The Canadian Press
OTTAWA—After years in which thousands of Canadians were diagnosed annually with deadly, asbestos-related cancers, the federal government finally is moving to ban all products containing asbestos by 2018.
Today’s announcement by four Liberal cabinet ministers includes the manufacture, use, import, and export of asbestos in common items such as building materials and brake pads.
There also will be new workplace health and safety rules, changes to the building code, and an expanded inventory of public buildings that contain asbestos.
Canada also has been one of the last international holdouts in agreeing to list asbestos as a hazardous material under the Rotterdam Convention, a highly-controversial position that federal Science minister Kirsty Duncan says the government now is reconsidering.
“Today is the first step to ban asbestos—its manufacture, its export, its import—and we hope to do this, we will do this, by 2018,” she noted.
Even minute amounts of asbestos fibres can cause lung cancer or deadly mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer.
This year, about 2,300 new cases were diagnosed across the country, continuing a trend the Canadian Cancer Society says it hopes has peaked following decades of heavy asbestos use.
The last Canadian asbestos mines in Quebec closed in late 2011.