🌲 Canada’s forests are burning: instead of protecting them, authorities and forestry companies keep spraying glyphosate, turning once-lush undergrowth into dry fuel. Why is this allowed, and who truly benefits?
A Landscape at Risk
Wildfires across Canada are more frequent and severe, yet in some regions, forestry companies continue using aerial glyphosate spraying to clear forests after logging, even as landscapes dry dangerously (Halifax Examiner, The Narwhal).
Glyphosate: Legal, But Controversial
Glyphosate is a widely-used herbicide legally approved by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency under Health Canada’s Pest Control Products Act (Canada.ca). In forestry, it’s used to kill competing vegetation to favor conifer monocultures: a method traced across over one million hectares in B.C. and common in other provinces.
🌱 What Counts as a “Pest”?
Here’s the disturbing part: in forestry policy, the term “pest” doesn’t just mean insects or weeds. It includes:
• Hardwood trees like aspen, birch, and poplar: species that naturally regenerate after disturbance, resist fire, and provide rich habitat.
• Berry bushes and shrubs that feed birds, bears, pollinators, and Indigenous families who harvest traditional foods.
• Understory plants that stabilize soil, filter water, and shelter countless small animals.
All of these life-giving species are legally framed as “pests” because they compete with plantation seedlings for sunlight and nutrients. The goal of spraying is not to restore a healthy forest, but to simplify it into a single-species “tree farm” of conifers like spruce and pine; the profitable timber crop.
This linguistic trick hides a deeper truth: what’s destroyed is not “pest vegetation,” but entire ecosystems that hold resilience, biodiversity, and cultural value.
🐝 Collateral Damage: Pollinators at Risk
The impacts of aerial glyphosate spraying don’t stop with trees and shrubs. When glyphosate is released from planes or helicopters, it drifts into wetlands, puddles, and ditches where insects and animals drink.
Bees and butterflies, (essential pollinators for wild plants and food crops) are particularly vulnerable. They lap up water contaminated with glyphosate, ingesting toxins that weaken their navigation, reproduction, and immune systems. Studies suggest glyphosate disrupts the gut microbiome of honeybees, leaving them more susceptible to disease and colony collapse.
Other pollinators (including hummingbirds, moths, and native solitary bees) are harmed when the flowering plants they rely on are wiped out. What forestry calls “competing vegetation” is often the very source of nectar and pollen that sustains life.
The result is a cascade of ecological harm: fewer pollinators mean fewer berries, fewer seeds, and ultimately fewer food sources for wildlife and people alike. What’s labelled as “pest management” is in fact the removal of keystone relationships that make the forest alive.
🚨 Why It’s Still Used, Despite the Harm
If glyphosate increases fire risk, kills biodiversity, and harms pollinators, why does spraying continue? The answer lies less in science than in economics and bureaucracy:
• Industry Profit Motives: Forestry companies prefer conifer monocultures (spruce, pine, fir) because they are fast-growing and lucrative. Glyphosate clears away “competing” hardwoods and shrubs cheaply and efficiently.
• Government Inertia: Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) continues to approve glyphosate for forestry use, often relying on outdated or incomplete risk assessments. Court rulings have even found these approvals “unreasonable,” yet the practice persists.
• Framing Language: By calling native hardwoods and berry plants “pests,” forestry policy justifies chemical eradication as “management.” This language obscures the ecological and cultural value of what’s being destroyed.
• Cheapest Tool Available: Non-chemical methods like manual thinning are possible (Quebec uses them), but they cost more upfront. Industry and regulators consistently choose the short-term savings of spraying over long-term forest health.
❌ Why It Shouldn’t Be Used — The Real Costs
Behind the bureaucratic logic lies the lived reality: glyphosate weakens forests instead of protecting them.
• More Flammable Fuel: Dead vegetation from glyphosate spraying dries into tinder, compounding wildfire danger during droughts and heat waves.
• Loss of Biodiversity: Native berry bushes, hardwoods, and fire-resistant species are destroyed, reducing food sources for wildlife and people.
• Pollinator Collapse: Bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds ingest glyphosate through contaminated water or lose their nectar sources entirely, threatening pollination cycles.
• Toxic Legacy: Concerns remain over glyphosate’s impacts on human health and ecosystems; from cancer risks to soil and water contamination.
Glyphosate may be convenient for industry, but its ecological price tag is catastrophic.
Voices of Resistance
The Métis Nation of Ontario has called for an immediate suspension of aerial spraying and adoption of non-chemical forestry methods. Quebec already banned glyphosate use in forestry back in 2001, proving alternatives exist.
A Better Vision Forward
Canada could choose biodiversity over chemicals, fire-resilient mixed forests over plantations, and Indigenous-led stewardship over corporate shortcuts.
Forests sprayed to death,
tinder waits for lightning’s spark,
profit fans the flame