‘Just because it’s been banned doesn’t mean it magically disappears’
PART 2: PREVENTION
HALIFAX — In his final week alive, Gerry Mercer didn’t want to complain about the pain. He knew enough to understand the end was near. Before he died, he took his watch off and silently handed it to his son.
In the span of a year, the former asbestos miner went from a healthy 59-year-old to a bedridden shell of a man. His last two months were excruciating, as mesothelioma took over his body and took away his ability to breathe or speak. He was given heavy doses of medication as doctors tried to keep him comfortable, but he didn’t need to say a word for his family to see how much he was suffering.
“I never want to go like that,” said his son, Rod Mercer, who lives in Paradise, N.L. “The way he died, it wasn’t right.”
Mercer’s death in September 2006, and those of hundreds of others of former asbestos miners from Baie Verte, N.L., was predicted decades ago when the miners’ union first began sounding the alarm about a cluster of lung disease. But without mandatory reporting when someone develops an occupational disease, and no registries tracking exposure levels to workplace materials, regulators, inspectors and doctors often find themselves recognizing clusters of disease after it’s too late.
In Baie Verte, a community of about 1,300 nestled into a rocky peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean in northwestern Newfoundland, asbestos once brought jobs and prosperity. An open-pit mine that began operating in 1963 produced asbestos used in products from brake pads to insulation sold from Europe to South America.
For many decades, asbestos was a part of life. School children brought home balls of it to play with. Residents said the white powder that blew in from the mine and milling operation coated clothes lines and strawberries that grew in local fields. For miners who worked at the Advocate Asbestos Mine, the documented exposure level was significant, as much as 30 to 40 times the legislated limits.
Kinart’s widow, Sandra, says that since Blayne’s death, Sarnia has improved screening for exposed workers.
“It still gives me cold shivers to think about what these men experienced,” said John Reardon, who has done extensive work on the Baie Verte claims for Newfoundland’s Office of the Workers’ Advisor.
Health concerns had been raised for decades, long before Mercer began working at the mine in the 1980s. The miner’s union, concerned about what it saw as a cluster of cancer and lung disease, brought renowned American asbestos specialist Dr. Irving J. Selikoff to Baie Verte in 1976. He examined 485 mine and mill workers and found 10 per cent of them had asbestos-related diseases.
Their employer, Advocate Mines, said the safety changes demanded by workers were economically unfeasible, but slowly began to make improvements. The province backed the company, saying workers taking a hard line on safety jeopardized the operation.
Although the use of asbestos has declined across the developed world since the 1970s, rates of mesothelioma are still climbing. The disease, which is almost always fatal, killed 292 Canadians 20 years ago. Today, the annual death toll has nearly doubled — and that’s only counting successful compensation claims filed provincially.
When you add in other asbestos-related diseases, such as asbestosis, the toll grows to several thousand Canadians each year. The Toronto-based Occupational Cancer Research Centre estimates about 1,900 cases of lung cancer and 430 cases of mesothelioma are caused by occupational exposure to asbestos each year.
Canada banned asbestos in 2018, but those working to prevent asbestos-related deaths say there are still many Canadians who have been exposed, buildings that are contaminated, and medical advances around early detection that need to come. It remains a significant problem for the construction industry, which accounts for a full quarter of all occupational disease claims.
“Just because it’s been banned doesn’t mean it magically disappears,” said Dr. Eudice Goldberg, who cofounded the Canadian Mesothelioma Foundation after her husband Arthur Konviser died from the disease in 2005.
Mesothelioma and asbestosrelated diseases are awarded compensation more often than any other type of occupational disease in Canada, and most experts agree there are many more Canadians who will never report their illness to a workplace compensation board.
For former miners, an asbestosis diagnosis in Canada can be worth as little as $2,000, while mesothelioma claims are worth more. But in many cases, people dealing with an occupational disease have other things on their mind than going through the time-consuming process of filing for compensation.
“A large number of the victims have never been compensated,” said Alec Farquhar, a lawyer who is co-ordinator of Asbestos Free Canada and was previously director of Ontario’s Office of the Worker Adviser. “Most mesothelioma patients don’t survive a year after diagnosis. They’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
Farquhar says the only way to prevent further asbestos deaths is to go beyond a ban and work to make Canada completely asbestos-free. His group is calling for the creation of a federal agency to combat asbestos-related diseases, which cost Canada in excess of $2 billion per year. That would include a national mesothelioma patient registry, a public database of all public buildings and workplaces that contain asbestos, and a strategy to address Canadians who have been exposed.
They want a formal review of past asbestos disease cases that may have been denied by compensation boards, or not filed at all due to a lack of awareness.
But some who worked in those industries say they don’t see a point in filing a claim with their provincial workers’ compensation board.
“Ultimately, there’s nothing you can do,” said Herb Daum, 65, of Powell River, B.C. “If you have asbestosis or mesothelioma, we can make your life more comfortable, but there’s not a lot that can be done. You’re still going to die.” Daum is among hundreds of Canadians who once worked for the Cassiar Asbestos Company in a now-abandoned mine in northern B.C. He was born in the community and worked in the mine’s milling operation until he was 29.
Only a tiny percentage of Cassiar’s workforce, now scattered across the country, have ever filed for compensation. Of the seven claims for occupational disease linked to asbestos exposure at Cassiar, only one was accepted, according to WorkSafeBC. Five were denied because a “causal relationship was not established,” and one was rejected because the worker couldn’t provide enough documentation, the compensation board said.
Daum, who considers himself lucky that he’s healthy, believes proactive screening of exposed workers can do more harm than good. He used to get regular chest X-rays, but stopped because he was concerned about radiation exposure.
Asbestos was a fact of life in the remote, hard-scrabble mining town just south of the
Yukon border. The company used to send truckloads of tailings, or waste asbestos mineral, to workers’ homes to landscape their properties.
“That was how we paved our driveways,” Daum said. “We played on the tailings’ piles when we were kids. Exposure was everywhere.”
Farquhar’s group says Canada can learn from countries such as Australia, where the government maintains a public registry of all buildings containing asbestos, and has a program to remove and dispose of the hazardous carcinogen. Australia, which banned asbestos 15 years before Canada, also has a national registry that monitors asbestos exposure among workers, measures mesothelioma incidence, collects exposure information and distributes annual reports about its findings.
In Canada, it’s a much more ad-hoc approach, he said. Asbestos is often only removed when it’s discovered in the middle of a construction project. Early screening of workers exposed to asbestos, when it does occur, is typically funded by labour organizations, and not by the government.
“It’s like we’re trying to shoehorn occupational disease into an existing health-care system that wasn’t designed for it,” said Farquhar. “In Canada, workers are like the guinea pigs in a lot of ways.”
Early detection is critical in treating asbestos exposure, something some communities have learned the hard way. Sarnia, Ont., was once ground zero for occupational disease in Canada, with an epidemic of mesothelioma, leukemias, lung cancers, brain cancers, breast cancers and gastro-intestinal cancers connected to the city’s chemical and refining industry. The mesothelioma rate there is about five times the Ontario average, according to the Ontario Cancer Registry.
Sandra Kinart, an activist who lost her husband and four members of her family to mesothelioma, said it took decades of workers dying from mysterious illnesses before people started taking the problem seriously. Family doctors have only recently begun to recognize the signs of occupational disease and ask more probing questions about potential exposures, she said.
“At first, it was like the dirty secret that no one talked about. When occupational disease knocked on your door, no one was asking where it came from.”
“Now, at least, we’re asking, ‘Well, where did you work? What were you exposed to?’ It’s about making the system better.”
Today, Sarnia has improved screening for exposed workers, created a support group for those who are sick and fasttracked compensation. Employers have made progress removing and containing asbestos when it’s discovered in their refineries and plants. And the local health-care system is much better connected, making it easier for sick workers to get referrals to access the help they need, Kinart said.
“The gold standard in hospice care is now in Sarnia,” she said. “We changed the system, but it took years of work to get here. And it was a horrible fight for their families”
But there are still challenges. Filing compensation claims remains a slow, bureaucratic process, and many widows’ claims for their dead husbands remain unresolved.
“What people want is justice, an acknowledgement of what’s going on,” Kinart said. “The widows who are left want a future that’s better so their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren will be safe and not have to worry about the things we worried about. Men and women shouldn’t have to go to work to die.”
The Baie Verte mine closed in 1995, but miners kept filling local cemeteries with more cases of lung disease and cancer. It wasn’t until 2008 that the province agreed to create a registry to document and verify records and to track the health and work history of everyone at the mine or mill in Baie Verte. More than 1,000 people were signed up.
The registry was the first of its kind in the country, and was supposed to help with treatment and expedite workers’ claims for compensation. The confidential database created a file for every registrant, with their work history, estimated asbestos exposure levels, and summary or medical and hospital reports.
But more than six years after it was filed with the provincial government, many former miners or their families are still waiting for compensation. Dozens of cases of gastro-intestinal cancer and chronic lung disease remain stuck in the system, bogged down in a bureaucracy unable to make a link between those diseases and workplace exposure.
A Memorial University study found 169 confirmed cases of asbestos-related diseases among former Baie Verte miners. But while more than 200 former miners filed claims for occupational disease, only 96 have been accepted by Newfoundland’s compensation board. In some cases, claims were rejected because miners didn’t have complete documentation or affidavits from supervisors proving their work history.
Meanwhile, miners and their spouses keep dying, allowing claims to expire before any compensation can be issued. In many cases, workers’ cases are denied because of lifestyle factors such as smoking.
In Mercer’s case, the provincial compensation board agreed his mesothelioma was caused by his years in the asbestos mine in Baie Verte, and gave his widow a one-time lump sum of $45,000.
Rod Mercer says his father, and plenty of other miners, paid the ultimate price for their jobs. It leaves him angry to think the dangers of asbestos have been well-known for a long time, but protection for workers still fell short. That can’t be allowed to happen again, he said.
“Money won’t bring anyone back, but I don’t know what they based that compensation on. It was almost like a slap in the face,” his son said. “As far as I’m concerned, somebody should pay a price for that, when you affect someone’s life.”
“A large number of the victims have never been compensated. Most mesothelioma patients don’t survive a year after diagnosis. They’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
ALEC FARQUHAR Lawyer