Is Agent Orange killing Canadian veterans?

John Walker leafs through his yellowing photo album, flip- ping page after page, pointing to the black-and-white photos of the young soldiers, beaming with good health and vigour.

"These guys -- they were all exposed to it. They are all infected, but do they know that?"

Infection may be the wrong word. But exposed isn't.

Walker is talking about being exposed to Agent Orange, the notorious toxic defoliant sprayed on Vietnamese jungles in mind-numbing quantities by the Americans during their war. Agent Orange created a horrific legacy of disease, cancers, and miscarriages, which scars that country's people to this day.

So toxic was Agent Orange that tens of thousands of Americans have fallen gravely ill or died as a result of exposure to the chemical during the war.

What few Canadians realize is that Agent Orange was used and tested here in Canada at the Armed Forces Gagetown base in New Brunswick and that hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian soldiers and support staff were exposed to it.

Many may be sick, dying or dead as a result.

Walker fears he too has fallen ill -- with adult onset diabetes -- because of his years at Gagetown, where he served as a private in the 2nd Battalion of the Black Watch Regiment.

"I remember one time in 1967 we were training and had pulled into a copse of trees for the night, a section of forest maybe one mile thick by two or three miles long.

"There were no leaves on the trees, no grass on the ground. It was all just dead.

"You pull in, you're digging slit trenches -- six feet deep, two feet wide - - you're covered in this (crap) and you're sleeping in it. And then you bring it all home and your wife washes your clothes ..."

His voice trails off. He's lost touch with his ex-wife and their two daughters, but he wonders if they too may have been affected.

Walker comes from a Dundas military family and back in 1965, still in his teens, he signed on with the Black Watch. Over the next four years he would spend about 21 months or so stationed at Gagetown, where in 1966 Canadian authorities invited Americans to test Agent Orange on swaths of the base's hardwood forest and scrub brush.

Although the tests were no secret at the time, they weren't acknowledged by the armed forces until the early '80s and then it was only to reassure the public that there had been no ecological harm done.

Until very recently, they insisted there were no health problems associated with the spraying and rejected all requests for compensation from sick -- and in some cases dying -- veterans.

It's important to note that establishing direct causal links between environmental toxins and cancers or diseases that turn up decades later in specific individuals is very tricky science. But in the U.S. authorities became so convinced about the overall association between Agent Orange exposure and a list of 11 or so cancers and diseases that they have for years extended disability pensions to any soldier who had those diseases and might have been exposed to the chemical.

Canada is years behind that standard.

But after decades of denial, late last year they quietly approved two disability pensions related to Agent Orange exposure, one from exposure in Vietnam (during peacekeeping duties) and one at Gagetown.

The story only leaked out last month.

And now, like a slowly burning fuse connecting a long string of firecrackers, it's blowing up in community after community across the country as word gets out.

Walker was stunned when he saw the press coverage and realized it may explain his health problems, his now barely controlled diabetes and the associated neuropathy in his legs.

Discovering that it could have been caused by a callous exposure during his service to his country hit him hard.

"It's like the stages of grief. The first week I couldn't even talk about it, this week I'm angry -- God knows what I'll be like next week."

He's applied for a disability pension and been told he'll get an answer within four to six months.

He says he hasn't been able to work since December and is down to his last $700 of his savings. He wonders how many cases like him are out there.

"How many thousands of soldiers were stationed there during those years?" Walker asks. And how many have fallen prey to diseases linked to, or associated with, exposure to Agent Orange?

The short answer is, no one knows.

Janice Sommerby, of Veterans Affairs, said yesterday that in the previous five years since her department began tracking disability pension requests linked to Agent Orange exposure, 25 people have applied. (Twenty-three have been turned down.) In the four weeks since the story broke, they've had 200 calls inquiring about disability pensions linked to Agent Orange.

Are Walker's illnesses caused by Agent Orange? Does he deserve a disability pension?

I don't have a clue.

But I know he and many, many other of our vets deserve much better treatment than they're getting so far.