COVER STORY COMPANION: Canada's Changing Landscape

What do you say when you are defending your services to a doctor who says he’s treating patients who have cancer as a result of pesticides? What about a mother who lost her child to leukemia and blames the lawn care industry? Or a nature-lover who claims chemical use over the years is causing a toxic build-up that is contributing to environmental depletion?
 
The answers to these questions do not come easy. Forget what the Environmental Protection Agency and numerous other research tells you about pesticide safety with proper use. Forget that gallons of a pesticide product typically contain 99 percent water and only 1 percent of the active ingredient. Forget that each turf and ornamental active ingredient brought to market today requires 10 to 12 years of research, $150 million and more than 200 tests to meet federal and state regulatory requirements. Forget about science.
 
Instead, think about motherhood and apple pie. Think about the sweet sound of birds chirping in the trees and children laughing and playing in the back yard. Think about the fear that results when seemingly credible people voice their concerns. Think about the doubt that is drummed up when misinformation is left unchallenged and becomes conventional wisdom.

Fighting romantic notions about family, nature and the outdoors that have been ingrained in most people since birth doesn’t work. “When people are having a hard time understanding an issue, they can’t comprehend the information being thrown at them from both sides so they go with their gut – and their gut usually tells them to stick to sentimental comforts,” explains Alan White, owner, Turf Systems, Burlington, Ontario.
 
Welcome to Canada.
 
Since the activists’ anti-pesticide campaign escalated as a result of a 2001 Supreme Court of Canada decision that granted municipalities the right to manage pesticide use over the provincial or federal governments, unprepared lawn care operators felt the sting and took the defensive approach.
 
For years they fought to stop municipalities from passing anti-pesticide bylaws and lost. Today, more than 35 percent of the population lives under regulations restricting pesticide use, including all of Quebec.
 
But like two grade school-aged children who get in a fight on the playground, one of them must walk away or the fight escalates. “Fighting just creates polarization and alienates the consumer,” White says. “When we are fighting against a wholesome message our industry starts to look like the bully even though we didn’t start the fight.”
 
Believing in the principle “the one who walks away from the fight is usually the most successful,” Canadian LCOs have stepped back to reconsider what they truly stand for – well-maintained green spaces – and how they can better broadcast their message. Improved communication and increased industry participation is enabling them to better control bylaw outcomes.
 
This is what you’re up against, U.S. lawn care operators (LCOs). Though all may seem quiet on the home front, “activists are engaged in U.S. politics as well as in Canada, and they talk to each other – there are no borders when it comes to activists,” explains Tony DiGiovanni, executive director, Landscape Ontario, a Canadian green industry association. “The Internet has enabled their communication to become rapid and effective. I have no doubt that the fight will come to the U.S. – it’s only a matter of time.”
 
TOO FAST, TOO FURIOUS. In Canada, activists have been pushing an anti-pesticide message for years – DiGiovanni takes it all the way back to the 1960s release of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring that examined pesticides and their assumed effects on declining songbird populations in the United States. “It’s a powerful book, and it inspired some activists groups, particularly coalitions against pesticides, to get started,” he says.
 
Chris Lemcke blames unprofessional LCOs for the increased sensitivity to the issue. The technical coordinator for turf operations, Weed-Man, Starborough, Toronto, remembers hearing about a Montreal-based homeowner who started an anti-pesticide campaign after an LCO sprayed pesticides on a windy day, supposedly hitting her child with the drift. “She was concerned and no one was able to ease her worries or give her any answers so she became a crusader against pesticides, saying she would do whatever she could to get rid of them in Quebec, if not the world,” he says.
 
These matters combined with Canadian municipalities’ quest for local power over the federal and provincial governments escalated the issue, according to Deb Conlon, managing director, CropLife Canada and executive director, Urban Pest Management Council of Canada, which represents the manufacturers, formulators and distributors of specialty pest management products. “The general population was asking legislators to do more concerning the pesticide issue, so we became the poster child for municipal power in an accidental way,” she says.
 
Once the Supreme Court of Canada made its unfavorable verdict in 2001, “any doubt municipalities had about regulating pesticide use disappeared,” DiGiovanni says.
 
And according to Jill Fairbrother of Fairbrother & Partners Incorporated, a public affairs company that is working with Scotts and Monsanto (both industry pesticide suppliers), “precedent matters, no matter how small.” So the Hudson bylaw, affecting a population of only 5,000, inspired a series of other pesticide-restricting regulations almost immediately, each one different from the next. Some permitted only less-effective “natural” products, such as beet juice and corn gluten, while others allowed some pesticide use but to limited locations and at limited times of the year or day.
 
Lawn care operators afraid of accruing fines (which are roughly $255 for each offense and can rise up to $5,000 for multiple offenses if the company is taken to court by the municipality, Lemcke says) tried to grasp all the various nuances in each municipality’s bylaw while still operating their businesses efficiently.
 
Threatened by the attack on their companies, LCOs became increasingly discouraged. As each new municipality considered drafting a bylaw, they desperately attempted to change lawmakers’ minds, urging their customers to call and express their concerns as well. Coalitions were quickly formed – some sustaining and others falling apart. Thousands of dollars were spent by pesticide manufactures, LCOs and industry organizations. But nothing was strong enough to prevent the city of Toronto, with a population of 2.48 million, to become the largest to pass one of the most aggressive bylaws, forbidding weed control entirely and limiting insect control only when “the presence of pests are in numbers or under conditions that involve an immediate or potential risk of substantial loss or damage” in 2003.
 
Today, 113 bylaws are in place across Canada and 12 more are at draft stages, pending adoption. More than 11 million Canadians, approximately 35 percent of the country’s population, are under pesticide restrictions.
 
TWISTING WORDS. In addition to creating confusion about lawn care products in general, activists are attaching terms like “nonessential” to pesticides to “trivialize what LCOs do” in Canada, and make lawn care services vulnerable to bylaw regulation, DiGiovanni says. “Lawns have become the target, being positioned as only ‘cosmetic,’” Fairbrother adds.
 
With these words activists have managed to engage human and animal health and environmental allies, such as the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. By attaching health issues to the terms “cosmetic” and “nonessential” and pressuring government officials, activists have been able to “win the media war with junk science reports, lawn care ‘mishaps’ and an ‘it’s for the kids’ message,” Fairbrother explains.
 
This is where many LCOs were left nearly speechless in front of lawmakers. “When an activist stands up and says to a lawmaker, ‘You can’t choose the aesthetics of your lawn over our country’s children,’ how do you think he’s going to respond? How do you respond as a lawn care operator?” DiGiovanni questions.
 
In addition to lacking the fund-raising needed to spread a positive industry message, Canadian LCOs were continually challenged because “they could not achieve a consensus; public opinion was not in their favor; the media was non-responsive to the ‘sound science’ story; legal options failed; and animal, human health and child welfare concerns trumped ‘big business,’” Fairbrother says.
 
One of the things the Canadian lawn care industry was doing wrong, according to Ken Pavely, Landscape Ontario’s Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and turf specialist, was defending products instead of responsible pesticide use. 
 
The industry took a step back and looked at the messages they were spreading compared to what the activists were saying. “Ninety to 99 percent of the communication from both groups is the same,” DiGiovanni says, pointing to promoting green spaces as the common thread. “It only breaks down when the industry believes it can still use pesticide products safely, judiciously and responsibly and the activists want zero use.”
 
Because healthy environment messages were coming more from the activists than the industry, consumers’ trust in LCOs plunged. “It was time for us to embrace our jobs as true environmentalists within a structure that promoted green spaces, cultural practices, stewardship and responsible use of pesticides as a required part of that,” DiGiovanni says, pointing to the practice of IPM as a solution that incorporates all of these points.
 
As a result, LCOs united with representatives from the golf course, municipal park, structural pest control and agriculture industries to form the IPM Council of Canada four years ago. In many of the early bylaws, lawn care was the industry most affected, but municipalities are continuing the anti-pesticide push into other markets as well. For this reason, for an IPM Council to be successful it had to have a voting member from each industry on board in order to create one consistent IPM message and grow consumer recognition of the concept, White says. The same year the council was formed, it established an IPM Accreditation Program. The volunteer program, which now has approximately 150 engaged and 60 accredited lawn care companies (which represents 70 percent of the lawn care industry in southern Ontario), collects businesses’ IPM program details and statistics annually and then physically audits them on their IPM implementation every three years. “The program has teeth – if you want to be accredited you have to go through the same process everyone else goes through,” DiGiovanni says.
 
The intention is to have accreditation in each industry. The golf course market is on board and the municipal parks IPM accreditation initiative is almost complete, White says, adding that the next phase is to incorporate the arboriculture, structural pest control and agriculture markets. “Ideally, at the end of the day, IPM accreditation will not be unique to our sector.”
 
In addition to branching the program out into other markets, the industry is also pushing to make it mandatory by provincial governments as a part of the licensing system so all Canadian companies follow the same rules. British Columbia has become one of the first provinces to accept it, White says, adding that he is disappointed that the Ontario government has so far rejected it. “We want to raise the bar of professionalism in the industry and bring trust back,” he explains. “This is one way to do it. Unfortunately, we are not as close as we’d like to be to getting this issue looked at provincially.”
 
While “IPM accreditation is definitely a good idea because it helps us talk about managing risk, which is one of the hot button issues,” Conlon adds, “at the end of the day, it’s how involved we are at the local government level that matters because that LCO is seen as a vote to that counselor. If we aren’t there, someone else is – and they are spreading an anti-pesticide message.”
 
That’s why more Canadian LCOs are reaching decision makers at a local level. “In the towns where local LCOs are regularly engaged in their communities, we have a much better success rate of drafting a bylaw that includes IPM and responsible pesticide use,” DiGiovanni says.
 
More Canadian LCOs realize their municipal counselors want the area to look good, so they are pushing “activism from an industry point of view,” DiGiovanni explains. “They are saying, ‘We want to educate you on the value of the industry from an economic, environmental and lifestyle benefit. We are the true environmentalists – we plant trees and gardens and tend to them and here’s the reality of how we do it. We are stepping up to plate and dealing with issues of trust. We want you to know we care about the environment and are here to work with you to create and maintain green spaces in the safest way possible.’”
 
These messages also need to be spread to the consumer, which is why Canadian LCOs are increasing public education. Landscape Ontario, for instance, is using popular local garden communicators, such as Charlie Dobbin and Denis Flanagan of Home & Garden Television’s One Garden, Two Looks, to help conduct free seminars on “Healthy Lawns, Healthy Gardens.” “They are fronting our message about the value of green spaces to the public to grab people’s attention and share a positive viewpoint,” DiGiovanni says.

THE AFTERMATH. Has the anti-pesticide issue affected the Canadian lawn care industry? The answer to this question is not a straight forward one.
 
First, while the U.S. green industry is valued economically at nearly $40 billion, according to the 2005 report Economic Impacts on the Green Industry in the United States, the Canadian green industry is valued at only $10 billion, DiGiovanni says. Within Canada, the province of Ontario makes up 50 percent of the country. So, there are approximately 2,600 lawn care companies and 26,000 licensed operators in Canada, 1,300 and 13,000 of which, respectively, are in Ontario. These numbers do not include the park systems or golf courses, DiGiovanni points out.
 
DiGiovanni measures industry success by sales of nursery materials to landscape contractors, and the numbers have been consistently positive. In 2002, nursery sales to landscape contractors were $101,064,000, rising to 110,160,000 in 2003 and 131,011,000 in 2004, according to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. “Economically, we’ve consistently grown for the last 10 years – from 5 to 14 percent a year,” he says.
 
So, from the numbers side of the equation, the anti-pesticide issue has not negatively affected the industry.
 
When it comes to individual successes or failures, LCOs who rely on pest control for most of their business model have the most at stake, DiGiovanni says.
 
But except for the one or two businesses who decide that lawn care as a service is becoming too much for them to handle, “the industry isn’t going out of business – there is still opportunity here,” Lemcke says. “You just have to find feasible solutions.”
 
For instance, since playable sports fields are still important to Canadian school systems, some LCOs are targeting schools with a niche service of soil improvement, overseeding, aerating and irrigation to improve playability without pesticides. “Schools receive a great deal of pressure from activists because their environment involves children and some LCOs are offering them solutions they can live with,” DiGiovanni explains. 
 
Even with new service offerings, Canadian LCOs’ profit margins are decreasing because the costs to operate a business have gone up, Pavely says. “If you are hand pulling weeds vs. spraying for them, your labor costs go way up,” he explains, adding that clients have been accepting price increases in the 10 to 15 percent range before balking at the rise.
 
Though business growth appears stable, aesthetically, there have been some dramatic changes.
 
Toronto and Montreal used to be well known for their garden paradises, lush lawns and clean streets. They used to rival U.S. nature spots like Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s Central Park.
 
“Now you don’t see flower-lined boulevards or finely landscaped city gates – you barely see the grass cut anymore in some public areas,” White says, describing a roadway median where he recently saw a shopping cart filled with trash disguised in grass that was nearly 4 feet high.
 
“Recently, I had a friend tell me that 10 or 15 years ago, Toronto was the cleanest city he had ever seen,” Lemcke says. “I’m ashamed of it now.”
 
Pesticide limitations have forced parks and city workers to eliminate pesticides completely or use alternative methods, such as organics.
 
As a result, the weeds are taking over. “There are some curbs and roadway medians where the weeds are 10 inches to 1 foot high, and people are dumping stuff in those areas,” Lemcke shares. “The employees can’t keep up with mowing down the growth because they don’t have enough manpower or money.”
 
The city of Toronto recently spent an additional $1 million on new mowers to try and tidy its green areas, but “a parks employee I spoke with recently said it hasn’t helped much at all,” Pavely says. 
 
Schools are also in “terrible shape,” Lemcke points out. “We rarely find schools doing anything to control the weeds. If they do, they are using organic programs and that requires a lot more input and time. Some schools don’t have the money for that.”
 
Pavely has been looking into property values in Montreal to see if the lack of aesthetics has caused any negative effects on housing. “Since Montreal is a hot market right now, I can’t tell if there is a direct effect yet but I’m keeping my eye on it,” he says. “The neighborhoods I’ve been driving through look awful.”
 
Whether or not consumers are concerned by the changes in their surroundings is a question that has not been answered yet, DiGiovanni reports. 
 
The ideal future of this issue in Canada is that the provinces or federal government will take back control and create one rule for all to reduce confusion and the amount of money being spent on bylaw creation, debate, implementation and management, DiGiovanni says. But when or if this will happen is unknown, and because the municipalities desire power and the provinces are so willing to give it up, Conlon is unsure this is a viable possibility for the future. “The society’s fear of pesticides will not go away,” DiGiovanni says. “We have to continue to embrace the IPM philosophy and responsible and professional pesticide use.”