Veterans made ill by defoliants await compensation

FREDERICTON, New Brunswick – Aging veterans who say they were made ill by the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides at a New Brunswick military base are hoping an announcement Wednesday will write the final chapter in a saga that has lasted more than 50 years.

Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson and Defense Minister Peter MacKay are expected to announce details of a compensation package at a news conference in Fredericton, not far from Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, which has long been used to train Maine Army National Guard troops.

“It has been a long, hard battle,” Gagetown veteran John Chisholm said Tuesday night. “When you consider that we went through prime ministers since … 1955 and 1956, when this stuff first started with the annual spray, and they knew then what it was doing to everybody, and they just let it go.”

Veterans and civilian contractors involved in the spraying of the defoliants on the sprawling training base claim they now suffer from a variety of illnesses, including cancers.

However, a report prepared by environmental researchers in Ontario recently concluded that mortality and cancer rates for both men and women living near Gagetown are similar to those for New Brunswick as a whole.

In fact, men in the Gagetown study region, which included the city of Fredericton, have a slightly reduced risk of dying from cancer when compared with the rest of the province – a finding that shocked local military veterans.

The report was the final in a series of similar studies that found the herbicide spraying programs had a minor impact on the health of local residents and most of those who worked at the base.

“It’s a whitewash,” Art Connolly, of the Agent Orange Association of Canada, said at the time of the report’s release. “Even Greg Thompson once said, when he was in opposition, that it was just a public relations exercise.”

The studies looked at the annual spray programs at the base, as well as U.S. military tests of Agent Orange and other combat defoliants over several days in 1966 and 1967.