Quebec and Canadian governments end their historic support of the asbestos industry
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quebec’s asbestos mines have operated for 130 years and made Quebec a world leader in export of asbestos over the past century. Even though the scientific evidence was overwhelming that use of asbestos was causing epidemics of asbestos-related diseases and death, the Quebec and Canadian governments continued to give the asbestos industry unquestioning financial and political backing. This legitimization of the asbestos trade by the Quebec and Canadian governments had disastrous repercussions around the world. Canada was more than a major asbestos exporter; it played a key strategic role as leading propagandist in denying the scientific evidence and in arguing for continuation of the global asbestos trade. As industrialized countries recognized the deadly health effects of asbestos and ceased to be customers, Canada successfully targeted developing countries as a source of new markets for asbestos sales. As a consequence, world asbestos sales have stayed steady at around 2 million tons of asbestos a year for the past two decades. 1–3 Canada created and aggressively promoted the marketing message that chrysotile asbestos, unlike other forms of asbestos, poses virtually no threat to health. Lobbyists, funded by the Quebec and Canadian governments and the asbestos industry, circled the world, bearing the Canadian flag, claiming that chrysotile asbestos could be, and was being, used under ‘safe, controlled conditions’, and was an excellent product for developing countries. Due to its credibility and expertise on the world stage, Canada succeeded in playing a pivotal albeit malignant role at United Nations (UN) gatherings, helping to defeat efforts of health experts to end or restrict use of asbestos. Canada has, for example, blocked the listing of chrysotile asbestos as a hazardous substance under the UN Rotterdam Convention for over a decade, thus allowing its continuing global trade without even minimal safety restrictions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it