Mr. Speaker, on January 11, in Woodstock, New Brunswick, giddy with the thought of power, the Prime Minister promised that a Conservative government would offer full and immediate compensation to soldiers and civilians who were exposed to agent orange or to other toxic defoliants at the Canadian Forces Base in Gagetown, New Brunswick. He promised that veterans would be given the benefit of the doubt in their claims for compensation.
The Prime Minister made these promises at the height of a tight campaign with the express goal of winning key votes in New Brunswick ridings. Yet, after three months in power, the Conservative government has made absolutely no progress on this file. In fact, the Minister of Veterans Affairs is backing away from the Conservatives' campaign commitments by saying that he refuses to be pressured into compensating victims.
Veterans in my riding listened to the throne speech and read the budget with interest but agent orange was not mentioned once. There were no commitments to act on this issue and no funds were earmarked for compensation. Not a single penny was put aside.
When I raised this issue in question period on May 5, the parliamentary secretary shrugged off my questions. She claimed that the government deemed this as a priority and that it would deliver. Where are the details? Parliament does not have them. Veterans groups certainly do not have them. I cannot help but wonder if the minister made promises during an election that he had no intention of keeping.
When he made those election promises, the Minister of Veterans Affairs knew this file quite well. He was a member of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs which heard expert witnesses from the Department of National Defence at two special meetings in June and November 2005. As a matter of fact, he was specifically sworn in as a member for those meetings, being otherwise an associate member, but was brought in because of his expertise on this file.
When he was in opposition he hounded witnesses at the committee and self-righteously dismissed their hard work on this file as a mere public relations exercise.
In June last year, the minister attacked the expert witnesses who appeared before the committee claiming that they were misleading Parliament and had not done their homework. He demanded that the witnesses draw conclusions about the health effects of exposure to agent orange before the Department of National Defence had completed its research.
At the committee meetings in November 2005, the current Minister of Veterans Affairs accused government officials of deliberately withholding information from the public. He asserted that the Department of National Defence could release the records of veterans who had been exposed immediately if they so desired. He berated their witnesses.
In fact, the current Minister of Veterans Affairs went so far as to suggest that recommendations made to the Department of National Defence were sufficient to begin compensating those whose health was affected as a result of exposure to agent orange.
If the Conservative government was so sure that it knew the right and responsible thing to do when it was in opposition, why is it so unwilling to act now?
The parliamentary secretary's assurances that the government is taking action to develop proposals to deliver on its commitments rings hollow. If I were more cynical, I might wonder whether this whole charade was a public relations exercise to win an election.
Had we only seen this type of thing with agent orange perhaps we could explain it, but we know well that with hepatitis C, we have heard and seen the same thing: a lot of talk but zero action and not a penny.