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The Invisible Epidemic [Asbestos] – by Tavia Grant (Globe and Mail – June 14, 2014)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

For John Nolan, the first warning signs came mid-November of last year while he was leading a tour in the Peruvian Andes. Mr. Nolan, 67, who lives in Fort Erie in southwestern Ontario, was guiding a group through the mountains near the storied Incan city of Cuzco.

He had criss-crossed the planet for years as a tour guide, and knew what higher altitudes typically felt like. But something terrifying happened while he was hauling his luggage up some steep stone steps to his cabin.

“I’ve never been out of breath in such a panicky, horrible way,” Mr. Nolan says in a raspy voice between laboured breaths. “Normally, when you run out of breath, you know you’re going to get it back. This was different. It was as if you were hitting a stone wall, with no hope of getting air. It was like suffocating.”

The diagnosis, back at home, was swift and cruel. It was mesothelioma — an incurable cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure. Mr. Nolan was initially given a few months to live.

Asbestos is the top on-the-job killer in Canada. But a Globe and Mail investigation has found that this stark fact has been obscured by the country’s longstanding economic interest in the onetime “miracle mineral.” Even though Canada’s own asbestos industry has dwindled from pre-eminence to insignificance —

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Russia, Zimbabwe pick up the asbestos baton from Canada – by Kathleen Ruff (Toronto Star – May 5, 2013)

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.

Canada is not longer in the asbestos business but its message is clear: if you can make money from a hazardous substance, then oppose safety requirements.

Kathleen Ruff is co-coordinator of ROCA (Rotterdam Convention Alliance) and will be attending the Geneva conference.

In February last year, an Italian court sentenced two asbestos industrialists to 16 years in prison for criminal conduct in having for years covered up the hazards of asbestos and failed to implement safety measures.

As a result of this coverup, thousands of workers and nearby residents of their Eternit asbestos-cement factory at Casale, Italy, died painful deaths from asbestos-related diseases. And the death toll at Casale continues to rise.

Yet the asbestos industry is fighting to carry on this same deadly coverup today. To date, Canada has been the industry’s chief political ally in achieving this goal. But this is about to change.

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Mon oncle Antoine: Of Asbestos Mines and Christmas Candy – by André Loiselle

http://www.criterion.com/

Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years, as the tastes and preoccupations of respondents have shifted and a few new masterpieces have displaced old classics.

But one thing has remained constant: in all of these polls, one title has invariably topped the list, unmoved by passing trends. It is Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), which for the last twenty-five years has held the official title of “best Canadian film ever made.” While some might claim that other films are equally deserving of this distinction, no one would deny that Jutra’s bittersweet tale of a boy’s coming-of-age in 1940s rural Quebec is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever to come out of Canada.

By the time he directed Mon oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra (1930–86) was already a well-known filmmaker in Quebec. The son of a renowned Montreal radiologist, Jutra was a gifted student who had completed medical school by the tender age of twenty-one. He never practiced medicine, though, for his passion had always been cinema, and he devoted all of his spare time and energy to the seventh art. Encouraged by his family to pursue his artistic vision, he started making shorts when he was still a teenager, and before turning twenty had already won a Canadian Film Award for best amateur film.

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Mon oncle Antoine – Full Movie (Mining Movie – 1971)

Mon oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra, National Film Board of Canada

 This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mon oncle Antoine is a 1971 National Film Board of Canada (Office national du film du Canada) French language drama film. Québécois director Claude Jutra co-wrote the screenplay with Clément Perron and directed what is one of the most acclaimed works in Canadian film history.

The film examines life in the Maurice Duplessis-era Asbestos region of rural Québec prior to the Asbestos Strike of the late 1940s. Set at Christmas time, the story is told from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy (Benoît, played by Jacques Gagnon) coming of age in a mining town.

The Asbestos Strike is regarded by Québec historians as a seminal event in the years prior to the Quiet Revolution. Jutra’s film is an examination of the social conditions in Québec’s old, agrarian, conservative and cleric-dominated society on the eve of the social and political changes that transformed the province a decade later.[1]

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Canada’s last asbestos mine may have future as Mars stand-in – by Peter Rakobowchuk (Globe and Mail – November 25, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

MONTREAL — The Canadian Press – Canada’s last asbestos mine, now winding down its operations, may have a new celestial calling — as a stand-in for planet Mars. Quebec’s Jeffrey Mine hosted nearly two-dozen scientists recently for a simulated Mars mission initiated by Canada’s space agency.

The scientists from four universities made a pair of trips to the Asbestos region, this year and last year, accompanied by a micro-rover. “There are definitely areas (on Mars) that are much more like what we have at Jeffrey Mine,” said Ed Cloutis, a University of Winnipeg professor who participated in the project. The new vocation won’t exactly replace the once-mighty asbestos industry as an economic lifeblood for the region.

The mine had been counting on a $58-million government loan to renovate and keep operating. The simulated Mars mission, on the whole, cost $800,000 — and some local officials, including an alderman and the town’s director general, didn’t even appear to be aware of the project when contacted by The Canadian Press.

The goal of the project was to simulate as closely as possible a Mars rover mission to detect the presence of, and determine the source of, methane on Mars.

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Asbestos products still being imported to Ontario – by Marco Chown Oved (Toronto Star – September 24, 2012)

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.

Despite recent announcements in Ottawa and Quebec that suggest asbestos will soon be a thing of the past, products made of the cancer-causing mineral are still being imported and used in Ontario today.

While the carcinogenic insulation is now being removed from buildings across the province, two new products that contain asbestos — brake pads and cement pipes — are being brought in.

Statistics Canada reports that $2.6 million worth of asbestos-containing brake pads were imported into Canada last year. Of that, more than half arrived in Ontario.

While Ottawa announced last week it would reverse its long-standing position and declare asbestos a dangerous material, and the new government in Quebec cancelled a loan that would have revived the defunct asbestos mining industry, the problem in Canada is far from over.

“Because we don’t mine, because we don’t use it in manufacturing, we are under the false impression that it’s gone,” said Liberal MPP Liz Sandals (Guelph), who introduced a private member’s bill earlier this year to ban brake pads containing asbestos in Ontario.

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The belated demise of Canada’s asbestos industry – by Kathleen Ruff (Toronto Star – September 23, 2012)

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.

Kathleen Ruff is senior human rights adviser to the Rideau Institute and author of Exporting Harm: How Canada Markets Asbestos to the Developing World.

In the space of three weeks, the political support the Quebec asbestos industry has enjoyed for decades from the Quebec and Canadian governments came crashing down.

It could hardly have been more politically dramatic or more financially devastating for the tottering, bankrupt Quebec asbestos industry. After 130 years in operation, the last two asbestos mines in Quebec — the Jeffrey mine in the town of Asbestos and the mine run by LAB Chrysotile at Thetford Mines — shut down more than a year ago in the face of catastrophic financial and environmental problems.

Both mines, however, clutched to hopes of resurrection, nurtured by a $58-million loan given to the Jeffrey mine by former premier Jean Charest just before he called the recent Quebec election, as well as by the undying political support that Prime Minister Stephen Harper swore to give to the asbestos industry during the 2011 federal election campaign.

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As asbestos industry collapses, a town’s fibre is torn – by Ingrid Peritz (Globe and Mail – September 22, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

ASBESTOS, QUE. — The sign by the side of the highway is hard to miss: ASBESTOS. No, it’s not a health warning to motorists about hazardous material ahead.

It’s the name of a proud community in southern Quebec, waging a fight to survive in an increasingly lonely stand against the world.

Asbestos has become a mineral with a dubious reputation and a doubtful future, and its namesake town faces a similar fate. Medical experts link asbestos to cancer. Countries worldwide ban it and Canadians rip it out of their walls. And now, in the space of less than four weeks, formerly staunch political allies in Ottawa and Quebec City have abruptly jettisoned their support for the asbestos industry.

Yet here in the town that asbestos created, where a onetime miracle fibre made fortunes, built schools and enriched hard-working families, embattled residents defend asbestos the way a parent defends a misbehaving child. It’s theirs, they know it well, and there’s no way it can be as bad as everyone says.

“Go ahead, you can touch it,” Pierrette Théroux says as she shows off a chunk of asbestos displayed proudly on her desk.

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It’s business as usual, asbestos company says – by Monique Beaudin (Montreal Gazette – September 18, 2012)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html

Reopening set despite Ottawa, PQ actions

MONTREAL – The company planning to reopen Quebec’s only asbestos mine says Ottawa’s decision to stop opposing the addition of asbestos to an international hazardous-substances list will not stop the mine’s relaunch next spring.
 
And despite a promise by the Parti Québécois to cancel a $58-million loan to reopen the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, a company spokesperson said work to prepare the mine to reopen is continuing.
 
“The status remains unchanged as far as the mine is concerned,” said Guy Versailles, a spokesman for Balcorp Ltd., part of a consortium of investors in the mine. The mine received the loan in June, and at least $7 million has been disbursed, Versailles said.

Adding asbestos to the hazardous-substances list under the United Nations Rotterdam Convention would require exporting countries to inform importing countries about the hazards of using it, and to include safe-handling and proper precautionary measures.

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Right thing to do is ban extraction of asbestos – by David Olive (Toronto Star – September 18, 2012)

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.

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Federal government won’t block efforts to limit asbestos exports – by Sarah Schmidt (Montreal Gazette – September 15, 2012)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html

OTTAWA — The Conservative government announced Friday it will no longer be a champion of asbestos on the world stage, effectively conceding the end of the asbestos industry in Quebec with a promise of up to $50 million to diversify the economy of the mining communities.
 
Industry Minister Christian Paradis, who represents a riding at the heart of Quebec’s asbestos mining region, said he didn’t want to abandon the industry, but said Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois left Ottawa no choice. During the summer campaign, Marois, who is now premier-designate of Quebec, promised to cancel an $58-million government loan to revive the Jeffrey Mine, signalling the end to Quebec’s long history of asbestos production.e
 
The federal government’s policy change of heart, unveiled in Thetford Mines by the government’s Quebec lieutenant, means Canada will no longer block international efforts, through the United Nations’ Rotterdam Convention, to place limits on the export of asbestos.
 
“It would be illogical for Canada to oppose the inclusion of chrysotile (asbestos) in Annex III of the Rotterdam Convention when Quebec, the only province that produces chrysotile, will prohibit its exploitation,” Paradis told reporters, saying it was clear the decision Marois is final, so it wasn’t a time for “academic” consultations.

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Canada to stop defending asbestos, striking blow to once-mighty industry – by Andy Blatchford (The Canadian Press/Montreal Gazette – September 15, 2012)

http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html

MONTREAL – The federal government has tossed in the towel and will stop fighting international efforts to list asbestos as a dangerous substance, striking another blow to a once-mighty Canadian industry now on the verge of extinction.
 
In a sudden reversal for the Harper government, Industry Minister Christian Paradis said Ottawa will no longer oppose efforts to include asbestos to the UN’s Rotterdam treaty on hazardous materials. For Paradis, the announcement Friday was far from celebratory.
 
He hails from central Quebec’s asbestos belt and is one of the sector’s staunchest defenders. Paradis looked glum and spoke in a nearly hushed tone as he spoke in his hometown of Thetford Mines, a community still dotted with imposing tailing piles that remind locals of the industry’s once-bustling heyday.
 
He blamed the new Parti Quebecois provincial government for killing the industry and cast Friday’s move as an inevitable response.
 
In making the announcement, the Conservatives fired the first shot in what is expected to be a turbulent relationship between Ottawa and the freshly elected PQ.

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Conservative government ends opposition to listing asbestos as hazardous substance – by Joanna Smith (Toronto Star – September 15, 2012)

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.

OTTAWA—The first potential clash between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and newly elected Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has come to a swift end as the Conservatives revealed they would stop defending the controversial asbestos industry.

Federal Industry Minister Christian Paradis announced Friday afternoon that the Conservative government would no longer oppose adding chrysotile asbestos to an international list of hazardous substances.

The Conservative government has stuck by the troubled industry despite strong criticism at home and abroad for downplaying the cancer-causing effects of chrysotile asbestos, but on Friday it was clear that Ottawa had seen the writing on the wall of the new political context in Quebec.

The Parti Québécois promised during the recent provincial election campaign to cancel the $58-million government loan the former Liberal government had given to the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Que. this summer.

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Ottawa does U-turn on asbestos mining – by Steven Chase and Les Perreaux (Globe and Mail – September 15, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA and MONTREAL — Canada is ending its much-maligned practice of defending asbestos mining on the world stage, a reversal of a stand that made it a pariah in some international circles.

The Harper government, which until Friday unflinchingly defended Canada’s right to export the cancer-causing mineral from Quebec, is blaming the incoming Parti Québécois regime for its change of heart.

Premier-designate Pauline Marois’s party,which will soon take office in Quebec, pledged during the provincial election campaign to cancel a government loan guarantee designed to resurrect the big Jeffrey asbestos mine in Asbestos, Que. It would have been the only mine operating in an otherwise moribund industry.

“The decision to close down the industry has already been taken by Mrs. Marois,” Industry Minister Christian Paradis said on Friday. He said Canada will no longer block international efforts to add chrysotile asbestos to a United Nations treaty called the Rotterdam Convention, a global list of hazardous substances. Being on the list places restrictions on trade of the mineral.

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Shattering the conventional wisdom on asbestos – National Post Editorial (September 10, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

If political strategists have any capacity for introspection, they should be asking themselves some serious questions about the Parti Québécois’ late-innings promise to cancel a $58-million government loan to the Jeffrey Mine in the Estrie, and to end all exports of chrysotile asbestos from Quebec.
 
Objectively, this is a no-brainer. The industry is paltry; exports in 2011 amounted to just $41-million, or 0.07% of Quebec’s total. Even in the town of Asbestos, it employs an insignificant fraction of the population.
 
For that meagre payoff, Canada gets a black eye on the world stage by joining Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Kyrgyzstan in opposing even the addition of warning labels to exports: In June, Postmedia news obtained a briefing memo to Environment Minister Peter Kent indicating that the government had in the past “acknowledged all criteria for the addition of chrysotile asbestos to the [Rotterdam] Convention [on hazardous substances] have been met,” but it nevertheless continues to oppose its addition.
 
Some continue to insist that chrysotile can be used safely. But the conclusively and disturbingly documented fact is that in the developing nations that buy the bulk of Quebec’s asbestos — notably India — it is not used safely.

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