Traveling across Canada with my documentary Amended1, I noticed that a part of the movie always got a strong reaction from the audience. This is the scene that documents my (long, infuriating, and ultimately futile) attempt to get an interview with Health Canada.
Posted yesterday at 3:00 p.m.
The film follows my mother and I as we embark on a multi-year investigative journey into the complex world of genetically modified foods (GMOs).
The idea for the film was born in 1999, a few years after the first GMOs appeared on the market, when the Canadian government asked the Royal Society of Canada to evaluate our new system for regulating GMOs.
The result was an in-depth investigation by a panel of 15 of Canada’s leading experts in the field, followed by a 245-page report that was described by the Toronto Star as “a polite but scathing indictment” of the federal government’s GMO regulatory system.
The report contained 53 recommendations aimed at addressing the lack of transparency and scientific rigor, but to date these recommendations have been largely ignored by our government. Rather than fix our GMO regulatory system, our government is now proposing to weaken it even further.
No government oversight
Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have recently proposed exempting many new genetically modified foods and seeds – especially those created by genome editing – from government safety assessments.
Companies that produce GMOs would themselves assess the health and environmental safety of their own products. There would be no government oversight and no obligation to inform government, consumers or even farmers, leaving everyone in the dark.
Farmers could unknowingly plant these new unregulated GMOs, consumers would eat them, and the government wouldn’t even know they existed.
For 25 years, the Canadian government ignored the wishes of Canadians and refused to label GMOs. We are now the only industrialized country in the world that does not label them. With the new regulatory changes, what little transparency we have left would disappear.
Multinationals and lobby groups
This attack on our regulatory system comes from multinational biotech and pesticide companies and their lobby group CropLife Canada, whose goal is to bring new GMOs to market faster, and quieter.
Early drafts of the new regulatory guidelines from February 2020 show that Health Canada originally proposed that genome-edited foods should undergo the same risk assessment as all other GMOs.
However, after meetings with CropLife Canada, Health Canada has revised its proposals to meet industry wishes. In fact, during the development of these new guidelines, Health Canada held 21 meetings with industry, but only three with civil society.
By abdicating its responsibility to ensure food safety, Health Canada would set a precedent for corporate self-regulation.
This type of governance undermines public trust and hijacks citizen-interest decisions in favor of commercial interests.
Genome editing and the potential for errors
Genome editing is a new way to modify the genetic material of plants, animals and other organisms by inserting, deleting or modifying a DNA sequence at a specific location in the genome. But precise changes do not necessarily yield precise results. A growing body of scientific research shows that genome editing techniques, such as CRISPR, can cause genetic errors and unintended effects in resulting GMOs.
In a recent case, the designers of cows genetically modified to be dehorned said that these new cows did not contain foreign genes, insisting that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) therefore did not need to regulate this new GMO.
However, in 2019, FDA researchers discovered foreign DNA in cows: two antibiotic resistance genes and various other genetic sequences from bacteria. The case highlights the potential for errors in the genome editing process and the fact that government oversight can find problems that a company would not detect on its own.
GMO producers are taking advantage of the emergence of new genetic engineering techniques to push governments to reduce, and even eliminate, regulations. But history has shown us that when the regulatory process is left to industry, problems ensue. Health Canada must prioritize the public interest above that of the biotechnology industry. It must not abandon the regulation of new GMOs.
1. Amended, the documentary on GMOs, was broadcast on Radio-Canada and received 16 awards, including the James Beard Foundation for best documentary in 2019.