How federal politicians sheltered asbestos industry: Jennifer Wells
The Star 20 December 2016 | Jennifer Wells
Context behind “comprehensive ban” is that successive Canadian governments shirked their responsibility on the issue for decades.
Has the phrase “better late than never” ever stood on a weaker truss than the Government of Canada’s decades-late decision to ban the manufacture, use, import and export of asbestos?
Successive federal governments — Liberal and Conservative — provided political shelter to companies mining chrysotile asbestos in Quebec, going so far as to fund the Chrysotile Institute whose purpose was to defend aggressively this particular type of asbestos as distinctly less hazardous than other forms of the magic mineral. (A paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2008 called this argument “redolent of the tobacco industry’s playbook on light cigarettes.”)
Occasionally, a politician would step out of line, only to be yanked back into asbestos-supporting formation.
Recall Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in the spring of 2009. When queried on his position, Ignatieff said this: “I’m probably walking right off the cliff into some unexpected public policy bog of which I’m unaware, but if asbestos is bad for parliamentarians in the Parliament of Canada, it just has to be bad for everybody else,” he said. “Our export of this dangerous product overseas has got to stop.”
He later backtracked to this: “We have had 60 years of experience with this product. What I said in answer to a question is that we have an obligation to international agreements to the countries that we export to, to make them aware of the risks. That is all I said.”
That same year, the Star travelled to India, tracing the transformation of the raw mineral into the type of corrugated asbestos roofing you see everywhere on the subcontinent. At the time, more than 90 per cent of Canada’s asbestos production was packaged up for export, and India had emerged as its number one customer. What became quickly evident was that industrial safety standards were inconsistently applied, a state of affairs known to mining executives back home. “We tried to rely on our own people to tell us if it was used or going to areas or users that were actually approved or respecting the norms,” a vice-president at LAB Chrysotile said at the time. “They had approval by the Indian government to manufacture asbestos-related products. Obviously, we should not have relied on the Indian government’s approval.”
So the Canadian companies, which worked through intermediaries in India, would place negligent operators on a black list. Or at least that’s what they would attempt to do. But clearly workplace controls were ultimately beyond their reach.
One operation, filmed by the CBC in 2009, showed workers lofting great armfuls of asbestos into the air, where it settled like a first snow on their clothing, their faces. The owner of that operation told the Star that the dry method was still in use, and went on to explain how superior the Canadian product was to that sold by Russia. The bags are supposed to be opened mechanically in a closed production system and not exposed to the air. At this operation they were opened by hand.
And there was another problem: the standard lecture on asbestos offers as its thesis statement that the fibres are not a cancer-causing hazard so long as they remain inert. Any traveler familiar with those corrugated rooftops can likely attest to the ways in which those sheets are sawed or drilled into by homeowners. Or, as a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board told the Star at the time, “If a factory turns out a piece of asbestos cement siding and some workers go at it with a power saw, which they are likely to do, there’s not going to be controls, there’s not going to be ventilation, there’s not going to be wet sawing.”
Canada’s complicity in this appeared likely to continue. The Jeffrey mine touted 200 million tonnes of untapped underground reserves, which would have extended that mine’s operating life another half century. If, that is, financing could be secured. But that didn’t happen. The Jeffrey mine ceased operations five years ago.
In this context it’s tough to muster notes of congratulation for the “comprehensive ban,” scheduled to come into effect by 2018. The government says it now wants to raise awareness of the health impacts of asbestos and to “help reduce the incidence of lung cancer and other asbestos-related diseases.” It only took three decades to get there.
