Banning asbestos is not just a good thing. It's the right thing. Arthur Frank raised some excellent points about the importance of "political will" for banning asbestos, and gave valuable comments on our article "Why some, but not all, countries have banned asbestos." We agree that what matters in the end will be "political will." When we speak of changes in social policies, politics matters. However, there are several shortcomings if we treat "political will" as the only matter. First, "political will" will not be formed spontaneously. Nor does it present itself everywhere needed. Especially for those countries where the political will to ban is not present, we have to think about the underlying cause for its absence, and how we can intervene to generate it. As for Canada, we knew that policy there should have changed much earlier, due to various differences from other nations without bans. The main focus of our study was the question, "what were the differences of countries with the political will to ban from the no-ban countries".
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