Ask your candidates: Do you support mandatory government safety assessments and reporting for all genetically engineered food and seeds? If elected, would you ensure that all genetically engineered foods and seeds are regulated?
Action Tools
- Click here for CBAN’s guide to asking your federal election candidates these important questions. Read the summary to ask your question at all-candidate debates or print it up to hand to your candidate.
- You can also host an all-candidates debate about food issues. Join the Eat Think Vote campaign – click here for the tool kit from Food Secure Canada.
In 2022/2023, the federal government removed pre-market regulation for many new genetically engineered (genetically modified or GM) plants and foods. These changes were designed by a corporate-government committee made up of representatives from the biotechnology and pesticide industry lobby group CropLife with other industry lobby groups and government officials.
Now, Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) will not assess the safety of most new gene-edited GM plants. Instead, companies will determine the safety of their own products, with no government oversight. These unregulated GMOs can be put on the market without notifying the government. Specifically, GM plants that have no foreign DNA – many of which would be produced through the new genetic engineering techniques of genome editing, also called gene editing – are now exempt from federal regulation. This lack of regulation is unscientific because gene editing can result in a range of possible unintended effects that could impact food and environmental safety.
Companies can now sell unregulated, unreported, gene-edited foods and seeds.
Demand government safety assessments
• I want government safety assessments for all genetically modified foods, including those produced through the new genetic engineering techniques of gene editing.
• I don’t trust companies to regulate their own products. I don’t accept corporate safety assurances. I don’t trust unseen corporate safety assessments and corporate science.
• I want Health Canada and the CFIA to be independent regulators to ensure food and environmental safety. I want independent science.
Demand mandatory transparency
• I want mandatory labelling of all genetically modified foods.
• I want mandatory reporting. I want the government to require companies to report all their GMOs, instead of asking them to voluntarily report new gene-edited GMOs.
• I want real transparency in the food system, not what Health Canada calls “voluntary transparency”.
For background:
- Details on the deregulation of gene edited GMOs:www.cban.ca/NoExemptions
- Introduction to Genome Editing www.cban.ca/GenomeEditingIntro
- Introduction to Genetic Engineering: What are GMOs? www.cban.ca/GMOintro
