by NOEMI LOPINTO

Just days before this weekend's international meeting on the trade of hazardous products, the Asbestos Victims Association of Québec (AVAQ) is accusing Canada of a "criminal attitude" for its continued production and traffic of asbestos. What makes it criminal, says AVAQ founding member Roch Lanthier, is that Canada opposes the inclusion of chrysotile, a kind of asbestos, on a United Nations list of substances that cannot be exported unless the importing country explicitly agrees. In the 1980s, the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade (PIC), which informs countries of the dangers of certain substances, was adopted and laid out in the Rotterdam Convention. In February this year, it was made legally binding.

"Canada is the only first-world country still opposing the inclusion of chrysotile on that list," says Lanthier. "We export and promote it in poor countries where there are no controls, while its use is banned or to be banned in most industrial countries. It's total hypocrisy."

Canada is the third-largest producer and second-biggest exporter of asbestos in the world, having shipped abroad 510,800 tonnes of the stuff in 1995, the last figures available. The word asbestos refers to several types of fibrous minerals, which can be divided into two main categories: amphibole and serpentine asbestos. The amphibole fibres used commercially are extremely hazardous. Chrysotile, the most common serpentine fibre, is considered less so. Almost all of the world's current asbestos production is chrysotile.

Scarring experience

According to the International Labour Organization, 100,000 workers die from asbestos-related disease a year. Lanthier occasionally represents sick workers or their families before the Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CSST), and says workers in Quebec are routinely denied compensation for their illnesses.

"Symptoms provoked by asbestosis usually emerge 20 to 40 years after exposure," says Lanthier. "Asbestos fibres are very stiff. They create small lesions on the lungs, and the body defends itself by developing scar tissue. Your whole lung becomes covered in it. As it develops, the lungs hurt and you are always out of breath. Nights are terrible. People wake up in sweat dreaming they are choking, a bit like emphysema. This lasts for years, and when it gets worse, water develops in the lungs - odoema - and the lungs deteriorate gradually."

Of four cases Lanthier is representing, two of his clients are now dead. In those two cases, the autopsy report said the workers clearly showed signs of asbestosis. But the CSST said families were not entitled to benefits because the client died of oedema and heart failure, which, according to Lanthier, "is like you saying a guy who dies of AIDS died of flu."

Lanthier says mill conditions in developing countries, like Thailand and India, are as bad as pre-1940 levels in Quebec. "Women work bare-handed in asbestos dust. We are exporting atrocious suffering, disease and death in poor countries where controls are not implemented.

Latent blame

A 2003 study by the Quebec National Institute of Public Health reveals women in the Chaudière-Appalaches area have the highest rate of mesothelioma - a fatal, asbestos-related cancer - in the world. AVAQ has since sampled the air in homes in Thetford Mines to evaluate the concentration of asbestos and found what they called "worrisome" results. They found rates 50 per cent higher than levels established for American schools and public buildings. The Asbestos Institute, a Montreal-based non-profit pro-asbestos organization, blames the resurgence of asbestos-related cancers on the latency period and on the presence of more virulent forms of asbestos in buildings built post-WWII.

According to their Web site, "It will take another 15 years… before we begin to see the benefits of modern chrysotile control measures and the ban on amphiboles and friable products, which were introduced in the 1970s…

"After World War II, construction sites… routinely used asbestos-based insulation products, which were sprayed on. The asbestos fibres (chrysotile, crocidolite and amosite), were applied directly on site, and sprayed onto walls, support beams and pipes… hundreds of thousands of buildings are still insulated with these fibres." The Asbestos Institute would not return the Mirror's calls by presstime.

"Asbestos is a miracle material, really," says Lanthier. "It can't be replaced adequately with anything else. It's really too bad it's so bad for your health. But plenty of things have been like that, DDT for example, and sooner or later we have to sort out the good from the bad. We should have sorted that one out a long time ago."