Exporting Ignorance: Canada's Opposition to the Regulation of the International Chrysotile Asbestos Trade Under the Rotterdam Convention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has long been viewed as a leader in matters of public health, human rights, and general public welfare. Recently however, the country has come under attack for its seemingly unreasonable and hypocritical trade policy concerning chrysotile asbestos. Chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, has been banned across most of the developed world. In Canada, asbestos is heavily regulated, and efforts to completely eradicate the substance are continuing across the country. It is remarkable therefore, that Canada continues to export high levels of chrysotile asbestos to the developing world, where occupational health and safety regulations are known to be less restrictive. Moreover, Canada continues to take the lead in preventing the regulation of the international trade of chrysotile asbestos under the Rotterdam Convention – an international convention designed to disseminate information regarding harmful substances to those who might not otherwise have access to such information. The overall purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there is no legitimate rationale for Canada’s position with respect to chrysotile’s listing in the Rotterdam Convention. First, the scientific basis of Canada’s position has been refuted by growing global scientific consensus. Second, the Canadian asbestos industry is now so small – it employs fewer than 900 workers nationally – that a complete shutdown of the industry would not be a significant injury to the overall Canadian economy. The argument in favour of continued government support is not economic; it is political. The industry is carried on almost entirely within Quebec, and therefore, a complete shutdown could have serious political ramifications. Third, Canada is now at odds with the majority of the world on this issue and is hurting its international reputation with its ongoing support of the chrysotile export industry. Last, apart from the moral debate over whether Canada should continue to support this export, there is little evidence to suggest that listing chrysotile in the Rotterdam Convention would have a negative effect on the Canadian asbestos industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".