The objective of the Healthy Lawns strategy is to reduce reliance on pesticide use for lawn care through the application of IPM principles, with particular emphasis on pest prevention, use of reduced risk products and application of pesticides only when necessary.

The PMRA, the provinces and the territories are achieving this by:

• Assessing which type of products should be available to homeowners;
• Narrowing the existing domestic category and establishing a new category for products for more controlled domestic use;
• Improving product labelling so that the use of lawn care pest control products is compatible with enhanced risk reduction practices;
• Developing training materials and programs to educate homeowners on healthy lawn practices which minimize the need for pesticides;
• Developing training materials and programs for vendors of domestic products;
• Developing training materials and programs to facilitate adoption of healthy lawn practices by working with organizations to enhance the training of lawn care and landscape service providers and green space managers; and
• Establishing a Healthy Lawns Web site to disseminate information on healthy lawn practices, to receive input from stakeholders on the development of risk reduction programs, and to report on training programs and progress.

Information regarding all the above activities under the Healthy Lawns Strategy can be found on the Healthy Lawns Web site .

The PMRA will continue to facilitate access to reduced risk products through harmonization activities including priority joint review of reduced risk chemical pesticides and biopesticides.

To increase public access to reduced-risk pesticides, a May 2002 PMRA initiative extends the Reduced Risk Joint Review program that has been underway with the US Environmental Protection Agency since 1996, to include submissions made only to PMRA. The program is designed to encourage pesticide manufacturers to apply for Canadian registration of reduced-risk products that are currently available in the U.S.

To minimize the barriers to these products, Canada will use the same criteria as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine eligibility of chemicals for the reduced-risk program and recognize the U.S. EPA’s biopesticide designation, thus further harmonizing the respective approaches of the two countries. Through this program, the PMRA also committed to shorter review time lines for products that have been shown to qualify as reduced-risk chemicals or biopesticides.

For more information about reduced-risk pesticides, like corn gluten meal, that have been registered for use in Canada please refer to PMRA’s regulatory decision documents (RDD series), directives (DIR series), notes (REG series), and proposals (PRO series) in the Publications section

The re-evaluation of the most common active ingredients used in lawn care pesticides (4 insecticides and 4 herbicides) has been underway since 2000. Changes to registration or withdrawals of lawn care products resulting from these re-evaluations will be implemented in the same time frame in Canada as those made in the U.S.

As per current PMRA standards, the re-evaluation of all of these lawn care products will target child specific exposure and will incorporate additional safety factors and aggregate exposure, similar to the EPA. Incorporation of cumulative risk assessment will be synchronized with the EPA as methodology for doing so is completed.

For more information about product re-evaluation and the re-evaluation of lawn care pesticides such as carbaryl, diazinon, malathion and 2,4-D, please refer to PMRA’s re-evaluation (REV series) and re-evaluation decision (RRD series) documents on the Publications section.