The following are speaking notes presented today to the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Forestry and Environment on behalf of the Advisory Council. The comments support a written brief available here in HTML and here in PDF.
My name is Jane Ledwell, and I’m here on behalf of the Prince Edward Island Advisory Council on the Status of Women. We are presenting a written brief today that argues in support of a province-wide ban on domestic pesticides.
This is an issue for women because pesticides have particular risks of negative health effects for pregnant women (including women who don’t know they’re pregnant yet), for women in general (especially senior women), and for children. There are no discernible advantages or benefits that outweigh these health risks. You can read these arguments in the written brief, but I’d like to talk with you more personally about the issue today.
As soon as domestic pesticides are applied, they become a neighbourhood issue.
I want to take you on a walk through my neighbourhood in Charlottetown. I’ll take you through a weekday in the spring or summer, though, since the sidewalks aren’t plowed today. As we take this walk, I invite you to think about how pesticides might move through the neighbourhood.
What I look forward to most in the springtime in my neighbourhood is that people and pets get out of their houses again and live larger parts of their lives in their yards and on the sidewalks.
Early in the morning, the paper carrier walks to neighbours’ doors to deliver the news. Retired folks walk their dogs, who wander back and forth over the edges of lawns, sniffing the traces of yesterday’s dogs. Back doors open onto backyard gardens where people feed birds and cats prowl from yard to yard trying to eat the birds. There are a lot of birds in the neighbourhood, eating crabapples and insects and keeping out of range of cats. People hang out their laundry before going to work.
Kids walk and cycle and wheelchair to school — to a junior high school in one direction and an elementary school in the other. The junior high students drag their flip-flops more and more slowly the closer they get to the school.
Parents pull up to drop their kids off at the licensed childcare centre around the corner and with the early childhood educator who cares for little ones in her home across the street. Some folks walk to work, or to either end of the street to catch a bus.
When workday traffic clears, the baby strollers come out. Jogging strollers, infant strollers, fold-up toddler strollers, double- and even triple-occupancy strollers. Some of the strollers get left behind with parents when toddlers, like my one-year-old daughter, test the world on their own feet and on their own terms, running ahead on her own, with all her senses alert to the world.
Our mail carrier walks across lawns to cut a few minutes off an over-subscribed mail route.
At lunch, while the babies nap, the junior high kids cut across lawns obliviously on their way to fast-food joints. They swear loudly, but they blush hard. Working folks come home to walk their dogs on their lunch breaks.
In the afternoon, the babies come out again, and some of the seniors at the retirement-living home sit out on the porch or in the yard in the sun or to move around with walkers or wheelchairs. Women who are making a change in their lives after leaving abusive relationships walk to get groceries for their families in second-stage housing.
The wind shifts. A light rain begins to fall. From two to four, people shuffle to and from the local funeral home for wakes.
School lets out. There’s soccer practice on the field at the end of our street. Kids play on the streets, throwing softballs, playing street hockey, skateboarding, splashing in play-pools, pushing each other off sidewalks.
People break out their barbecues, and the smell of other people’s suppers makes folks walking home from work arrive home hungry. They eat on their decks, hearing faint sounds of their neighbours eating on their decks.
And at night, after the birds have come home to their roosts and gossiped loudly about their days, people settle. Sometimes evidence of heartbreak and addiction and conflict spills out of houses and onto the sidewalks at night.
This is what we mean by all walks of life.
I’m a 35-year-old woman. When I walk on my street, sometimes I’m with my curious one-year-old. Sometimes I’m pregnant. Sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I might be. Sometimes I like those “maybe” times best of all. But those are the times I and any potential fetus are most at risk from pesticide exposure.
All of this to say that all this vitality — and potential vitality — in my neighbourhood is so much more valuable than Mr. X’s dandelion-free lawn or Ms. Y’s lawn free of brown spots from chinch bugs.
All of this to say that cosmetic pesticides can’t possibly stay put in a yard when wind and birds and pets and children and walkers all trail from yard to yard in a real, lived-in neighbourhood. Property might be labelled “private” but it’s not, and the air and water and animals are all shared.
All of this to say that as legislators you have an opportunity to take away one health risk for women and children in a risky world, and there’s no reason in the world not to do so when you can.
Pesticides are a neighbourhood issue, a provincial issue, a women’s and children’s health issue, and — finally — an equality issue, if we want equal ability to experience and enjoy the world around us without fearing risks to our health or our children’s health.
Thank you.
