Greenpeace is also pointing its finger at Environment Canada for failing to notify Turkish officials that the CSL Manitoulin may have been embedded with toxic chemicals. Turkish law prohibits the import of toxic waste.

Both CSL and the Ministry of the Environment deny any wrongdoing, noting that Canada has no rules concerning the disposal of old ships -- many of which are laden with potentially harmful chemicals in their insulation, paint and electrical systems. Moreover, the Montreal-based company says the ship was sold through a U.S. broker, absolving CSL of responsibility for where it ended up.

"The resale [of the Manitoulin to Turkey] was completely beyond our control," said Pierre Prefontaine, a CSL vice-president, to The Canadian Press. He refused to disclose the name of the American scrap company that bought the Manitoulin.

Greenpeace officials rejected the explanation, and called on Mr. Martin to disclose what were the contents of the Manitoulin and indicate where he stands on ship dismantling practices carried out during his tenure at CSL.

"[CSL] and Paul Martin knew what selling the vessel to a broker meant," said Andrew Male. "If you're selling a gun to a kid, you're not off the hook for how the gun gets used. Let's not forget, we're talking about a future head of state."

A spokesman for Mr. Martin said the prime-minister-to-be had nothing to do with the running of the company at the time of the decision to sell the Manitoulin.

"Mr. Martin obviously has no knowledge whatsoever of this ship or the details concerning its sale," Scott Reid told The Canadian Press yesterday.

"Mr. Martin has no ties to the company whatsoever now. For the past decade, he had no role in operational decisions."

Shipowners argue bans on the international import and export of toxic waste -- such as asbestos, PCBs and heavy metals -- do not apply to ships because whatever toxic waste may be present is embedded in the ships, which are in fact mostly recyclable steel. Environmentalists say the practice of dismantling ships in Third World shipyards is an environmental and human catastrophe. An average of at least one worker per day is said to die taking apart vessels in yards that critics say are littered with hazardous chemicals and dangerous working conditions. Activists argue that shipowners take advantage of the lack of concrete laws, as well as loose local enforcement standards, to keep a comfortable distance from their end-of-life vessels.

Environmental groups have been trying to shame shipowners for years to change the way they dispose of their old ships, a practice made uneconomical in the West because of tight environmental regulations and higher labour costs.

CSL and Environment Canada admit they never sent documentation to Turkish officials regarding the Manitoulin, or any other ship sent for recycling. Nor does CSL deny that those ships may have had toxic waste embedded in them when they arrived at breaking yards. Rather, the company says it doesn't have to keep track of its vessels after they are sold to a broker.

CSL has sold three vessels, including the Manitoulin, to U.S. brokers in recent years.

"The details of any subsequent re-sale of those three vessels from our buyer to other buyer(s) are not known to CSL," Claude Dumais, the company's director of fleet management and engineering, wrote in a recent e-mail. "CSL does not carry out any business with recycling yards outside of Canada and the details of the condition of those three vessels [before they were being towed away by the buyer] are also not known."

Marietta Harjono, a Greenpeace campaigner in The Netherlands, says shipowners' attitudes have obstructed progress on the issue of shipbreaking.

"The shipping industry has always strongly campaigned that ships are never a waste, even if they are on the way to the beach to be scrapped," Ms. Harjono says.

The Manitoulin plied the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway for more than three decades, carrying shipments of everything from grain to iron ore, before it began to outlive its usefulness. After first being sold to at least one broker, the Manitoulin was towed to the Aliaga shipyard in Izmir, Turkey, last year. There, it was dismantled and the leftover steel was melted down at local mills to make new products, such as reinforcing bar, the kind of imports Canadian steelmakers blame for hurting their business.

The carcasses of Aliaga's rusting hulks stretch across the beach where about 1,200 workers earn a meager living dismantling the vessels. They wear little, if any, protection against the fumes and live with the constant threat of falling through rusting floors, being hit with falling debris, or cutting with their torches in
the wrong place and setting off an explosion. There are reports of fires almost every day, and shipbreakers regularly lose limbs or are killed.

"Worker safety is suffering from serious inadequacies in almost all respects," according to a Greenpeace investigation of the yard last year. "Accident reporting is nonexistent or unreliable ... There are no or limited emergency medical facilities."

There are few reliable statistics about deaths and injuries among shipbreakers, but high-profile accidents, including the explosion of Amina, a Greek oil tanker, at an Indian yard earlier this year, provide evidence of the risks. Ten workers died and more were injured after torchcutters came upon a large amount of oil still inside the ship.

The Greenpeace report also found that soil in the Turkish yard was soaked with oil, heavy metals and "highly toxic" PCBs. A report conducted by German academics more than a decade ago found the air contaminated with cancer-causing asbestos fibres and critics say conditions have not improved. Local fishermen have reported a large decline in fish stocks and there are reports of waste from the dismantled ships being dumped into the sea.

It was here that the Manitoulin arrived last year.

Ship brokers say scrap steel from broken vessels can fetch anywhere from US$100 to US$200 per ton. On that basis, the Manitoulin could have sold for as much as US$5-million, though the actual sale price was likely much less and does not include towing costs, which can reach several hundred thousand dollars.

CSL, one of the country's largest cargo ship companies, is not alone in using the foreign shipbreaking yards. Decommissioned vessels belonging to other Canadian firms such as CP Ships, a former arm of the Canadian Pacific conglomerate, have also ended up at yards in four other key shipbreaking nations: India, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan.

Together with Turkey, these five countries dismantle more than 98% of the 700-odd vessels taken out of service around the world every year, with yard owners paying more than US$1-billion to ship owners. Canada contributes a small fraction of that: about five end-of-life vessels per year.

Elizabeth Canna, a spokeswoman for CP Ships, says her company believes it's unsafe to tow or sail a ship across the ocean with all its hazardous materials stripped. But the company does adhere to the International Chamber of Shipping's recycling code of practice, a voluntary guideline that calls for shipowners to remove some hazardous materials and provide a complete inventory of the remainder so yard owners know what is onboard. Like CSL, the company is behind efforts to clean up shipbreaking, Ms. Canna says.

Over the last two decades, shipbreakers in low-wage countries began to market themselves as an alternative to highly mechanized -- and expensive -- Western yards. It was an attractive choice, especially since the few remaining shipbreakers in Western countries sometimes pay nothing to owners for their vessels.

"If you send a ship to Europe or other yards in the U.S., it's going to cost money," says Paul Topping, a marine policy expert at Environment Canada. "These yards in India and other places are paying for your ship."

Strict environmental regulations in North America and Europe also help make the decision to use developing world yards a "rigged game," according to Wayne Elliott, president of International Marine Group, one of just two Canadian shipbreakers. The Port Colborne, Ont., firm dismantles about two vessels a year.

"We couldn't pay what those other companies are paying for vessels," Mr. Elliott says. "We couldn't even come close, if the truth be known. Our costs here are considerably higher.

"Where it might take us five months to cut a ship, other yards might do it in four weeks. They might put 1,000 men aboard and they might kill 20. You can't put that many people on a boat at the same time -- they'll be in harm's way."

While the price of breaking a ship in Western yards may be high, critics argue that the cost in environmental pollution and threats to human health are far greater at unregulated yards. It's a situation that cries out for stricter rules and a level playing field, Ms. Harjono says.

"As long as ship owners are not legally made responsible for their end-of-life vessels, hazardous old ships will continue to go to the least regulated countries with dramatic consequences for both people and the environment."

Some critics say those rules already exist within an international agreement called the Basel Convention. In the late '80s, as Western countries began to adopt tougher rules concerning the disposal of toxic wastes, much of that work moved to poor nations willing to import hazardous materials, with few questions asked. So prolific was the trade that the convention was adopted in 1989 by a United Nations sponsored conference to stifle the movement of toxic waste from wealthy nations to poor ones.

Canada and more than 150 other countries signed the agreement, which obliges exporting countries to notify receiving states of waste shipments. Importing nations can refuse to accept such materials. Some, such as Turkey, have imposed their own national bans, but critics say they are often not rigidly enforced.

"Canada appears to be admitting that it is in violation of international law," argues Jim Puckett, co-ordinator of Seattle-based Basel Action Network, an environmental watchdog. "It is a no-brainer that ships contaminated with asbestos and PCBs are subject to [these laws]."

Although an independent report written for convention members concluded ships should be considered waste for the purpose of recycling, they have never been specifically included -- or excluded -- from the agreement. That has sparked furious debate over whether shipowners and their decommissioned vessels fall under its mandate.

The industry has long maintained that since more than 95% of a ship is recyclable steel, exporting vessels with embedded hazardous materials is not the equivalent of exporting a tub of industrial waste.

"There is no question that if you pulled the PCBs out of the transformer of a ship, packaged them up and shipped them somewhere you'd definitely be [subject to existing laws]," says Mark Winfield, an environmental studies professor at the University of Toronto. "It's more ambiguous in other cases. But the point that underlies what [critics] are saying is valid: there is definitely stuff under the Basel Convention's jurisdiction in those ships."

Greenpeace wants companies to deal only with regulated yards that use more mechanization and impose strict safety rules, or see existing waste trade laws enforced on ships.

A meeting of Basel Convention members -- including Canada -- in Geneva last month agreed to work out the myriad legal issues involved and there was some agreement that vessels can be treated as waste in certain circumstances. This week, the International Maritime Organization -- a UN agency charged with setting maritime standards -- begins meetings expected to end with the adoption of recycling guidelines for ship owners.

Greenpeace's Ms. Harjono argues that more voluntary guidelines are only a first step toward what is really needed: mandatory rules to regulate the practice.

"Without such a decision, we do not see any hope of improvement for the reality on the ground for workers and the environment in Asia and Turkey," she says.

Mr. Elliott, the Canadian shipbreaker, also hopes Canada will force the issue, drawing some of the business back to this country and helping to clean up distant shipyards.

"We decided a long time ago that we didn't want to dump oil into our drinking water or have PCBs floating around," he says. "Exporting our problems is not right."