Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
That's a good question, and I'm glad the member has asked it. In fact, I'm encouraging other members on the other side to ask that very question.
I do take a lot of pride in what we have done in that program. What we did was very fair and generous. As you well know, we set aside just a little under $100 million for that program--$95.7 million to be exact.
Of course, Mr. Chair, I alluded to the fact that a lot of time and history has passed under the bridge since this Agent Orange issue occurred. It goes back to 1966 and 1967. In all fairness, it was a very complex, very difficult package to put together simply because of the passage of time.
We followed the previous government's fact-finding mission. I suggested some changes in terms of what they should be doing on the ground, which the previous government responded to. We did make some additional changes to the fact-finding mission to dig a little deeper. But at the end of the day we were basically trying to put together a package and bring back as much of this information as we possibly could to make sure that it was fair and generous.
Mr. Chair, first of all, when I went to cabinet I wanted to make sure we had enough money to do the job. Our best-guess estimate was that we'd have 4,000 people who could potentially receive the ex gratia payment. It turned out that today we have a little over 2,000.
It was all linked to science. In other words, you'd have to have a medical outcome or a condition as a result of the spraying. For that, Ms. Sgro, we went to the only available science around the issue of exposure to Agent Orange, and we relied on the Institute of Medicine. There are certain medical outcomes associated with Agent Orange, but never do they say it would cause one of these. They say it's a condition that could be associated with exposure, but they never say this is a cause and effect, if you will.
In fact, Dr. Furlong, who was appointed by the previous government, had been a member of the New Brunswick legislature and was a highly respected individual. In all of his reports--and there's a truckload of reports and work that they did--never once did he say that we should, to use the word that he often used, “compensate”.
We came up with an ex gratia payment of $20,000 tax free. If we had relied on the information provided by the fact-finding mission, none of that money would have gone out to the victims of that exposure.
I think we have done the best job we possibly could with the information and the passage of time. To be very honest with you, Ms. Sgro, it could have been dealt with more effectively right then in 1966, 1967, 1968, that period when the information was fresh and they knew what had happened.
Some of the criticisms we get--and some of these are internal criticisms--are about how we know whether or not it was Agent Orange that caused the medical condition. It could have been the spraying that occurred as a result of the natural resources. New Brunswick was spraying heavily because of spruce budworm. There was agricultural spraying going on in the area. We had the railway companies spraying the same types of chemicals. The list goes on.
Again, I think in all fairness we did the best we possibly could. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. As in anything, we'll never get it perfect. I would never suggest for a minute, Ms. Sgro, that we have it perfect, but I think we have it about as good as we can. To be very honest with you, many of your colleagues on your side of the House, including former ministers, were pretty pleased with what we'd done. They have been very supportive of me and really believe that we did the best we possibly could.
I thank you and many of your colleagues for that support.