How Canada Changed from Exporting Asbestos to Banning Asbestos: The Challenges That Had to Be Overcome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Less than ten years ago, the asbestos industry enjoyed the support of every Quebec and Canadian political party. The Chrysotile Institute and the International Chrysotile Association, both located in Quebec, aggressively marketed asbestos around the world, claiming scientific evidence showed that chrysotile asbestos could be safely used. The industry created a climate of intimidation. Consequently, no groups advocating for victims of asbestos or campaigning for its outright ban existed in Quebec to challenge the industry. A campaign was launched to mobilize the scientific community to speak out. Working with scientists, activists, and asbestos victims around the world, a small group of Quebec scientists exposed the false arguments of the asbestos industry. They publicly and repeatedly challenged the unscientific and unethical asbestos policy of the government. By appealing to Quebec values and holding those in power accountable, the campaign won public support and succeeded against all odds in defeating the asbestos industry.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".