Surrey students force Mayor Dianne Watts to deal with pesticides

The City of Surrey has finally taken tepid steps toward doing what many other municipalities did quite some time ago: ban cosmetic pesticides.

Last week, the region's second largest municipality launched a public consultation process "to receive options  for pesticide control in the City of Surrey".

In addition, the council voted in favour of an eight-month trial to ban the use of herbicides on boulevards and medians.

Some pesticides and herbicides contain carcinogens that have been linked in peer-reviewed studies to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Surrey is still far behind other municipalities—such as Vancouver, West Vancouver,  Burnaby, the District of North Vancouver, and New Westminster—that have dealt with this issue in a more comprehensive way.

But the pressure continues to build on Mayor Dianne Watts, who has basically thumbed her nose at Canadian Cancer Society efforts to ban cosmetic pesticides.

Some of the credit should go to six Kwantlen Polytechnic University students, who played a key role in drawing attention to Surrey council's hesitation to take steps to protect children's health.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote an article in the Georgia Straight about the efforts of Caron Adderley, Darren Maslack, Nicole Mueller, Erin Shankie, Bridget Trousdell, and Rebecca Yanciw  to persuade Surrey council to take action.

The students named their  group LEEP, which was a shorthand version of the longer name: Love Our Environmen—Eliminate Pesticides.

At one point during their campaign for a safer environment, they were ordered to leave Bear Creek Park's promenade where they were handing out leaflets and petitions at a city-sponsored environmental event.

“A city employee asked us to leave the grounds, and basically said we were against the official Surrey policies,” Adderley said at the time. “We weren’t in line with their policies on pesticides. They didn’t want the public to be confused about the fact that this is not an official Surrey policy.”

The students' efforts have demonstrated once again that it is possible to change the world. Sometimes, however, it doesn't happen quite as quickly as  some people might like.