Stop the Spray Canada

Our Fight to End Chemical Forestry

Chemical forestry is the use of herbicides in public forests to kill “competing” vegetation and favour industrial softwood (conifer) plantations. 🚁💦☠️

But our forests are not weeds, and that so-called competition includes broadleaf regrowth, forest foods, medicine plants, pollinator habitat, wildlife habitat, and the natural diversity of the forest. This practice has exposed communities, workers, watersheds, wildlife, and public forests to 70 years of cumulative chemical risk, while helping create dense, dry conifer plantations that are known to burn hotter and faster in a warming climate. 🌲🌲🌲🔥

This fight has never been about one chemical. It is about ending chemical herbicide spraying in public forests and protecting watersheds, wildlife, biodiversity, forest foods, medicine plants, Indigenous rights, rural communities, and future generations.

This practice began about 70 years ago with chemicals such as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the same herbicides that made up Agent Orange. The dioxin contamination linked to 2,4,5-T should have ended chemical forestry forever. Instead, governments and industry switched to glyphosate in the 1980s. Now triclopyr, imazapyr, and other herbicides are being used. ☠️☠️☠️

Our Rights Have Been Ignored

For generations, people across Canada have opposed chemical herbicide spraying in public forests because these lands are our watersheds, wildlife habitat, sources of food and medicine, places for fishing, hunting and recreation, and shared public lands. For Indigenous Peoples, the impacts also reach treaty rights, Aboriginal rights, traditional land use and responsibilities to the land – concerns governments have ignored for decades.

No one consented to chemical spraying in Canada’s public forests. Governments must stop protecting Chemical Forestry and start protecting our water, wildlife, communities and future generations.

Read 37 years of formal resolutions demanding an end to Chemical Forestry.

Choose Your Province to Take Action

The case for chemical forestry should have collapsed in 1999, when Canada’s own Senate Subcommittee on the Boreal Forest recommended that “all herbicide and chemical pesticide use in the boreal forest should be phased out as soon as possible.” Instead, governments ignored the warning, ignored the people, and kept spraying.

After 45 years of glyphosate spraying in forestry, the case for continuing has fallen apart. For decades, governments and industry hid behind the claim that glyphosate spraying posed “no unacceptable risk.” That foundation has collapsed. In December 2025, the Williams, Kroes & Munro (2000) glyphosate “safety” review – a cornerstone of regulatory confidence for a generation – was retracted over serious ethical concerns, including Monsanto’s involvement, reliance on unpublished Monsanto studies, excluded evidence, and possible ghostwriting.

March 2026 Seattle Glyphosate Symposium – Scientific warnings continue to grow about serious health risks linked to glyphosate-based herbicides – including cancer concerns, endocrine disruption, reproductive harm, neurological effects, liver and kidney damage, metabolic harm, genetic damage, oxidative stress, and impacts on the gut microbiome.

Continuing to spray public forests with a chemical linked to this level of concern is not “acceptable risk”, and neither is switching chemicals.

Québec – The Proven Alternative

Québecers won their protection in 2001, when Québec stopped issuing forestry herbicide spraying licences in public forests, and industry adapted.

That proves a modern, non-chemical path is possible.

Other provinces can do the same.

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As glyphosate becomes a scientific and political liability, the industry is not modernizing; it is simply switching chemicals like they did 45 years ago. In provinces like Alberta and Ontario, we are seeing a shift to chemicals like Triclopyr and Imazapyr. Whether applied by air or ground, changing the name of the chemical herbicide does not eliminate the danger to our waterways, wildlife, and communities.

This is no longer just a scientific dispute. It is an accountability crisis.

Seventy years of government-authorized chemical exposure in public forests cannot be brushed aside as routine forest management. Ontario banned non-essential cosmetic pesticide use in 2009 to protect families, children, pets, and communities from unnecessary chemical exposure. Yet rural families, Indigenous communities, wildlife, waterways, pollinators, food and medicine plants, and public forests are still being exposed.

So what is the system protecting?

Not public forests.
Not watersheds.
Not wildlife.
Not Indigenous rights.
Not rural communities.
Not future generations.

It is protecting chemical forestry.

That is not responsible forest management. It is not conservation. It is not precaution. And it is not sustainable.