Victims of industrial disease often suffer in silence, but Blayne Kinart, a Sarnia, Ont., millwright who had been exposed to deadly asbestos, wanted to raise public awareness of the plight of those who had been poisoned on the job.
To that end, Mr. Kinart allowed graphic and often intimate photographs of his emaciated body to be taken in the hope that the images would give a higher profile to the illnesses asbestos causes.
Some of the compelling pictures by photographer Louie Palu appeared in The Globe and Mail's Focus section this year, illustrating a feature story on how Sarnia, a community that hosts Canada's largest petrochemical industrial complex, had become a kind of slow-motion Bhopal for many of its workers.
Mr. Kinart died on Tuesday from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. He was 58.
"People who knew him as this big guy, powerful muscular guy, couldn't believe what they were witnessing," said Jim Brophy, who heads an occupational health clinic in Sarnia. "This disease . . . transforms you physically. You look like you were just released from Auschwitz."
Mr. Kinart was born and grew up in Sarnia. He met his wife, Sandy, in grade school in the city, and he made his home and worked there.
But Canada's Chemical Valley of refineries stretching along the St. Clair River had a darker side, a blue-collar tragedy of enormous proportions that he felt compelled to speak out about. About 3,000 workers there have registered with occupational health authorities over the past six years, complaining not only of mesothelioma, but also an array of equally frightening illnesses, such as leukemia and brain cancer.
Mr. Kinart's wife said her husband's outspokenness wasn't motivated by his own condition, but by a feeling that he had to break the silence in the community about the huge amount of industrial disease. "Blayne always felt that this wasn't about him. This was about the voice of all the men who were sick," she said.
Mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of lungs and other internal organs, is an extremely painful illness with no known cure. The median survival time after diagnosis is only two years. The highest rates in Ontario -- at more than four times the provincial average -- are around Sarnia, according to figures from Cancer Care Ontario.
Although the cancer is a relatively quick killer, it has a lengthy latency period. Those, like Mr. Kinart, who have recently become ill received their premature death sentence in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr. Brophy said the tragedy of Mr. Kinart's death is that it was preventable, had governments and industry taken asbestos seriously at that time. "After tobacco smoke, there is no other manufactured carcinogen that's having such a devastating effect. People like Blayne Kinart should be alive today," he said.
Until the 1980s, large amounts of asbestos were routinely used in the petrochemical industry as an insulating material by workers who had little in the way of the respirators and other protective equipment now mandatory when handling a dangerous carcinogen.
Mr. Kinart had prided himself on being a strapping and athletic man well into his 50s, and he said he couldn't bear to look at his body for five months after receiving his diagnosis. "Then one day, I decided, 'Well, it's about time I looked in the mirror,' and I sat down and broke down and cried. I just couldn't believe what was left," he said in an interview this year.
Mr. Kinart was an avid fisherman. On an angling trip a year ago with one of his grandchildren, he was left in tears. "I went out there fishing with him and I broke down and started to cry because I didn't know at the time whether I would be ever able to do it again," he said.
No one knows how many more workers will contract mesothelioma before the epidemic finally dies because of reductions in the amount of asbestos in use. The incident rate has risen by about 65 per cent over the past two decades and there are about 150 cases a year recorded in Ontario's cancer registry. The actual number of those afflicted is thought by occupational-health experts to be higher than the official government statistics because the condition is often incorrectly diagnosed as lung cancer.
The only known cause of mesothelioma is asbestos, suggesting that most cases are caused by some kind of workplace exposures, but only about one out of three people in Ontario with the disease are compensated by the province's workers' insurance agency.
Mr. Kinart didn't have trouble getting his compensation claim approved, but he was stunned to find that his paltry award for pain and suffering under Ontario's worker insurance system was a lottery-like choice between either $298 a month until he died or a $38,000 lump sum.
He knew the odds with mesothelioma, and took the lump sum.
Mr. Kinart also spoke out about what he viewed as Canada's disgraceful international role in continuing to supply the world with the dangerous carcinogen that was killing him. Asbestos has been mined in Quebec for decades, and the federal government in 2000 tried to block French public-health efforts to ban imports of the mineral because it was such a major health hazard. Canada claimed France was violating trade laws.
"You can still buy this stuff in the market and the Quebec government still protects this asbestos mine. I don't know why. How many people are they going to kill?" said Mr. Kinart, a former union health and safety activist.
His family and friends are planning an outdoor service on Monday that they think will be fitting tribute for Mr. Kinart because it will be held at a park on Sarnia's waterfront that has a memorial dedicated to workers in the city who have died prematurely from occupational diseases.
Besides his wife, Mr. Kinart leaves his three children, Shari Scarpelli, Lisa Waller and Shane, and four grandchildren.
Martin Mittelstaedt is The Globe and Mail's environment reporter.
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