In the rice paddies of CFB Gagetown

In a staggering revelation, the Canadian government is finally coming clean on a tragic decision taken in 1966 to allow the US government to test Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown. No formal notice was ever given to the soldiers who operated on the base, and the government has spent the intervening years denying that it had ever allowed Agent Orange to be used in Canada. The Toronto Sun editorial tells more:

How can our federal Liberal government continue to ignore the plight of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Canadian soldiers who were poisoned by Agent Orange in the 1960s?

As reported on Sunday by Greg Weston, Sun Media's national affairs columnist, soldiers stationed at CFB Gagetown, N.B, were exposed to the dangerous chemical defoliant for years.

Our government secretly gave permission to the U.S. military to test Agent Orange for use in Vietnam at Gagetown, while Canadian soldiers continued to live, work and train there.

Incredibly, for decades after that, even as a growing body of medical evidence linked Agent Orange to cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, blindness and birth defects in the children of Vietnam vets, successive Canadian governments hid the truth.

What is most puzzling about this is not the coverup — that's been typical government behaviour since Confederation — it's the fact that the Canadian government of Lester Pearson would allow US chemical weapons testing at all. Canada was not involved in the Vietnam war, and had no interest in furthering US military plans.