08/21/2026
🌱 Something as ordinary as choosing a plant for your garden can have consequences far beyond your backyard.
CBC News is looking at a surprisingly large hole in Canada's efforts to protect biodiversity: invasive plants are still being sold at garden centres and nurseries across the country, sometimes without customers even knowing what they're buying.
Plants such as English ivy, goutweed and periwinkle can escape our gardens and spread into surrounding ecosystems, competing with native species and affecting the insects and pollinators that depend on them.
Yet Canada's rules remain a patchwork. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulates some invasive plants, provinces and territories have their own legislation, and now municipalities are increasingly stepping in themselves.
Nanaimo and Surrey, B.C., have moved toward restricting sales, while London, Ont., has considered requiring retailers to warn customers when they're buying invasive species.
Advocates argue this shouldn't be left to individual cities.
The Canadian Coalition for Invasive Plant Regulation is calling for a national database identifying which plants pose risks in different parts of Canada, stronger federal oversight of the horticultural industry, and either removing invasive plants from shelves or clearly labelling them.
That matters when Canada has committed to reducing the introduction and establishment of known invasive species by at least 50% by 2030.
And prevention can be enormously easier than trying to repair an ecosystem afterward. As horticulture expert Jim Hole told CBC, “The payback is huge if you can keep even one more invasive species out.”
This is also the kind of practical public-interest reporting CBC does particularly well. It's national environmental policy, but it's also information Canadians can actually use the next time they're standing in a garden centre wondering what to plant. 🌿🐝🇨🇦
Would you support national regulations requiring invasive plants to be clearly labelled or removed from sale altogether? And should Canada be doing more to encourage nurseries and gardeners to choose native species?
