For those who follow pesticide politics, it would have come as little surprise to learn last month that a pivotal health study on glyphosate was designed and written in great part by employees of a major pesticide producer. 

As you might expect from a health study done by Monsanto, the company trying to sell the product, this one found the pesticide carried no cancer risk. Despite its glaring conflict of interest, the study went on to inform policy in Canada and around the world.

If Canada truly wants to decouple from, and reduce its dependence on the United States, not blithely replicating America’s increasingly untrustworthy decisions would be a good place to start.

How did this happen in the first place? Monsanto has long been accused of having an outsized influence over US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pesticide approvals which are often mirrored by Canada. When the study was published in 2000, Monsanto was one of the world’s largest, most powerful agrochemical and genetically modified seed companies and had successfully captured the EPA.

In August 2018, a US jury ruled that glyphosate, sold as Roundup, had given California school groundskeeper Dewayne "Lee" Johnson cancer and failed to warn him about the product's health risks. The decision triggered a........

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