Brilliantly ‘The Daily Show’ focused on Quebec and the dark side of asbestos last night. Watch the video and post your comment on Jon Stewart’s forum. As a mesothelioma widow, it is reprehensible that Mr. Bernard Coulombe, President of the asbestos Jeffrey Mine said “India is used pollution” and touted about the safe use of asbestos.
Thank you, Aasif Mandvi. You are a hero to asbestos victims communities around the world! Linda Reinstein, www.adao.us
“The Daily Show (and the Colbert Report) didn’t report on Canada’s election, but The Daily Show did talk about a dark, unpopular element of the Canadian economy.
Aasif Mandvi reported from a small Quebec townjust north and east of Montréal and its struggles to continue to export a product synonymous with the name of the town: Asbestos.
The town wants to expand an underground mine to extract more asbestos. Now in the United States, you might be asking why there would be a market for asbestos. The workers at Ground Zero after 9/11 were subject to asbestos exposure. And asbestos is strongly linked to mesothelioma and lung cancer.
Mandvi, who was born in India, gets to the “punch line”: India is buying that asbestos. The show also played a clip from a CBC documentary “Asbestos: Canada’s Ugly Secret” showing Indian workers wearing bandannas over their noses and mouths while working with asbestos.
There isn’t a whole lot of humor in the story: asbestos is a difficult subject to find humor. The story made a strong connection between 1st World countries exporting dangerous materials to other parts of the world. And this isn’t just about asbestos and Canada. The United States exports a lot of cigarettes to the rest of the world.
The Quebec economy is not in great shape, but this doesn’t give them the right to deal in this substance. Yet, as long as places such as India think it’s okay, Quebec’s argument is that some place will produce the asbestos, and why not Quebec.”