Editorial: Stop promoting asbestos exports

When Quebec Health Minister Yves Bolduc was asked what he thought of Industry Minister Clement Gignac’s proposal to have the government’s workplace health and safety board conduct an annual audit on the safe use of Quebec asbestos in countries to which the product is exported, he respectfully declined. For good political reasons, if not good health reasons.

Had Bolduc answered, and answered honestly, he would have had to have gone along with the Laval University public-health expert who called Gignac’s suggestion utopian and hypocritical.

The industry minister’s proposal came in response to the latest salvos, these from the Canadian Medical Association and the influential British medical journal The Lancet, against Quebec’s policy of restricting the use of chrysotile asbestos as a dangerous substance at home while shipping it abroad to developing countries such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines, which don’t have similar rules against it.

Once hailed as a “miracle mineral” with fire retardant properties, asbestos has more recently been fingered as a killer product by a host of eminent health authorities who have identified the fibres it sheds as a cause of lung cancer and mesothelioma, a cancer that attacks the lining of the body’s internal organs. The World Health organization attributes more than 100,000 deaths worldwide each year to asbestos poisoning, while the CMA pegs the Canadian annual death toll from asbestos exposure, the symptoms of which can take decades to manifest themselves, at close to 300.

Against this backdrop, the provincial government is weighing a request from a private consortium for a $58-million loan guarantee to finance the expansion of the Jeffrey Mine in the town of Asbestos in the Eastern Townships, a project that would restore 250 jobs in a place that risks becoming a ghost town if its single sustaining industry were to disappear.

A delegation of union representatives from various Asian countries to which we ship asbestos was in Quebec last week to petition the government, without success, to stop the exports and point out that the industry minister’s monitoring proposal is unrealistic considering its widely scattered use. Yet as long as their countries don’t ban the product, Quebec can’t be entirely blamed for the traffic, since user countries would get it from somewhere else if not from here.

In the absence of laws against asbestos use elsewhere the trade is not wholly illegitimate. What we should do at least is not encourage the industry with government subsidies or sales promotion. –© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette