Comment by alephnerd
16 hours ago
Deep dive into New Brunswick, JD Irving, and their ongoing issues with Glyphosate pollution. Canadian researchers specializing on CJD have been blocked from investigating this case [0].
Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.
The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a couple years now [4][5]
It reminds me of similar stories I heard while growing up from family friends of mine who ran a construction business on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland about how cheap it was to "lobby" and get a personal meeting and photograph with Martin and Harper, and this was after Railgate.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-minister-le...
[2] - https://nsadvocate.org/2020/09/15/big-win-for-the-irvings-in...
[3] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/pcs-criticized-...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/world/canada/irving-famil...
The doctor in question here explicitly pointed out increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:
> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
>untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.
This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.
Margins in the House of Commons have been paper thin for decades, and this gives inordinate power for MPs to threaten a no-confidence motion behind closed doors.
In a province like NB where most politicians from both parties either solicits donations from Irving or are former Irving careerists(eg. the former Premier Higgs who was Irving's CFO), it gives Irving's leadership an inordinate amount of power.
My relative who owns a construction business would do something similar in Punjabi heavy ridings in BC as well - he's become fairly prominent in the Gurdawara and Mandir circuit, and because most older Punjabi Canadian voters don't really follow English language news (and in some cases cannot even speak English), they tend to defer to the candidate and party that the Gurdawara or Mandir committee makes a hukumnama for. In ridings across much of BC, there are enough of these kinds of Punjabi voters (Sikh and Hindu) that MPs will try to co-opt these committees to become their de facto enforcers for the community.
Eric Adams in NYC used similar immigrant machine politics which landed him on the FBI radar, because the old country's intel organizations continue to monitor their diasporas, and oftentimes leverage them tactically, which led him to being caught in the dragnet due to two separate investigations into Turkish [0] and Chinese [1] influence ops in NYC.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/nyregion/eric-adams-brian...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/adams-china-camp...
It feels like now you're saying it's not because it's parliament's nature to be like this, but rather these other factors that occure within parliaments and other systems?
Can't you unelect the MPs? Doesn't the paper thin margins increase those odds? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the issue is a parliamentry system, but rather people either aren't aware of the issues (media), or have decided (wrongly or rightly) not to care. Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems.
I don't know enough about Candaian Punjabi dispora to comment about the other stuff.
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If it was glyphosates, this would be a much more widespread problem. Roundup/glyphosates are used extensively all across the US and we would be seeing similar statistics everywhere.
Also it's "glyphosate", right? Not "glyphosates". It's not like some weird class of industrial chemicals; it's a specific herbicide, used since 1975, more commonly known as Roundup, notable because Monsanto owns patents on genetically-modified crops that are resistant to it.
They're probably referring to the different salts (isopropylamine (IPA), potassium, or diammonium) which can greatly affect absorption and effectiveness
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You are assuming a simple direct causation, instead it could be a reaction of glyphosate with something else in their bodies that they have inhaled from the air (or from their food), perhaps a heavy metal (given those are mentioned in TFA)
The Irving family also has a near monopoly on oil refining, trucking, and other high polluting industries in NB and Maine.
The region in NB where this issue is occurring is the hub for NB's and North America's forestry industry. Over 40% of all harvested forest land in NB is treated with glyphosate [0].
Commercial forestry at JD Irving's scale largely died out in much of the US excluding Maine (where it is also has inordinate political power [1][2]).
[0] - https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
[1] - https://themainemonitor.org/maines-future-with-irving/
[2] - https://mainebiz.biz/article/the-irving-influence-a-look-at-...
Glyphosate, not "glyphosates". Roundup. It's used everywhere. It's an extremely widely used herbicide.
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