Asbestos jobs come at price

According to Quebec Premier Jean Charest, his government’s decision to breathe life into Canada’s all-but-dead and internationally discredited asbestos industry has nothing to do with electioneering.

The decision to toss a $58-million lifeline to the shuttered Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Que., he said, is simply to demonstrate “a position that reflects our beliefs about the safe use of asbestos.”

However, not so safe that asbestos will be used in Quebec, or the rest of Canada. Governments and organizations have been spending millions and sending out armies of workers clad in haz-mat gear to remove asbestos from anywhere it might come into contact with Canadians.

As was the case when Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged Ottawa’s support for Canada’s asbestos industry at the start of last-year’s federal election campaign, Mr. Charest’s confidence in the safety of a material deemed by the World Health Organization to be one of the world’s “most serious occupational carcinogens” is limited to its use in a handful of developing nations that have weak regulatory regimes.

The value to Quebec and Canada to supporting this industry will be some 425 jobs. The worldwide cost of supporting this industry over the years is estimated at about 107,000 persons who will die yearly from asbestos-related diseases such as lung cancer. By all accounts it is a painful and wretched death.

Mr. Harper said his government would never stand in the way of an industry engaged in a legal trade. It remains legal to sell asbestos without the right-to-know and prior-informed-consent regimes required by the Rotterdam Convention because, since 2006, Canada has consistently blocked the product from being listed.

In spite of Mr. Charest insistence that politics has nothing to do with his support of the asbestos industry, politics has been to only reason it has survived for decades. Although government support is widely unpopular throughout most of Canada, the mines exist in a part of Quebec considered important to the federal Conservatives and provincial Liberals. It is a region they neglect at their political peril. This typically wouldn’t be enough to save an industry that is considered vital. For example, although the tobacco industry was considered too important to ignore until nearly the end of the last century, the pressure from outside the small regions of Quebec and Ontario where tobacco was farmed became so opposed to subsidies that governments found ways to wean farmers off growing tobacco.

Pressure is also the reason that provincial and federal governments are expected to soon announce Canada’s first national air-pollution strategy, meant to harmonize standards, reduce pollution and protect public health across the nation.

But asbestos isn’t used in Canada and it’s difficult to sell in the U.S. because of lawsuits. The product is banned in about 50 other nations. Until Canadians can agree to punish governments that continue to connect Canada’s good name to the product, Mr. Charest may be right — supporting it isn’t electioneering so much as protecting narrow political interests over the good of his province and the nation. The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.