Author: Robert Percy

Good question eh? 

The best solution so far? Steal ’em. Thats right, simply poach from a competitor. Have a little chat with a big 3 company technician…you know, Abell/Orkin/Steritech as you run into one picking up product at Gardex. I see it daily. Or put your business card under the wiper every time you see one stopped doing service.

Trolling at conventions and conferences was always fruitful, until Covid.

They are already trained and licensed, and most will tell you they are underpaid, overworked and smarter than their bosses!

Hell 10% will start their own Company in 2 years!

The Structural Pest Control market, our little Industry, is growing. A simple search of Stats Canada, from the 2016 and 2023 census shows private dwellings in Canada have grown from 14 million in 2016 up to 16.2 million in 2021.

2 million new homes, of which a certain % receive the services of a licensed professional.

What % you may ask?

I have a pretty damn good idea, but that’s my little secret, called market intelligence!

But, In rough terms I’m going with a SWAG and projecting this growth would take about 50 new techs every year to cover the growth. Not a lot really, but 250 new bodies out spraying pesticides and placing bait or mouse traps.

And the talent pool? Indeed Recruitment? Monster Jobs? Classifieds? Word of mouth? Relative?

To be honest more of the latter, to be honest.

Where’s the Associations on this one key issue? 

The least they can do is start holding meetings again, since they ain’t doing much else.

Oh, and SWAG? 

Scientific Wild Ass Guess. Works every time.

February 10th, this constantly cold Kansan is standing next to the lake an hour north of Toronto trout fishing.

Not ice fishing as you’d imagine, but using a 9’ fly rod and cast a leech patterned fly into open water around the dam.

Second day of record temps, 12 degrees and sunny!

And the second week we’ve had calls about “flying ants”

February. No snow, record temps, a bit of sun and out they come, those few colonies that confuse an early sign of the Spring to come with the real thing and get a jump on colony expansion.

As we all know, or should, colonies will produce more queen and winged reproductives often called swarmers as the colony comes under pressure. Often after winter when food supplies and stores dwindle due to the lack of foraging.

It happens every year, right around the first week of ….March. Not the first week of February. Calls on carpenter and citronella ants.

Attribute this and the lack of snow to globally warming…might as well.

What’s this mean to the Industry?

Beats the hell out of me. Every time I predict a banner year it rains until August.

So this year I won’t, so maybe it will be. Keep those sprayers tuned!

Mayor of Toronto Olivia Chow!

The Queen of carbon monoxide herself, The Right or Left Honorable Olivia Chow.

Oh, c’mon Robert, she’s all about green and trees and tree huggers and peace on earth, good will blah blah

So here’s why she’s the only nomination.

Bike Lanes.

I repeat:

BIKE LANES

Another OMG Robert, bike lanes are wonderful, they keep us safe peddling to work in the snow and ice eight months of the year. We all ride to the bank, the grocery store, the local tavern and liquor store, in that order, every Saturday with all the kids in tow! It’s good for the environment!

Yeah, right.

Here’s the god awful truth Big O, you’ve backed up traffic by reducing every road to 2 lanes and eliminating 1/3 of the parking spaces to create your wonderful bike lanes. And not just a little backed up, we’re talking 15 – 20 minutes extra commute time.

Bloor once had parking on both side’s and 4 lanes of traffic. Just perfect if you’re a shop owner in the Kingsway too! Plenty of room on the road and parking fairly abundant.

Now with the creation of an 8’ bike lane, a 4’ ”safety gap”…on both sides mind you….she’s cut usable road by more than 50%.

So what has this reduction in lanes caused?

Idle traffic, more idle traffic and even more idle people…the cause of city smog and global warming. Cars sitting in a single lane waiting to make a left hand turn. Or a right. Or to park.

Perfect example, as you head east on Bloor from Islington you’re basically going over the Humber, into the Kingsway or to take the South Kingsway down to the Gardiner to get to Toronto. Great way to go from the burbs. One of the more popular morning commutes.

Prior to bike lanes, you may have sat at the one light for a turn, but cars were never backed up more than twelve deep. Two lanes heading east to Toronto.

After installing these save the planet bike lanes, sat at the intersection for 7 light changes. 120 cars in front of me. Still on the west side of the Humber. It took 12 minutes to get to the intersection, to make a right hand turn. Since there is now no turn lane.

And forget the right on red, or any other color, as the bikes have the right of way and their own special cross signal, which they all ignore anyway.

So while several hundred cars sat idling an extra 15 minutes, nearly 8 times the amount of pollution being pumped out, guess how many bikes used the bike lane.

At 8:00 am

On a Monday, with 3 degree temps and a cold wind.

Yeah, you get the picture.

Congratulations Olivia.

Thats right, I’m now getting advice from Uber drivers.

Every Wednesday I usually head to downtown Toronto to have a pretty young doctor stick needles into my spine…supposedly to alleviate pain. Thats not a joke.

And if you’ve ever driven in downtown TO you’ll soon realize Uber is the only sane way to go. Or risk being set on fire or stabbed or pushed in front of a train going by subway.

So today was no different, and a pleasant enough man picked me up…only to inch our way down the Gardner EXPRESSWAY.

Like many Uber drivers this gentleman was an immigrant to Canada just like myself. So naturally we started griping about the traffic, which led to the condos and the people and health care and more people and the damn immigration policy. He came to Canada in 1993, myself in 2002. True Canadians!

i always listen closely, as many of these folk are lawyers or doctors or veterinarians, you know, where there’s just no need for their services.

But he said and I quote: ”Trudeau is turning my Canada into another Bangladesh. A million more people means 200,000 more homes. It takes 4000 more family doctors, 8000 more nurses, 25,000 new classrooms in 500 new schools. 3 major hospitals and 2 more universities. Did he think about that?”

I had no response, as what he said was so damn logical and sound and true that all you could was shake your head.

Then we reached our destination in silence, thinking about what lurks ahead.

As the year winds to a close it’s a great time to take a well-deserved deep breath. Business is slowing down as the occasional invaders from outside die off with the frost, but a great long Indian Summer helped fill the coffers with an extra treatment here and there. 

In retrospect not a bad year to be in Pest Control

It’s also a great time to review both your customer base, and the high points, and low points and figure out how to better tackle 2024.

But in doing this, take stock of your toolbox and make a note of what worked great, and what didn’t.   Call backs or a satisfied customer.

Then change, adopt and adapt, find out other’s successes.  And think about how to do your job with dwindling tools and product restrictions.

Be prepared for the on-going uprising in cities and towns and provinces as these pesticide bans and restrictions start to snowball across the country.

What happens if the rodenticide bans hits 80% of your customer base in Ontario?  Or continues to expand to other products and use areas?  Neonics, pyrethroids, and perimeter applications. 

The trick is being proactive instead of reactive.

Let me give you an example…

BC banned the Second Generation Anti-coagulant Rodenticides 2 years ago. Montreal followed suit this year and now the buzz is that the same discussion is taking place in Ontario, especially Toronto. in reaction, SPMAO had an emergency meeting in an attempt to bring members together to fight this, with about 20 folks going to or zooming the conference.

Too little, too late? Probably, to be truthful.

But what kept them from starting up 2 – 3 years ago, simply by engaging the whole industry to start laying the groundwork locally that rodenticides, including the SGARs. SPMAO and CPMA and non-members (ask distributions help) should have started a grass roots campaign targeted at local level politicians.

A simple but real list of the reasons why we need to keep these, and the negatives if lost.

All, yes every last one, of your local politicians know absolutely nothing about rodenticides. They have no position, until it’s brought to their attention. And so far the first ones to mention the word are…

You guessed it! The dreaded ”environmentalist”. But the real word is the ”anti-pesticide movement”. They need one dead owl, and boom! No mention the owl was hit by a truck first, but the autopsy showed rodenticide in its system. Or did it? Since the BC ministry folks wont share the results….

But thats water under the rat.

So since we weren’t prepared to be proactive and you lose Contrac, Resolv, Ratak and Final, what else have you used? What else have you tried? Might be the season, eh?

Happy Holidays, may peace rain down on all of us.

It’s 3:25 am, another night of not sleeping, and i just devoured a left over hot dog and a homemade chocolate shake.

so you lie awake at night and your mind roams.

And tonite I’m dwelling on all the ”cide” words, which generally regard killing something.

Herbicide, pesticide, homicide, genocide, biocide, even molluscicide of all things.

But why the heck are some are noun thar describe an actual thing, and others a noun that describes the ”act of killing”.

The USEPA defines PESTICIDE as;

“Any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying, repelling, or mitigating any pest.Mar 8, 2023”

The Google search definition of HOMOCIDE;

“…from Latin homicidium “the act of killing a man,” from homo “man” and -cidium “the act of killing,” from caedere “to kill, cut”Sep 10, 2023”

So I use a gun to commit a homicide. But then do I use a chemical to commit a pesticide?

But then if pesticides kill pests, does that mean I can use a homicide to kill homosapiens? Prelude is a pesticide, is a Smith & Wesson a homicide?

But then we should name guns and knives and arrows all as homicides, and the local Canadian Tired runs an ad as having the greatest selection of homicides available!

Or we start committing the act pesticide with a whole range of products, including chemical substances.

It sounds a lot cooler to say I’m committing a pesticide with this fly swatter as this damn mosquito is keeping me awake!

Who wrote these rules anyhow?

Sleep tight faithful reader, whoever you are!

It’s gotta be the age, or post C19, or something that makes time seem to fly by.

What happened to the summer, and all the fun bugs that go with it? Anyone see uptick in overall treatments? “Not really” or ”meh” is the answer I get most of in the back.

Ants? Plenty hot enough, except the rain every other day kept applications away. Nothing to overflow the pockets.

Lots and lots of yellow jackets, especially now as fall arrives. Just stand by your grill. But at $180 bucks a treatment and the neighbors rotting apples on the ground makes the decision easy not to spray.

Course that $180 was cheap compared to this issue:

That was an hour and $637 later for an emergency veterinarian visit with Blu, who decided that this one damn yellow jacket needed to be pounced on and eaten. All from the same dog with Lyme disease and epilepsy.

And yes, i had cancelled my Trupanion doggie insurance one month before all this happened.

But can’t blame poor Blu for a lousy summer when I spent June pissing kidney stones and August fighting Covid 19.

Well goodbye 2023 Summer and welcome winter! Another 8 months of pure bliss.

Keep smiling, and wear your PPE!

The city of Toronto has just had an environmental event with contaminated water breaching a local waterway that feeds into Lake Ontario.

A large chemical supplier/warehouse catches fire, and in order to contain the 7 alarm inferno from other chemical warehouses a vast amount of water was thrown at the blaze.

The end result was a river of ash and sludge and dirty fire water that took the normal route all water takes in this area, downstream through gutters to storm drains to the Mimico Creek watershed and into Lake Ontario.

And the oils, lubricants and fluids went with the water, all of which are highly toxic to fish and other aquatic flora and fauna.

Just like all of the pesticides we store and use.

The AWSA, or Ag Warehouse Standards Association, which Gardex is a member of, oversees the warehousing of pesticides as an Industry. The Ag Chemical industry, or pesticides to be specific.

Their recommended policy is “let it burn” if a pesticide or fertilizer facility goes up in flames. Let the chemical go into the atmosphere instead of the water system.

Makes sense, unless you’re in a populated area, where if you didn’t contain the fire it would jump from one chemical warehouse to the next, then the fire is so far gone ”let it burn” turns to ”run like hell”

So honestly there is no clear answer besides minimizing the risk that started the fire. Someone making judgement calls.

And if it goes up, wont it come back down? Somewhere? Oh, maybe thats better.