Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Chris Arsenault's book Blowback at Octopus Books (116 third Ave.).

This is the story of a war coming home; a story of the military and economic currents that allowed Agent Orange to blow through trees and into rivers in New Brunswick. More than anything, it’s a story of soldiers, civilians and local residents who blew back against the government and companies who poisoned them.

The village of Enniskillen, a sleepy cluster of a few dozen houses in New Brunswick’s Queens County, has never been invaded by a foreign power. But during the 1950s to 1970s, the village was ground zero for a different kind of offensive, this one launched by the American and Canadian military against its own people with the deadly dioxin Agent Orange. Between 1956 and 1984 the Canadian military and its private subcontractors sprayed more than 1 million litres of rainbow herbicides around New Brunswick. The American military was invited to test Agent Purple and other toxins on Canadian soil after the chemicals had been banned by the U.S. Congress.

Chris Arsenault holds the 2008/09 Phil Lind Fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s Dept of History. A former contributor to CBC Radio, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, THIS Magazine and numerous other publications, Arsenault is currently Canadian correspondent for Inter Press Service, a United Nations affiliate based in New York. Arsenault has reported from Cuba, Colombia, Vietnam, northern Alberta and Chiapas, Mexico and has been a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, York University, Laurentian, St. Fx. and the Universidad Anáhuac in Mexico City.

Chris won the Trent Central Student Association (TCSA) award for community engagement in 2004 for spearheading a campaign to bring fair trade coffee to Trent University campus. In 2006, he was voted “best activist” in Halifax by readers of the Coast Magazine. A former service sector organizer with the Canadian Confederation of Unions (CCU), Arsenault’s journalistic and academic work focuses on corporate globalization, the extractive industries, foreign policy and social movements. Arsenault plays drums for the folk fusion band, The Clementines (http://www.myspace.com/clementinesband) and he presently lives in Vancouver.