Canada Set to Vote on Asbestos Mining

July 6, 2010

Ottawa, ON "Quebec breathing new life into one of Canada's last remaining asbestos mines", states the headline of a 6/14/10 article in the Winnipeg Free Press, in what seems to be a cruel play on words. While a few hundred jobs are at stake for miners in the town called Asbestos (the provincial government is close to backing a loan of $58 million to reopen the mine), Canada allows exports of asbestos mainly to countries that do not require a license to import the material—causing thousands of people to breathe their last breath due to asbestosis or mesothelioma.



To make matters worse, the Canadian government does not require exported asbestos to carry a hazardous material label. The Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Public Health Association and the National Specialty Society for Community Medicine, and likely most the Canadian population itself, believe that asbestos mining is a blight on Canada and are calling for both the provincial and federal government to stop funding and promoting asbestos.



The decision is simple, said Matthew Hodge, president of the National Specialty Society for Community Medicine: "Invest taxpayer's dollars to diversify the region and to retrain those currently employed by the declining asbestos industry."



Currently the Prime Minister is deciding whether to create hundreds of new jobs with a proposed $800 million copper-gold mine in British Columbia (BC). At stake is the destruction of a fishing lake (home to 90,000 rainbow trout) and other significant environmental damage. Although an assessment by BC acknowledged harm to the environment, it concluded that the economic benefits outweigh the harm—a projected $5 billion injection over the 20 year mine lifespan and $600 million revenue for governments.



Environmentalist and first nations in the region are opposed.



If the federal government allows the mine deal to go through, it may step back and allow the Quebec government to put more importance on a few hundred jobs and the economy of Asbestos than hundreds of thousands of lives in countries like India—where 300,000 tons of asbestos was imported in 2007, mainly for use in roofing. It is unlikely that Indian roofers know that chrysotile asbestos is hazardous when the makers aren't required to warn them.



"It's a challenge to understand why in Canada we restrict asbestos as a hazardous product," said Dr. Jeffrey Turnbull, Canadian Medical Association. "Yet we then export [asbestos] to other settings across the world where there is not the same degree of health protections in place."