Canadian asbestos a global health threat
Bernard Coulombe, president of Jeffrey Mine Inc., says that reports showing workers in India handling asbestos with their bare hands is an example of “false information” (“Critics brand asbestos as Canada’s latest global sin,” Dec. 28).
Coulombe claims that Quebec’s asbestos is “used safely everywhere we export it” and comments that “there might be some small mom-and-pop shops who buy asbestos from China and do a bad job.”
But the fact is that workers in India filmed by CBC’s The National, handling asbestos with their bare hands, were not handling asbestos from China, but asbestos from Quebec. The clothes and skin of the workers were covered with asbestos fibres, as they worked with sacks of asbestos from LAB Chrysotile Inc. in Quebec. The Indian company employing these workers, Eagle Asbestos Pvt. Ltd, was a customer of LAB Chrysotile.
According to the asbestos industry, asbestos exported from Quebec has been handled under rigorous safety conditions overseas since 1997, when the Canadian government and Quebec’s last two asbestos mines signed a memorandum of understanding promising this. The evidence shows that these are false assurances.
Kathleen Ruff
Smithers
Article source: http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/Canadian+asbestos+global+health+threat/5963832/story.html