NEWS FLASH: IDENTICAL DIOXINS LESS TOXIC IN ONTARIO

This following article came off of Yahoo! News yesterday. The title is "Man who lost wife to cancer fights Veterans Affairs for Agent Orange payment". The second last sentence in this news release reads as follows "Agent orange was part of a toxic cocktail of herbicides sprayed at CFB (Cnd. Forces Base) Gagetown in 1966 and 1967 by the U.S. military, with permission from Canada."

That above sentence absolutely stuns me. The U.S. military is doing chemical testing in Canada. Secondly it was done "...with permission from Canada." Odd I was a teenager then and reading newspapers. I must have missed the plebiscite. Or perhaps it was an election issue. The focus of this article is that this particular woman's family have missed out on a $ 20,000 payment for victims of Dioxin poisoning carried out by the U.S. military on Canadian soil. The real issues are more likely the fact that the $ 20,000 is a pittance and frankly disgusting. Also is the fact that Canadian authorities are buying their way out of moral and legal accountability.

Then there is the issue I've indicated in my title for this posting. They sprayed poison namely Dioxin also known as 2,3,7,8 TCDD onto the ground down east. Here in Elmira Ontario the very same Agent Orange containing the very same Dioxin was manufactured for export to the U.S. military. Here in Elmira, Uniroyal Chemical aka Chemtura sloppily spilled, pumped, buried and drained Dioxins into the air, soil, groundwater and even into the Canagagigue Creek. To this day they are still on that site merrily being transported down river onto floodplains all the way to the Grand River just below West Montrose. How fortunate for us, our neighbours, our children and wildlife that we are magically immune here in Ontario to cancer causing Dioxin. I mean surely we must be immune. Our governments, regional, provincial and federal have cheerfully ignored our pleas and demands for over twenty years to clean up this poison. Dioxins are below ground, readily accessible on both sides of the creek at Chemtura. We know exactly where they are yet the Region of Waterloo and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment would rather protect Uniroyal/Chemtura than the citizens who live here. I surely hope the politicians involved are happy with their payoffs be they political, financial or social.