Part One - The Fall of Saigon, Monday, April 24
Part Two - Quiet Diplomacy or Quiet Complicity, April 25
Part Three - Partners in Conflict, April 26: Part 1 Part 2
MPEG Gallery - short videos from the As It Happens Vietnam trip

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Partners in Conflict

The war in Vietnam wasn't Canada's war. Ottawa didn't send troops - but Canada did send a lot of other things, like TB clinics and doctors and nurses. There was also material that was not so benign - from helicopter parts to bomb bays and bulk explosives. That material didn't go directly to Vietnam.

Canada and the US were partners in NATO and NORAD, and in 1959 we'd become partners in defence production, too. The Defence Production Sharing Agreements meant that Canada helped fuel the American war in Vietnam. The arms industry also fueled the Canadian economy. Through much of the 1960's, Canada's unemployment rate was below four per cent.

The NDP leader of the time, Tommy Douglas, called it "blood money to the tune of more than $300-million a year."

Canada sold record quantities of nickel, iron ore, lead, zinc, copper and oil to the United States - and arms. It was estimated that as many as 145,000 jobs were tied directly or indirectly to arms sales; jobs with companies like United Aircraft and De Havilland, Magna Electronics, Fleet Manufacturing and Canadian Marconi.

In June 1968 the new Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, rejected arguments that it was immoral to sell arms to the United States during the war in Vietnam.

"If it were a question of morality and if I felt that it were bad to sell arms to the United States in a moral sense then I would have to feel that it's bad also to sell them nickel and asbestos and airplane components," told told CBC interviewer Patrick Watson at the time.

Mitchell Sharp, the external affairs minister of the time, says it's difficult to tell how much of what Canada sold to the United States actually ended up in Vietnam. He notes that the two countries had longstanding arms agreements - and the United States also had obligations in other parts of the world.

As the war dragged on and the debate about US involvement in Vietnam became more heated, student protests in Canada spread. The protesters didn't even know about Canada's role in the production of one weapon that would leave one of the dirtiest legacies of the war - Agent Orange.

In the early 1980s, the federal government admitted that the Canadian military tested Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown during the 1960s. At first the government claimed that there were tests - but only to determine whether the chemical was suitable to clear vegetation at Gagetown.

The issue was brought to light in the House of Commons during Question Period. Terry Sargeant, an NDP member from Saskatchewan, eventually tracked down an American report that referred to the testing at Gagetown. That report indicated that Canada was co-operating with the American army in testing Agent Orange. John Lojak worked in Research and Development at the Uniroyal Plant in Elmira. He says the chemical was developed at the Elmira plant - as a common herbicide that was widely used in Canada to kill weeds - in people's gardens, under power lines and alongside railroad tracks. At the time it was thought to be quite safe for people. Then the formula was altered to make it more effective - for wiping out whole forests in Vietnam.

"We knew Uniroyal was selling the chemical to the US army," Lojak told As It Happens host Mary Lou Finlay. "At the time they weren't using the name Agent Orange. But we knew that we were selling products to the US army and at the time the US was involved in Vietnam."

In 1967, the American spray planes wiped out one and a half million acres of trees and crops in Vietnam. Agent Orange was more than a weapon of ecological mass destruction. It contained a poison that was deadly to people, too: dioxins.

By the time the Americans stopped spraying Agent Orange, the U.S. had dumped more than eleven million gallons of the chemical in South Vietnam, and the people of Vietnam are paying for it today.

The Vietnamese blame birth defects in children born today on Agent Orange.

Dr. Le Cao Dai directs the Agent Orange Victims Fund of the Vietnam Red Cross. His job is to help the people who have been poisoned by Agent Orange - not just veterans and farmers from the war years, but the children who are being born today with deformities. The families need money and jobs and medical care and they need to be told that the defects of their children aren't their fault.

Dai also treated wounded North Vietnamese soldiers during the war. He remembers seeing American planes flying low over the forests, dumping their deadly chemical cargo.

"I saw many spraying operations occurring," Dai said. "But at the time I did not know what kind of chemicals the Americans were using. Then I saw the problems our people were beginning to suffer. There were many cases of malaria and cancer."

It can't be said for sure whether the people that Dai is now helping were damaged by Agent Orange - there are plenty of other toxins in Vietnam's environement today. Dai doesn't have the money to do a lot of research. But studies in the United States have established a link between Agent Orange and diabetes, immune deficiencies and certain kinds of cancer and the US government offers special compensation to some of its Vietnam War vets as a result. No one has offered to help the Vietnamese.