little poison would be safe— like an aspirin, or a glass of wine with dinner.   I stood by as it seeped quietly into the soil, the womb, the breath of morning.   I waited for proof, as if the…

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