The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.
The Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) was too generous last Friday in lauding Ottawa’s announcement that day that Canada will stop objecting to the listing of asbestos as a dangerous material under the U.N.’s Rotterdam Convention on exports of hazardous materials.
“Canada has a moral obligation, backed by well-grounded evidence, to close down this [industry] and stop exporting a potentially hazardous material to countries that are ill-equipped to protect the health of workers who handle asbestos fibres,” said Erica Di Ruggiero, chair of the CPHA.
“The Government of Canada has made a good public health decision,” she said. Ottawa has done no such thing. There is nothing to stop continued exports of Canadian asbestos. The feds’ hands were forced by Quebec premier-elect Pauline Marois, who in the closing days of the recent Quebec general election, vowed to cancel a $58-million loan guarantee offered by the Charest government to revive Canada’s sole asbestos mine, in the Eastern Townships community of Asbestos.
Marois pledges to instead redirect those funds to the economic diversification of Asbestos and nearby Thetford Mines, once the world’s biggest asbestos-producing region. And to no longer prop up a fading industry complicit in the estimated 107,000 deaths each year from asbestos exposure, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Almost all of the victims are in developing world countries.
Stephen Harper, who as recently as the 2011 federal election, reserved one of his few Quebec campaign stops for an Asbestos appearance in which he bellowed that he would not abide dictates from abroad on asbestos exports, will now, he says, invest as much as $50 million in Ottawa’s own economic diversification of the region.
Harper is following Marois’ lead, in an effort that should have begun three decades ago when the global consensus emerged that there simply is no “safe” way of extracting or using asbestos.
Canada’s hypocrisy on asbestos has long been malodorous. Like almost all advanced countries, Canada has banned most domestic uses of asbestos, whose fire-retardant properties are greatly outweighed by its carcinogenic ones. Harper has been spending millions of dollars to remove the last traces of asbestos in the Parliament Buildings and his official residence at 24 Sussex Drive.
That’s a lamented and inevitable extension of the multibillion-dollar effort across North America and Europe over past decades to remove asbestos from tens of thousands of schools, homes and workplaces. Barack Obama’s start in public life was organizing public-housing residents in Chicago’s gritty South Side to successfully lobby City Hall to remove asbestos from their homes.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Toronto Star website: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1257705–right-thing-to-do-is-ban-extraction-of-asbestos-olive