Mr. Coulombe, 69, says he believes that you can recapture the past. At a time when Canada, like many countries, is spending millions of dollars to remove asbestos from buildings, to say nothing of covering asbestos-related disability claims, Mr. Coulombe wants a $58 million loan guarantee from the province of Quebec. He is hoping to attract investors and revitalize the mine that gave rise to the town in 1879 and for more than a century has swallowed chunks of it into its ever-expanding pit.
Adding to the controversy over the plan, Mr. Coulombe’s strategy is to sell to countries like India, Pakistan and Vietnam, where enthusiasm for cheap asbestos often comes with a lax approach to workplace health and safety.
It would seem a quixotic venture. Mr. Coulombe’s proposal has been widely condemned by the medical and public health community both in Canada and abroad. The mineral’s dangers have largely eliminated the market for it in Canada as well as the United States, where the last asbestos mine closed in 2002.
But while many Canadians outside Quebec view the mine’s survival as something of an international embarrassment, history suggests it would be unwise to dismiss Mr. Coulombe. The asbestos industry was once a prominent symbol of Quebec’s might in natural resources, and the mine — now known as Mine Jeffrey — played an outsize role in the province’s political history.
“The whole asbestos debate is purely emotional,” said Paul Lapierre, the vice president for cancer control at the Canadian Cancer Society and an opponent of Mr. Coulombe’s proposal. “As Quebeckers we were once so proud of our mining industry, including asbestos.”
The political strength of asbestos will be tested this month when the province is expected to announce a decision on the loan guarantee.
Jeffrey was once a key operation of Johns Manville, the American building materials company, and at one time provided most of the world’s supply of one type of asbestos. But over time a large body of scientific evidence linked it to lung cancer and mesothelioma, a fast-acting cancer of major organs, and asbestosis, a hardening of the lungs that ultimately suffocates its victims.
In 1982, health-related lawsuits forced Johns Manville into bankruptcy; the Jeffrey mine was sold to its managers a year later.
The fortunes of asbestos have continued to sink. After peaking at 4.79 million metric tons in 1977, worldwide production reached only 1.97 million metric tons last year. Some countries, including the members of the European Union, now ban the mineral’s general use. Synthetic fibers have assumed most of the tasks it once handled, if at a higher cost. Asbestos’s remaining markets are mainly less developed nations as well as China and the countries of the former Soviet Union and China, some of which have mines. Its one remaining attraction is its low cost.
Once it reaches developing countries, asbestos from the Jeffrey mine is usually mixed with cement and formed into inexpensive pipes and roof sheeting.
The town of Asbestos, once prosperous, has tracked the mineral’s decline. The former town hall sits abandoned. When repairs to the building proved unaffordable, the local government moved into a church it purchased for $1. The mine pit, which is about a mile wide and 1.2 miles long, and its two huge mills are currently inactive.
As he rapped on a wall in his shabby office, Mr. Coulombe, an engineer who joined the mine 42 years ago, lamented that its asbestos-based wallboard was no longer available.
Mr. Coulombe readily acknowledges the mineral’s dangers and the harm it has done. But he asserted that the trouble mainly resulted from other forms of asbestos and not the variety, known as chrysotile, produced at Jeffrey as well as operations in nearby Thetford Mines. “The people against us in the medical community, they know nothing about chrysotile,” Mr. Coulombe said. “We show our opponents all sorts of studies done over the last 25 years all around the world that demonstrate that there is no problem working with chrysotile. But they don’t take that into account. They say ‘It’s a carcinogen, it’s a carcinogen, it’s a carcinogen.’ ”
Illustration by Joon Mo Kang, photographs by Colin McPherson/Corbis, left, and courtesy of Michael Frayn
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