Showing posts with label asbestos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label asbestos. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Asbestos - Part 2

I suspect you have to be of a certain age to appreciate the allusive wit of Graeme McKay's editorial cartoon in today's Spectator. Enjoy!



Please sign this petition urging Prime Minister Harper to stop threatening Michaela Keyserlingk and to stop exporting asbestos.

Monday, August 15, 2011

The Curse of Canada's Asbestos Exports

While I have written previously about Canada's ongoing indefensible export of death, also known as asbestos, a story in today's Star puts this abominable practice back into the public consciousness.

Entitled Tories tussle with asbestos widow over use of party logo in ad campaign, the piece details how Michaela Keyserlingk, whose husband Robert died in 2009 of mesothelioma, (a cancer caused almost exclusively by exposure to asbestos) has been running an online banner since the spring that reads, “Canada is the only western country that still exports deadly asbestos!” It is a campaign that has the Conservative Party of Canada upset and threatening legal action.

Her crime? The unauthorized use of the Tory trademark, which is used as part of her banner admonition, Danger – Canada is the only western country that still exports deadly asbestos!

Is her appropriation of the CPC logo trademark infringement? Of course. But the more important question? Is Mrs. Keyserlingk morally justified in its use? Same answer!

Should you like to show support for this brave Canadian, please consider visiting her website.



Wednesday, June 29, 2011

More on Asbestos

The other day I wrote a piece lamenting the ongoing immoral Canadian export of asbestos and the fact that Canada was the sole country that recently prevented it from being listed as a toxic substance under the Rotterdam Convention. I also suggested that the government has made all Canadians who say or do nothing about this indefensible export complicit in it.

The Star's Tim Harper has a good column about the issue, and the fact that efforts are being made to keep this issue in the public arena. Kathleen Ruff, a senior human rights adviser to the Rideau Institute, is one such person unwilling to shrug her shoulders and lament her lack of power, reminding us that the export of this deadly substance is a question of democracy, saying, "If Harper cannot be budged from his position ... Canadians are nothing but serfs in a dysfunctional democracy.

We need to all get involved. Write to your Member of Parliament, and even if you get, as I did, the official party line about how chrysotile is safe if handled properly, your opposition is on record. To do anything less is to give permission to this Government to continue a practice that, according to The World health Organization, kills as many as 107,000 people annually.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Asbestos - Canada's Shame Continues

I recently wrote about the opportunity that Canada had to end its pariah-like status by no longer opposing the listing of asbestos as a toxic product in the Rotterdam Convention. Because the Convention requires consensus, Canada, of all the member nations, was the only country to oppose that listing once again, scuttling any attempt to rein in its use in developing countries.

Bearing in mind that Canada's agreement would not have actually impeded its indefensible export of death, but only add a warning as to its danger, our country insisted upon being the lone holdout, continuing to adhere to the fiction that asbestos is safe when handled properly.

This is, of course, the Conservative Party line, one that was parroted by my Member of Parliament when I wrote to him about the issue. Now Geoffrey Simpson has written an article excoriating Canada for its position; it is a timely reminder of how, thanks to the neo-con agenda that has been so vigorously promoted these past several years, Canada has not only lost its former exemplary international reputation, but also made all of its citizens who say and do nothing about this abominable behaviour complicit in it.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Asbestos - An Opportunity to End Canada's Shame

While I have written previously on Canada's ongoing indefensible practice of exporting chrysotile (asbestos) to developing nations despite its well-known lethal health effects, this country does get the chance to begin to rectify things today as it meets in Geneva with 142 other countries that have ratified the Rotterdam Convention, which concerns pesticides and industrial chemicals that have been banned or severely restricted for health or environmental reasons.

Canada has previously opposed the listing of asbestos; judging by the response I got from my M.P., I am not hopeful that it will relent this time, despite international and domestic pressure to do so.

The full article about Canada's past obstructionism and present opportunity can be read here.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Stephen Harper, John Steward, and Asbestos

An online article in today's Globe and Mail, written by Gerald Caplan, explores how the Harper government's retrograde policies have made Canada something of an international pariah. Especially interesting is how the export of asbestos was recently skewered on The Daily Show.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Canada's Shame

While I shall always be proud to be a Canadian, I have never subscribed to the mantra, "My country, right or wrong," which to me means uncritical acceptance of every action taken by one's country simply because it is one's country. In my mind, such a philosophy is an abdication of one of the responsibilities of citizenship, not an expression of it.

With that in mind, I am reproducing below an article from yesterday's Globe and Mail that addresses an issue of fundamental wrongdoing, the export of asbestos to developing countries. As most people know, asbestos is a leading cause of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lung lining that is invariably fatal. In fact, it is what killed the actor Steve McQueen many years ago. Despite the well-established link between asbestos inhalation and this cancer, the Quebec provincial government, aided and abetted by the federal government, continues to mine and export it, the result being increased rates of mesothelioma and other lung cancers in places such as Mexico, where it is used as an additive to strengthen cement. No amount of jobs (700 in Quebec) can justify this export of death.


Government investment in asbestos is morally bankrupt

Quebec has lent Jeffrey Mine Inc. $3.5-million to keep it alive when the asbestos industry should be allowed to die a natural death

Andre Picard

From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Sep. 08, 2010 12:48PM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Sep. 09, 2010 12:08PM EDT


Investissement Québec, a government agency, has provided Jeffrey Mine Inc. with a $3.5-million loan, allowing it to continue mining asbestos for a month longer and giving it one last gasp at attracting foreign investment.

One has to wonder why.

Why are the governments of Quebec and Canada so hell bound in their support of a deathly, dying industry?

How can a country and a province that claim to care about human rights and international health justify peddling tonnes of a carcinogen to the developing world for a few shekels?

What horrors are being wrought in the name of economic development, and in a bid for a few votes?

To date, 52 countries have banned asbestos. It is a cancer-causing product, and we have known so since the 1950s. The tiny fibres, when inhaled, can cause lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis.

Asbestos was once a miracle fibre because of its resistance to fire, rust, rot and termites.

In Canada, the “white gold” was once used liberally, in everything from pipe insulation to car brakes, modelling clay to talcum powder.

As a result, we have one of the highest rates of asbestos-related cancer in the world. In Quebec, asbestos is responsible for half of all workplace-related deaths.
Domestically, the use of asbestos is now strictly regulated under the Hazardous Products Act. We go to great lengths and much expense to remove it from public buildings, including Parliament and 24 Sussex Dr.

Yet Canada allows – and actively promotes – the export of asbestos. Ottawa even opposes the inclusion of asbestos in the Rotterdam Convention, a treaty on the use of hazardous substances.

The federal government also provides $250,000 a year to the Chrysotile Institute so it can flog asbestos abroad and propagandize at home.

The institute is a master of Orwellian doublespeak: It calls asbestos “chrysotile”; it promotes the “safe use” of the product, glossing over the scientific evidence that there is no practical means of safe handling; its lobbying is responsible for the fact that, in Quebec, the “safe” level of exposure to asbestos is 10 times what it is in other provinces; and one of the group’s favourite rhetorical claims is that asbestos is invaluable and safe because even NASA uses it.

Indeed, asbestos is used on the space shuttle so that it won’t catch fire during launch and re-entry. But the reality is that the principal buyers of asbestos are India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, where the mineral is used in construction. Needless to say, the workplace safety standards in these countries aren’t exactly comparable with NASA’s.

“When it comes to the asbestos industry, you readily abandon science and put forward the lie that Quebec asbestos can be safely used, when even your own government health experts have told you this is not true,” Mohit Gupta, co-ordinator of the Occupational and Environmental Health Network of India said in a stinging letter to Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

Every credible health organization in Canada, from the Quebec Institute for Public Health to the Canadian Cancer Society has condemned the federal and provincial governments for their unethical promotion of asbestos.

More than 100,000 people worldwide die of occupational exposure to asbestos each year, according to the World Health Organization.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Asbestos-related disease has a long latency period; workers breathing the fibres today will be sick and dying in decades. And, unlike Canadian workers, they will have little legal recourse.

Canada – one of the top five asbestos exporters in the world – is a major contributor to the carnage, but we turn a blind eye to it.

It is apathy tinged with more than a slight hint of racism. Killing workers in India is no more acceptable than killing them in Canada, regardless of the jobs the practice creates in small-town Quebec.

There are two asbestos mines in Canada: the LAB Chrysotile Mine in Thetford Mines, Que. is a few years from exhaustion; and the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Que., which is in bankruptcy protection. Between them they account for 7 per cent of the world production of asbestos, worth a few hundred million dollars a year.

These mines should be allowed to die an overdue death. Monies that go to promoting and subsidizing the sale of asbestos should be redirected to retraining and supporting the remaining workers – about 500 in total, almost all of them close to retirement age.

But Bernard Coulombe, owner of the Jeffrey Mine, has grand plans. He wants to massively expand and extract 200,000 tonnes a year of asbestos (oh, sorry, chrysotile) for the next 25 years.

He needs a $58-million investment to make a go of it.

Quebec was prepared to make a loan guarantee in that full amount, with a few token conditions, such as attracting some private investment and asking importers to respect safety standards. But the support seems to be wavering.

It is time to stop “exporting death made in Quebec,” according to Gilles Paradis, scientific editor of the Canadian Public Health Association Journal.

“The decision by the Quebec government to continue exporting chrysotile asbestos is a public health tragedy for Canada and the rest of the world. Asbestos kills workers and citizens. … The decision is wrong, unethical, indecent and we should be outraged.”

Indeed.