Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for his important question and I am happy to provide an answer.
First, the Department of National Defence does assign a high priority to its environmental programs and is committed to conducting its operations in ways to protect human health and the environment. The department is also committed to ensuring that its contaminated sites and hazardous waste are managed in a safe and prudent manner. We have been working very hard at that for situations that have piled up over the last 50, 60 or more years.
The health and safety of our Canadian Forces members, the Canadian public and the environment is an important concern in the day-to-day conduct of the work of the Department of National Defence.
During the second world war, Canada and its allies participated in a chemical and biological warfare program, as my colleague has suggested. This program was driven by wartime urgency and the need to build defensive capabilities against weapons that had been used with terrible results in the first world war, which was at that time still a recent and painful memory.
As part of this program, the production of anthrax on a moderate scale commenced at Grosse-Île in late 1943 and continued through August 1944. To ensure that no hazards resulting from the production of Anthrax remained, the Government of Canada conducted a thorough decontamination of structures and surrounding terrain at Grosse-Île to ensure that the site was free of residual anthrax before opening the site to the public in 1997.
Once the decontamination was completed, an interdepartmental expert committee consisting of representatives from Parks Canada, Health Canada, Agriculture Canada and the Department of National Defence determined that the risk of a residual anthrax hazard was extremely remote and work commenced to restore the site.
A documentary aired in June 2010 reporting that barrels of anthrax mixed with a solvent were dumped into the St. Lawrence River by the Canadian Forces after World War II. The department conducted a review of all wartime agent disposals in the 2003-05 timeframe and there are no records that corroborate the release of anthrax into the St. Lawrence River.
That said, based on the information in the documentary, if barrels of anthrax were dumped into the St. Lawrence River, we can rest comforted by the fact that if the anthrax had been mixed with formaldehyde, as reported, this procedure would have been effective in destroying the anthrax.
DND will continue to assess new information as it becomes available.
The Department of National Defence takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously. As a good environmental steward, the department is addressing past environmental problems to maintain the health of the environment, the Canadian people and our Canadian Forces members into the future.