Evidence of meeting #131 for National Defence in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was gagetown.
A video is available from Parliament.
Chairman, Brats In The Battlefield Association Inc.
They say there are not.
Saleem Sattar has been out looking for them after they were reported. There have been chemicals found in some of the barrels, but I don't think they've really amounted to much in the way of how they reported it. It's hard to say if there are still some buried out there. I'm sure there are somewhere, but I don't think they're coming forward with it.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
Okay.
Ms. Beauchamp, have you been able to align chronologically the times of spraying with the times that your family was posted to Gagetown? How closely do those align or coincide?
As an Individual
Well, based on one of the appendixes.... I attached an appendix to my brief, and that lists the dates, what was sprayed and how much was sprayed, so for the years, it gives that. I was there when a lot of dioxins were sprayed, including the DDT.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
We're focusing on Agent Orange, I believe, but DDT is definitely—
As an Individual
No. We need to focus on all of the chemicals. It's not just Agent Orange.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
All right.
To the best of your knowledge, is there any reagent that can be used to neutralize or to chelate the offending chemicals that are still lingering, perhaps, in the soil?
As an Individual
Probably the best person to ask will be here on Thursday, when Meg Sears will be speaking.
I don't know if Gary can answer that question. I'm not sure.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
How old were you when the Agent Orange or dioxins were dispersed in Gagetown?
As an Individual
I moved there when I was five years old. I left when I was 12 years old.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
Did they disperse it aerially, or was it sprayed on the ground? How was it applied to the land?
As an Individual
I think the majority was by air.
Gary can answer on whether any was sprayed by hand on the land. I'm not sure.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
I haven't been to Gagetown. Are there any rivers, streams or little lakes on the property?
As an Individual
That's where we used to fish—where the spraying was. When I first went to Gagetown, military families were allowed to go in the back where all military personnel, like the soldiers, would train on the rifle ranges and when doing manoeuvres or whatever. Families were allowed to go fishing back there, pick blueberries back there and drink spring water wherever we wanted. It was carte blanche. I mean, it wasn't just families. There were cadets from across this country.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
What about wildlife? We know that DDT wiped out the eagles in southern Ontario for quite a while. What about the fish and the eggs of any waterfowl? Were there any observations that the wildlife had been impacted?
As an Individual
I can't say for mammals, but for fish I never noticed any, but.... We ate all of the fish, too. That was something that was in the report; they said we removed the skin of the fish. It's well known in the scientific community that once you remove the skin of the fish, you've removed the fat, and because dioxins accumulate in the fat cells, the study was flawed. The reports of the amounts of dioxins in the fish were inaccurate.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
There were no observed obvious deformities. Is that correct?
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
They say that Maine's state legislature released a report calling DND's investigation into Agent Orange at Gagetown “biased” and “flawed”.
Can anyone elaborate on how this statement was arrived at?
As an Individual
I don't know how it was arrived at. I know there are, on the Prevent Cancer Now website, investigative documents that identify where the fact-finding project was most likely flawed.
Part of that has to do with the counts they did for the epidemiology studies. They actually included, for the health outcomes, the exposed personnel with the non-exposed. They also, from what I read, included all of Fredericton, and Fredericton was pretty far away at—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Unfortunately, again, I'm going to have to move on. I apologize.
Mr. Collins, you have five minutes.
Liberal
Chad Collins Liberal Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome to our witnesses this afternoon.
Mr. Salisbury, I'll start with you. Thank you for your service, sir.
You talked about poor documentation, and both of the other witnesses, Ms. Beauchamp and Mr. Goode, talked about incidents and actions that would have occurred back in the 1950s and 1960s.
I shared an experience with the committee at our first meeting. When I was a municipal councillor, we were dealing with the federal government and Transport Canada in assuming airport lands in our municipality. We found evidence of PFAS, and then it was a big fight to try to secure compensation for the local municipality related to the cleanup costs.
Part of the battle and struggle was securing proper documentation to prove our case. Without breaching confidentiality, we had to seek out people who used to work at the airport and who provided testimony that, in fact, that did occur and was part of their job duties.
How do we deal with the whole issue of poor documentation as it relates to, in this instance, issues that go back to the 1950s and 1960s?
I'm asking you that question because you piqued my interest when you talked about being a former medical officer of health with the City of Ottawa. You would certainly know the whole issue as it relates to freedom of information requests and the ATIPs that have been mentioned here today. Do you have any recommendations along those lines?
Col (Ret'd) David Salisbury
For individuals, it's going to be extremely difficult. One of the parts I didn't get to in my brief, because I was too long-winded—I'm sorry about that, Chair—is that we really need to adopt a different mindset, specifically when we're talking about historical exposures.
We're not going to find what people were exposed to. We're not going to be able to test them and be able to say that they were exposed to this and we now know that. We're going to have to work on the basis of what is referred to very succinctly in the PACT Act in the United States as presumptive diagnoses. That is, you get this diagnosis, and we know you were in such and such an area. We're going to put those two together. We're going to presume that it was caused by that.
Physicians as a whole, I would say, are not very interested in causality for the most part. We diagnose people, we treat them for their diseases, and we move on. Causality is a very nebulous concept in some ways, and it's also extremely difficult to prove. There's something in epidemiology called attributable risk fraction. I'll quickly give you an example. We know that asbestos, for example, causes lung cancer, not the thing that everyone talks about, which is mesothelioma. That's a done deal.
If you have a mesothelioma, we know that's because of asbestos, because it's about the only cause. If you have lung cancer and you're a pack-a-day smoker, or you worked in a bar where you were exposed to second-hand smoke, I have no idea how much was caused by your smoking habit, how much was caused by the fact that you worked in a smoky bar, or how much was caused by your being exposed to asbestos in your work. There is no scientific or medical way to tease those things out. We have to, for historical purposes, work on a presumptive diagnosis and presume that people were exposed. We're going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and we're going to look after them from that point of view.
Going forward, I guess there might be some hope that electronic health records will solve some of this. We also need to make sure, though, that those electronic health records can talk to each other, which is a huge problem. I think that, in Ontario, there are 12 different vendors of electronic health records, and those electronic health records don't talk to each other, even though they're supposed to all meet the same standard, which, by the way, is HL7. It's the international standard for communicating health information electronically.
I think that's part of the solution. The other part is that we need to tighten up on looking after the families. I don't know if we call it a shame, but it's certainly a real hole in our system that we don't look after the families of uniformed members, because they're moving the same number of times as the members are. Up until—
December 10th, 2024 / 5:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
I apologize for cutting people off.
Dr. Salisbury, if you consider yourself long-winded, you've come to the right committee.
Liberal