Veterans deserve better

The war protest song “Johnny I hardly knew ye,” first published in 1867, describes the plight of a British soldier who has lost his arms and legs in war and is left to sit on the street with a begging bowl. Fast-forward to 2016 and it is apparent that government’s appalling treatment of injured military veterans has not changed.

We ask our soldiers to put themselves in harm’s way and then turn our backs on them when they are injured and need our help. As a cost-cutting measure, the previous Conservative government decided that a one-time payment to a maximum of $360,000 for a severely disabled soldier would suffice. The present day Liberal government campaigned on the promise that it would restore full lifetime pensions to injured veterans. The recent budget sadly made no mention of that.

In recent years, Members of Parliament have voted to increase their own pensions for life, with many to receive in excess of $100,000 per year. Perhaps it is time for Canadians to demand that a hold be put on pension payments to parliamentarians until they deal with the issue of lifetime pensions for disabled veterans. funds for a new Secretariat for the Interpretation of Wicked Jokes?

Considering the hourly billing rate for all these MPs and the PM, this joke will probably cost the taxpayer half a million dollars before the hue and cry settles.

We should tell these people to grow up. Surely MP Dianne Watts, or someone else at the meeting, could just have commented that the joke was a bit out of place and perhaps secured an apology? But to make a fuss like this is most disturbing.

Before we know it, Nicola di Iorio will be asked to resign, his career ruined, with the consolation that he may have accumulated enough time to ride off into the sunset with an indexed pension. More and more, we are surrounded by the hurt feelings, huffy responses and quivering apologies appropriate to kindergarten. Are there any adults left in Parliament. Or in Quebec? promised spending in the future. Where’s all that actual infrastructure cash that was supposed to go toward creating thousands of middleclass jobs, as promised in Trudeau’s campaign a year and a half ago? And if not that much money is actually being spent, then why the big deficits?

Bill Morneau better start loosening the purse strings as it were, or his legacy will be as the finance minister who failed to stimulate the economy while deficits ballooned. I would like to congratulate Christie Blatchford, lawyers like Omar Ha-Redeye and judges like Alex Pazaratz for attempting to shed light on our “utterly broken” law system.

Why has the law society or the government not addressed this critical shortcoming, which is obviously destroying homes and lives?

I would request that Blatchford write a series of personal stories of the victims to show the terrible toll this neglect is causing, and hopefully exert pressure on those who have perhaps deliberately failed to address this issue.