CN abandons herbicide spray plan after public concern

CN Rail is clearing the track and everything near it.

But in a surprise move, the company revealed this week it has decided not to spray the brush and vegetation that is encroaching on the nearly 120 kilometres of track from Bedford to Brookfield.

“There will be no spraying in this location this year,” said Jonathan Abecassis, a regional CN spokesman. “Vegetation along the right of way will be cut by hand and machine for this year.”

While Abecassis said he doesn’t know what is behind the decision to abandon the spray permit granted by the provincial Environment Department in early August, opponents of the spray program are grateful for the change of direction.

“I might suspect it could have something to do with people talking about it,” said Emma Richter, a volunteer with the recently formed Greenpeace Halifax chapter.

“I am glad that in my mind they made the right decision not to spray. I am sure if nobody had approached them they would have just gone ahead and done it. They realized it was better to not do it.”

The local Greenpeace group had scheduled a rally against herbicide spraying along the track for this past Sunday but the uprising was cancelled because of rain. Richter said one of her group had reached out to CN and that Sam Austin, councillor for Dartmouth Centre, had contacted the company and raised the issue in a newsletter.

Richter said a big thing for companies now is to create jobs in Nova Scotia and the manual vegetation cull will generate employment, if only on a temporary basis.

“It’s a small victory but we have prevented at least one company from spraying,” Richter said.

But other companies are still ready to spray herbicides. The four permits issued earlier this month by the Environment Department cover about 1,654 hectares of woodland. The total area cited for spraying included the CN spraying approvals that were to be done by Wilderness Environmental Services of Ontario.

Northern Pulp, which owns the Pictou County pulp mill at Point Abercrombie, has been approved to spray 1,098 hectares of woodland in Halifax, Hants, Colchester and Pictou counties. The company will spray 15 sites and 933 hectares with an aerial spray, and the other seven sites and 165 hectares with a ground spray.

As was the case last year, when Northern Pulp sprayed more than 1,300 hectares of woodland, the forest will be sprayed with 2.8 litres of VisionMax for each hectare. The compound glyphosate constitutes 49 per cent of VisionMax, according to a 2011 data sheet from Monsanto Canada, the herbicide giant that produces glyphosate. Glyphosate is registered for use in a wide variety of settings, including agriculture, forestry, and home gardens and patios.

Despite its approval by Health Canada three decades ago, and a final re-evaluation decision on glyphosate in April that determined products containing glyphosate are not a concern to human health or the environment when used according to the label, many remain unconvinced that the product is not a carcinogen.

“Government should not be going forward with these things that are harmful to people’s health without doing proper public consultation,” said Lenore Zann, NDP MLA for the TruroBible Hill-Millbrook-Salmon River.

“Ten countries around the world have banned glyphosate,” she said. “It’s killing the hardwood trees, it’s killing all of the things that are not softwood, not coniferous.”

Kathy Cloutier of Northern Pulp argues that glyphosate is perfectly safe.

“The vegetation management program is something that has been carried out for over three decades,” Cloutier said. “It’s very, very heavily regulated in forestry use and we would not use something that we did not feel was safe or that we were not comfortable with.”

Cloutier said strict government regulations are applied to spraying, including a buffer zone from dwellings, notification of spraying, and certain wind speed and other weather-related restrictions.

The Northern Pulp spray program is expected to start later this month.