Virtually every one knows that asbestos is a very dangerous product that has to be handled with extreme care. At the very least, it has to be labelled as dangerous and in need of special handling – if not simply banned – because it will kill you if you breathe it in any kind of quantities. There was a time when this was not so clear, and mining communities around the world – especially in Quebec – made a decent if hard living mining it, until the workers began dying of lung congestion. Now, decades later, billions are being spent removing asbestos from buildings in Canada. It can only be done safely with great caution by workers dressed in protective clothing, and it must be done if any building with asbestos in it is torn down, renovated or if the asbestos has been stirred up in some way. It’s the law.
And now even the lumbering the United Nations bureaucracy has concluded that at the very least asbestos must be labelled as a dangerous material needing special handling, in particular when it is exported. But that decree did not pass, since the vote required unanimity, and, despite the fact that even a rising economic power like India unexpectedly decided to vote in favour and take the economic hit, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Canada turned it down. Yes, shamefully, Canada, which knows all too well how dangerous this material is, decided it would rather protect the jobs of the 500 asbestos miners still working in Quebec rather than act with any decency. It is a good question of what the newly elected conservative majority would not do for money, or votes. The leader of the opposition socialist party called this vote the height of hypocrisy. He was being too generous