Asbestos Residents in Denial?

October 21st, 2010. By janem

The bid to buy the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec is the talk of the town. Apparently the mine owners, who are faced with bankruptcy, are close to sealing the deal with some interested Indian financiers. Trouble is, will the deal seal the fate of countless asbestos workers in India?

Hugues Grimard , the mayor of Asbestos, was harping on about how its asbestos won’t be dangerous if it is used properly on the CBC radio this morning. By ‘properly’,  I guess he means you must wear full-on safety gear, including respirators. Maybe he should take a trip to India and pay for asbestos awareness education and the cost of kitting out asbestos workers in safety equipment. And while he’s at it, stamp a few warning signs on those cargo boxes exporting the deadly cargo to India. To date, Canada is not legally obliged to do so.

Organizations worldwide–including health experts in India–want asbestos banned! (Read Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI) letter to Quebec’s Chief Minister)

A resident of Asbestos was also interviewed on the radio show. The last thing she wants is the mine shut down because it is her family’s livelihood. She described growing up in Asbestos and how people would sweep asbestos fibers from the streets, how the kids used to make asbestos snowballs from the fibers with their bare hands. “I’m 62 years old and perfectly healthy,” she said. “My husband has been working the mine for years and he’s still alive and kicking—and I mean kicking,” she laughed. But she won’t be laughing if asbestosis or mesothelioma rears their ugly heads a decade or so from now (latency period typically takes 20-30 years.) She also claimed that she knows no one who has died from asbestos disease.

Try telling that to thousands upon thousands of asbestos victims. By 1984, 154 people had been killed from asbestos in Ontario, Quebec’s next-door neighbor. And about 454 asbestos victims were collecting workers’ compensation at that time. They worked at the John Manville Plant in Toronto (the name was later changed to Manville Corporation when lawsuits started to pour in, and thereby saved themselves millions of dollars at the expense of former workers). What’s going on with the workers at the Jeffrey mine—are they in denial? Have they been paid to keep quiet? OK, I’m not going into a conspiracy theory now but it makes you wonder…

Amazingly, Asbestos, Quebec had scheduled the Canadian Cancer Society’s (CCS) “Relay for Life”, a fund raising event to take place within the town’s streets—where asbestos fibers were swept up decades ago. Not surprisingly it was cancelled, apparently as a result of political differences arising between the town’s and the Canadian Cancer Society’s positions on the production of asbestos.

Meanwhile citizens of Asbestos are pressuring Quebec’s Premier, Jean Charest, for loans that will keep the floundering asbestos mine open but the CCS is urging Quebec’s Premier to “let [the mine] die.”

“Our mandate is really public health,” says a spokesmen for the CCS, André Beaulieu, “and right now, obviously, the community’s looking from an economic point of view and we understand.” How polite. Isn’t it about time Canadians rallied together and stormed the mayor’s office, barricaded the Jeffrey Mine?

Check out these videos from the CBC archives–where do I sign up to stop the Jeffrey Mine from churning out any more asbestos?

Tags: Asbestos, Asbestos Mesothelioma, asbestos_mesothelioma

This was posted on Thursday, October 21st, 2010 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Emerging Issues . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.