Glyphosate-manufacturer Monsanto Facing Class-Action Law Suit in Canada

In December 2023, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice certified a new class-action law suit that alleges that Roundup—the most commonly used herbicide in the world—causes cancer, namely non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The certification decision is a significant milestone in the effort to hold Monsanto and Bayer accountable for the alleged harm caused by Roundup, and its active ingredient glyphosate.

The evidence of serious harm from the weed killer is undeniable. In November 2023, a jury in Missouri found Bayer’s Monsanto was liable for claims of negligence, design defects and failing to warn plaintiffs of the health dangers and was ordered to pay $1.56 billion.

According to a 2023 article in Reuters based on regulatory filings, roughly 165,000 claims have been made against the company for personal injuries allegedly caused by Roundup. When Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion, it also acquired the lawsuits. By 2020, Bayer had settled most of the pending Roundup cases—paying out roughly $11 billion— but 50,000 claims are still pending.

With so many lawsuits pending, the parent company, Bayer, decided in 2023 to remove glyphosate from its residential lawn and garden formulas in the US, but says the ingredient will remain in the household and agricultural Roundup products sold here in Canada.

In 2019, Health Canada, saying it “left no stone unturned in conducting its review,” re-approved glyphosate until 2032 — with the only caveat being that the manufacturer needed to provide more details on the product labels. When it first made it’s decision to renew the product approval in 2017, it received eight notices of objection, as well as “concerns raised publicly about the validity of some of the science around glyphosate in what is being referred to as the Monsanto Papers.” Canada’s regulatory “watchdog” (more like lapdog) decided to approve the product nonetheless.

Bayer continues to claim that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup is safe for human use.

As I’ve written previously, ever since 1974, when glyphosate was first sold to farmers in the US by the Missouri-based agrochemical giant, more than 1.6 billion kilograms of the active ingredient have been applied in the US alone. Globally the figure is closer to nine billion kg, making it the most heavily used herbicide in the world.

To wrap your head around how vast an amount this is, consider this: In just one year—2014 — farmers sprayed enough glyphosate to cover every single hectare of the world’s cultivated cropland with 0.5 kg of the herbicide.

From my 2016 piece Glyphosate and the Politics of Safety:

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in a number of products sold worldwide under various trade names including Roundup, Visionmax, Rodeo, Wipe Out, and Ground-up. It is reported that in the US alone there are 750 products containing glyphosate.

The way the compound works is by shutting down a biochemical pathway found in plants by interfering with the production of amino acids, needed for the plant to grow. Eventually, the plant dies from starvation.

But glyphosate, the active ingredient, only accounts for about 40 per cent of the herbicide formulation. The rest is water and any combination of more than 2,000 substances, which could be added by the manufacturer but not listed on the label. Health Canada’s media relations advisor, Andre Gagnon, says the public is not informed about what makes up the inerts (known as “formulants” in Canada) because those substances are considered “Confidential Business Information.” But Gagnon says Health Canada knows what they are and they’ve been “deemed safe for the proposed uses before the product is approved for use.”

Independent scientists, however, have been warning for years that glyphosate plus all the other ingredients may be much more dangerous than glyphosate all by itself. In 2013, one controversial study that appeared in the journal Toxicology concluded that the inert ingredients were more toxic than glyphosate alone. As well, in 2015 the research arm of the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a probable carcinogen.

In 2016, there were only 4 lawsuits in the US against Monsanto, by people who had developed NHL after using Roundup. But as already stated, that figure quickly skyrocketed to 165,000 claims, with 50,000 cases currently pending.

Glyphosate sprayed corn field in Ontario. Not a weed in sight. Photo courtesy: David Patriquin

Carcinogen, yes, but is glyphosate also an endocrine disruptor?

I’ve had an interest in glyphosate for many years — at least since the 1990s when it was found to be impacting the forage of bears in British Columbia, and later when it was found to be killing one of bear’s favourite foods, wild blueberries. But since then studies have shown that these chemicals aren’t just negatively affecting wildlife. The chemicals are now widely distributed in the environment, are in our food and water, and have been detected in urine, serum, and breast milk. The ubiquitous presence of these residues is extremely worrying since not only has glyphosate been found to be a probable carcinogen, it has also been linked to endocrine disruption, by either mimicking, blocking, stimulating or inhibiting the body’s natural hormones— a subject I hope to explore further at some point in the future.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has this to say about endocrine disruptors in general:

Several conflicting reports have been published concerning declines in the quality and quantity of sperm production in humans over the last four decades, and there are reported increases in certain cancers (e.g., breast, prostate, testicular). Such effects may have an endocrine-related basis, which has led to speculation about the possibility that these endocrine effects may have environmental causes.

If glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor—and it very well might be— it’s not alone. In 2010, a study by University of California, Berkeley biologists found that atrazine, one of the world's most widely used pesticides, manufactured by Syngenta, was wreaking havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, essentially emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females. At the time, Tyrone Hayes, professor of integrative biology stated that the 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially "dead" because of their inability to reproduce in the wild.

As early as 2003 the harmful effects of atrazine were being reported by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry:

Atrazine has been shown to cause changes in blood hormone levels in animals that affected the ability to reproduce. Some of the specific effects observed in animals are not likely to occur in occur in humans because of biological differences between humans and these types of animals. However, atrazine may affect the reproductive system in humans by a different mechanism.

Hayes did a TEDx talk on the subject.

Despite the potential harrowing health effects, atrazine, much like glyphosate, continues to be widely sprayed to kill broadleaf and grassy weeds, mainly on row crops such as corn, sorghum and sugarcane, but is not allowed for residential lawns in Canada.

Screen grab from 2014 Democracy Now piece “Silencing the Scientist” about how Tyrone Hayes was being targeted by atrazine manufacturer Syngenta after his research showed it was a dangerous endocrine disruptor.

As evidence builds, so does the residue on our food

Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) sets the maximum residue limit for food-pesticide combinations — for meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy products, grains and some processed foods. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency supposedly monitors these levels and enforces residue limits. But because glyphosate isn’t considered very toxic by HC, the maximum residue limits allowed in Canada are fairly high. But that isn’t even the half of it. The issue most Canadians are unaware of is how the MRLs are set in the first place. As previously written:

Basically it works like this: Monsanto submits to the PMRA the rate it says is necessary for the herbicide to work. Monsanto then conducts field trials using its proposed rate, and residue levels are collected on the tested crops. These results are reported back to the PMRA where they are reviewed and MRLs are then established. Health Canada says that the MRLs are only established for the active ingredient, glyphosate in this case.

But since glyphosate residue is in just about everything we eat (unless it’s organic), the residue levels need to be added up to determine our daily exposure to the chemical. Government reviewers do this too: they look at how much of each crop the typical Canadian would normally ingest in a day to establish an acceptable daily intake level. “The dietary risk assessment uses these identified crop residue levels and calculates the potential total human dietary exposure based on Canadian diets, to determine whether risks are acceptable,” says media advisor Andre Gagnon. By “acceptable” he means “that the level of dietary exposure is less than or equal to the amount that is considered to be acceptable when consumed daily over a lifetime.”

But what happens if one were to exceed the acceptable daily intake? Gagnon says a wide margin of safety is built in and high-end values are typically used in these assessments so as not to underestimate exposure. He says that even if residue levels were found to exceed the MRL, it doesn’t mean a food poses a health risk to consumers: “Negative health effects in animals resulting from glyphosate exposure occur only at doses more than 100 times higher (and often much higher) than the levels that humans are normally exposed to,” he says, and then adds, “when it is used according to label directions.”

So, Monsanto supplies Health Canada with the field data to establish the residue levels we’re allowed to ingest. But how does Health Canada come to the conclusion that these residue levels are safe?

Industry sponsored science and the funding dilemma

As previously reported:

When the PMRA was created in 1995, staff and resources from four federal departments — Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada and Health Canada — were consolidated into a single agency within Health Canada. The mandate of the PMRA has always been a dual and conflicting one: to “minimize the risks” associated with pesticides while at the same time “enabling access to pest management tools.”

According to the rules around the registration of pesticides, the agency first has to conduct a review: it looks at what other regulatory authorities have decided, such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the European Union, and other member countries of the OECD. And when it comes to the health studies, the source of the information is the manufacturer: “It must undergo extensive testing, which is the manufacturer’s responsibility to carry out,” says Gagnon. “The onus has always been on the applicant to provide the data required to support a pesticide application.”

Once the manufacturer submits all the data and results to Health Canada with an application for registration, Health Canada follows a set of test guidelines and principles developed by the OECD to assess whether Good Laboratory Practice was adhered to. Health Canada scientists also cross-check the data from different studies, and findings with those from counterparts in other countries. But essentially all the studies they look at are industry-sponsored ones.

Gagnon also says that the decision to register a product is based on the potential social and economic impact of doing so.

But there’s something else Canada’s pesticide regulator gets from the manufacturer: fees.

A few years after the PMRA was established, concerns were already being raised about whether its priorities might be skewed in favour of its revenue-generating activities.

Government critics were calling it a “funding dilemma” and arguing that cost recovery fees, which were collected from companies like Monsanto — registrants wanting their weed and pest killers registered for sale in Canada — were accounting for too much of the agency’s operating budget.

In 2000, a report of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development (chaired by Liberal MP Charles Caccia) was released titled “Pesticides: Making the Right Choice for Protection of Health and the Environment.” Among many other things, the report studied the funding issue and relayed that at the time (between 1997, when cost recovery fees were introduced, and 2000) payments from registrants accounted for roughly 30 per cent of the agency’s annual operating budget. The report went so far as to say that cost recovery fees were “a possible disincentive to the registration of safer pesticides.” The Committee recommended that if fees were going to be paid by registrants they should go to the Receiver General of Canada instead of directly to the PMRA:

If this were done, the PMRA might be under less pressure to generate revenues through the registration of pesticides in order to bolster its operating budget and thus might give a higher priority to the non-revenue-generating activities within its mandate, notably programs directed at developing alternatives to pesticides.

The Committee also recommended increased funding for the PMRA: “We were alarmed by the level of concern among senior scientists in all departments and associated scientific organizations about the government’s declining ability to respond to new demands and emerging issues.”

While it’s difficult to know how many of the Committee’s extensive list of recommendations were taken up, it’s safe to say the funding dilemma remains. According to the PMRA’s most recent annual report (2014-2015) cost recovery still accounts for roughly 30 per cent of its base operating budget, and registrants continue to pay PMRA directly.

The Committee also recommended that the precautionary approach be taken in decision-making, and that the “absolute priority” of the PMRA should be the “protection of human health and the environment”:

The precautionary principle means that appropriate preventive measures are to be taken where there is reason to believe that a pesticide is likely to cause harm, even when there is no conclusive evidence to prove a causal relation between the pesticide and its effects.

Now with growing evidence that a causal relationship is likely, it’s fair to say the precautionary approach has been completely abandoned.

In a precedent-setting victory in 2018, Plaintiff Dewayne Lee Johnson won a lawsuit over cancer claims and Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million. Johnson alleged the company's glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup gave him non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer, when he was working as a school groundskeeper. It was the first lawsuit of its kind. The monetary award was later reduced to $20.5 million on appeal. Photo: Pesticide Action Network.

Current class action suit launched in Canada a ‘milestone’

According to Koskie Minsky, one of the firms prosecuting the class action, the Class is represented by Jeffrey DeBlock, an NHL-survivor, who was diagnosed with NHL when he was seventeen years old after using Roundup as part of his summer job on a local farm. “After his diagnosis, DeBlock went through extensive treatment, which has permanently impacted his health and quality of life,” says Jonathan Ptak, a partner at Koskie Minsky.

“This lawsuit is not only about seeking compensation for past wrongs but also about ensuring corporate accountability and public safety going forward. The extensive evidence presented in our certification motion underscores the gravity of the allegations and the importance of this case."

[The Quaking Swamp Journal will report on any updates to the Canadian class-action lawsuit against Monsanto when details become available.]