Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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...

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

Roundup is IPA, Touchdown is DAM. Both extremely common.

Yeah both glyphosate.

But the doctor in the OP explicitly pointed out that they had 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...

Just because glyphosate is everywhere doesn't mean it can't be concentrated in a particular place.

To be clear I'm not taking a stand for the glyphosate argument at all. I just don't think your line of reasoning is a fair counterargument in this case

They would need to have been ingesting or breathing the glyphosate pretty recent to their blood draw. It doesn't absorb easily into skin, and it passes through you quickly. And if you do get a concentrated dose, you get nausea, vomiting, respiratory issues (if inhaled). It's a weird thing to be the culprit, since it's hard to get, and doesn't cause many issues. And it's weird to mention at all, since he says only "a few people" had elevated levels of it.

"Melissa Nicholson said her 59-year-old mother, who has suffered for four years with a neurological disorder, received test results indicating she had levels of glyphosate in her body that were 47 times higher than the acceptable level."

This is bizarre. Either she lives right next to a farm that's spraying it, and she's getting it blown into an open window in her house where she's breathing it, and then immediately went for a blood test... or she's somehow ingesting it in/around her house (like from a bottle of Roundup that keeps getting splashed on something she's ingesting).

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.

Yes, but almost the entire cluster of the NB cases are around Caraquet NB, which is completely surrounded by softwood plantations, and this has been a case they have been fighting for years.

Additionally, Industrial scale lumber harvesting uses magnitudes more Glyphosate than a home gardener or your local HOA.

I don't doubt something specific is going on there, but it's unlikely it's Roundup, since every suburb in North America is carpet-bombed with the stuff.

While other areas might receive high doses, I'd wonder if there is a link here to the amount of salmon and deer the people there eat, that itself consumed exposed plants or lived in exposed water, compared to the rest of the country? Or the impacts on aquifers?

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.

>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.

> Can't you unelect the MPs

All MPs in NB need to kiss the ring, otherwise they'll face a well funded challenger.

Furthermore, 1 out of every 7 NBers are employed by JDI and Irving Oil.

> 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

The ability to threaten a no-confidence motion means individual MPs can have an outsized impact on the executive branch.

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