CANADA: Agent Orange in Ontario

Agent Orange in Ontario

On this week’s Focus Ontario – Did We Poison Ourselves.

SEAN MALLEN: What do you think should be done now by the province, by the feds, by whomever?

Ken Graham: Well, they should be trying to put a real effort out to try and find out who all was exposed to this kind of a chemical, and you know where they worked and have some proof on it, but I guess there’s a fact-finding panel being set up and it’s going to be looking into that and hopefully they’re going to come up with some suggestions on this as well.

SEAN MALLEN: I’ve talked to a couple of the people involved in this, and interviewed one earlier in the program ended. Returning again, not to harp on the point, but the issue about them not being contacted earlier about this, are serious questions going to be asked of what happened in the ministries in those days about how this was handled. I’ll tell you why specifically,

I spoke to a gentleman in the St Catharines area and he said he was concerned about this, he was covered with the stuff spraying up north, and he asked, he and some of his colleagues asked, in the ‘70’s, the supervisors, is this Agent Orange that we’re spraying. They were told no. Effectively they were lied to by ministry of Transport people. Don’t you think that as part of this, really tough questions need to be asked of how this was handled within government, within bureaucracies?

Gilles Bisson: Everywhere, it’s everywhere and the problem is the latency of these particular chemicals is quite long, both in the environment and within our bodies. So I think there’s a couple of things that need to be learned, that we have to have an independent process so that you know it’s not the fox in charge of the hen house doing the review.

Gilles Bisson: But my point is this, at one point when they did find out, it was incumbent upon the MNR to go to the government and to the public, and to say listen, this is dangerous, we found out how dangerous it is and people need to be warned and we need to track people who have been exposed so that we can get to them hopefully in time to treat the diseases because in some cases you can treat these cancers.