Mr. Speaker, I trust that will not be counted against the time of my speech.
If I am using strong words of language, it is because I am personally ashamed and frustrated at my government and what it is doing with this industry. As I said, we send teams of Canadian lawyers at great taxpayers' expense to Rotterdam, Geneva, all around the world. Wherever people are working to have asbestos banned, we send these expensive teams of lawyers to resist it.
When France announced it wanted to ban asbestos in 1999, the Government of Canada went to the WTO and intervened. It claimed it was an unfair trade limitation. Where would we sell our asbestos if France banned it? Fortunately for the French people France won and Canada lost at the WTO and banned asbestos in all its forms, including the chrysotile asbestos mined at Thetford Mines in Quebec.
There is no safe level of this killer product. This is what motivated me today to move this motion in the natural resources mines and minerals category of the main estimates. I want my country to stop promoting the asbestos industry. I want my country to be able to hold its head high when it goes to international forums. I want my country to join the global campaign to ban asbestos in all its forms.
We are so stupid about asbestos in this country. We have contaminated our own Parliament Buildings to the point where they are not really fit for human habitation. My office in West Block is so riddled with asbestos that we really should not be in there. Asbestos was sprayed on virtually every commercial and institutional building in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. In our zeal to be boosters of asbestos, we contaminated schools, hospitals, public government buildings and our own Parliament Buildings.
We were spraying it on to steel beams for fireproofing not realizing that it crumbles 15 or 20 years later. It becomes friable and it comes down on our suspended acoustic ceiling. When we change a light bulb now, we get a face full of asbestos fibres. These fibres are so small and dangerous. It takes eight hours for an asbestos fibre to drop from the ceiling to the floor. That is how tiny they are. They are invisible. We cannot see them but they can and will kill us.
The province of Quebec has the highest rate of mesothelioma among women in the world. The province of Quebec has the fourth highest rate of mesothelioma among men in the world. This is from a 2005 report of Quebec's national institute of public health. So do not tell me that Quebec asbestos is somehow benign because it seems to kill Quebeckers just as readily as it kills people in Thailand, India and the other places where this killer material is sent.
I worked in the asbestos mines. We worked in clouds of the stuff. Not everybody gets sick. Fortunately, God willing, I will not get sick from asbestosis, but the latency period of 25 to 30 years means that everybody in this room could be affected from their exposure just because of their tenure in these buildings.
I will never support an estimates process, a budget or a bill that contains money, corporate welfare for corporate serial killers. I will not buy it. I will not be a part of it. I refuse to vote for it. All of the laudable things that our Minister of Natural Resources talked about are spoiled by the fact that he continues to subsidize, promote and spend taxpayers' money on this evil industry.
I have read a great deal about the history because I feel personally affected by this. It was McGill University that first started raising questions about whether or not asbestos is bad for people. Why? The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company paid for and created a new laboratory at McGill University to study asbestos. Guess what? The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was having trouble underwriting asbestos workers because they were dropping like flies, so it needed somebody to put the big question mark there. The same way the tobacco industry did. Any issue has a scientist somewhere it can buy to tell people what they want to hear.
The latest report being pushed by the associate deputy minister to the minister is a report that cost $1 million. The Chrysotile Institute paid $1 million for a report to raise the question saying that chrysotile maybe should not be viewed in the same way that other categories of asbestos are viewed. The rest of the world does not agree.
I gave a speech this year at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, among the world's leading authorities in asbestos related disease and I asked everyone that I could whether it was true that chrysotile kills. Every one of them, from Dr. Selikoff's own assistants down the line said, “Yes, chrysotile asbestos kills in the same way that crocidolite and tremolite and the other asbestos categories kill”. There is no safe level of asbestos. I will not tolerate voting in favour of any particular budget line that includes asbestos.
The public and members of the House of Commons should be made aware that we have such blinders on when it comes to this mineral that we even opposed having it listed as a hazardous material at the Rotterdam convention. The Rotterdam convention is the United Nations gathering that lists hazardous chemicals for export, et cetera. It does not try to ban these chemicals. It says that if this product is to be sold and exported, the purchaser has to have prior informed consent.
Canada objected to asbestos being put on that list of hazardous materials. Again, for the third time in a row, we sent teams of Department of Justice lawyers to Rotterdam to oppose even warning the people to whom we sell this stuff that it might be harmful. Imagine, how selfish is the face of greed that we are seeing here. What kind of a business would be so irresponsible as to refuse to put a material that is a known carcinogen and the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known, on a list of hazardous materials so that the people it sells it to have a fighting chance to take some precautions so they will not inhale asbestos fibres?
When I was working in the asbestos mine, my foreman had already had one lung removed and he went back to work. He came to us from Thetford Mines. Ours was a new asbestos mine in Yukon. We needed experienced asbestos miners to show us how to open up this new mine. Frenchie was his nickname, nothing derogatory, but when he came to us he only had one lung. He had already had a lung removed from having worked in the asbestos mines before.
I will simply say that many of us in the NDP will never support corporate welfare for corporate serial killers. The asbestos industry is a corporate serial killer. I am sick of Canadian government officials acting as globe-trotting propagandists, as merchants of death, these guys that are exporting human misery by the tonne. I will not tolerate it. This country should ban asbestos altogether in all of its forms.
At the very least, in a letter I sent to the Minister of Natural Resources, we should never sell it to any country that has not signed the ILO protocols on the safe handling of asbestos. None of the customers Canada sells our product to have ever ratified ILO convention No. 162. This is the irresponsible nature of the industry here.
The final point I will make is there are safe alternatives to using asbestos. Most of the asbestos we sell is used in cement asbestos mixtures to make asbestos pipe and asbestos roofing tile. There is a cellulose wood fibre, Douglas fir, the waste material that rots on the forest floor throughout B.C., which is the perfect binding agent for cement asbestos products. In fact, there is a Weyerhaeuser mill in Kamloops, B.C. that is on the verge of closing. Weyerhaeuser Canada told me that that mill would create 400 jobs if it could only sell its wood alternative cellulose product for a cement binding agent in these products.
We do not have to peddle this killer product mined in Quebec. We could sell this neutral, benign, safe product, an environmentally correct product from the Weyerhaeuser mill in Kamloops. We could satisfy the world's needs for concrete products without exposing unsuspecting third world workers to the misery that is death by asbestosis.
Having said that, I do not want to drag this out any further. I have already said that I think it is morally and ethically reprehensible to be dumping this product into underdeveloped nations. We should do what the rest of the developed world is doing and ban asbestos in all its forms. Let us follow the progressive nations and not be a part of this terrible asbestos mafia any longer.