It has been nearly one year since high-risk asbestos abatement projects in the Medical Sciences Building (MSB) led to serious asbestos contamination and exposure to asbestos in the MSB. On January 31, 2018, at noon, at University College Room 152, a broad coalition of employee and student groups, whose members were impacted by these asbestos abatement breaches, will host a panel to discuss how these failures occurred and what questions remain outstanding. A lively discussion will take place in response to the questions: Has the University’s senior administration reported fully enough about what went wrong? Why aren’t members of the U of T community as safe as they could be?
Titled “Asbestos on Campus, One Year Later: What have we learned? What questions remain?,” the panel is jointly co-sponsored by the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA), CUPE 3902, USW 1998, CUPE 3261, Arts and Science Students’ Union (ASSU), Association of Part-Time Undergraduate Students (APUS), IBEW 353, LiUNA 183, and the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union.
Guests will include:
- Melisa Bayon, Political Action and Outreach Director, Ontario Federation of Labour
- Natasha Luckhardt, Program Development Officer, Workers Health & Safety Centre
- Pamela Arancibia, PhD student, University of Toronto, and Chair, CUPE 3902
- Pat Brubaker, Professor, University of Toronto, Departments of Physiology and Medicine
Also, Mark Lai, President, ECOH, UTFA’s Advisors on Environmental Health and Safety, will provide information about Asbestos Testing Protocols.
For more information, please visit UTFA’s website at www.utfa.org or its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/utfaculty. The event can be followed on social media via the hashtag #asbestosUofT.
For more information, contact:
- Terezia Zoric, UTFA Vice-President, Grievances, 416-978-3351, zoric@utfa.org