Worker's History finds A home

Abstract

Recently the Toronto Star ran a story about a lavish new lakefront housing development in the eastern suburbs of Toronto owned by one of the Bronfman companies. Under the quaint name of “Port Union Village,” the developer is resurrecting the long-forgotten history of a tiny port that had existed on the spot in the nineteenth century in order to sell a myth of rural gentility in the 1990s. What the story failed to explain was that the new houses were rising on the site of the infamous Canadian JohnsManville Company, where from the 1940s to the 1970s several hundred workers worked with asbestos.