Veterans caught on a new battlefield
Government, public-sector union prepare for war over cutbacks
There was something that Laurie Hawn, a Conservative MP and a common-sense former air-force colonel, said to The Canadian Press the other day that best sums up the current clash between this federal government and the group of people it has always clasped close to its bony bosom and claimed to hold dear — soldiers.
“The fact is, we’re caught in a bit of a love-hate relationship,” Hawn said. “People love to love soldiers, as they should. (And) a lot of people love to hate government. That’s the reality.”
The clash came to wide public attention this week after a disastrous encounter between Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino and a group of veterans and Public Service Alliance of Canada members who came to Ottawa to jointly launch a last-ditch effort to stop the closing of eight more district Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) offices (the first closed earlier this month) across the country.
Fantino was very late to the meeting and got an understandably hostile reception when he arrived.
Challenged by a veteran who dared point a finger as he questioned him, Fantino reacted with characteristic bluster and walked out, his very ham-handedness breathing new life onto a fire the government believed was dulled to embers, if not out.
The veterans and union folks then proceeded to a furious news conference, where, unusual political allies, they raged about the dismissive treatment and demanded the minister’s resignation, the TV cameras capturing their anger, upset and tears.
On another front, a recent reported rash of suicides of soldiers has laid bare the simmering question of how well, or not, Canada is dealing with those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or other so-called “operational stress” injuries.
Establishing the truth of it all isn’t easy, as it never is when on one side there is government with its opaque bureaucracy (whether Veterans Affairs or Service Canada, the one-stop shop that one wag calls “the Department of Everything” and which is now supposed to pick up the slack of the veterans’ care), and on the other, the sheer emotional pull of damp-eyed old soldiers and the civil servants who have helped them and now stand to lose their jobs (about 80 jobs will disappear, but a good chunk through attrition).
Add to this what Erin O’Toole, a veteran of 12 years himself and the Conservative MP for the riding of Durham in Ontario, remarked upon Thursday when he stood in the House of Commons — “the low level of knowledge in this place, and outside this place, about how our veterans have been served.”
(He was speaking on an NDP motion that would have reversed the closing of the VAC offices, among other things. It was defeated, but the government then delayed the scheduled vote on the closings to Monday.)
If the knowledge gap between civilian and military Canada closed somewhat during the years of the war in Afghanistan, there’s still a lot of misinformation in the air about how soldiers and former soldiers are treated and, among veterans, about what help is available and how best to get it.
O’Toole and Hawn were at the Tuesday meeting — and contrary to what I said in an earlier column, they weren’t sent there by Fantino, but rather had asked to attend out of interest — and both were surprised when he didn’t show.
In fact, O’Toole told me in an email that he attended earlier meetings about the closings, and that it was because of the veterans’ concern that the government agreed to place a permanent, full-time VAC case worker — fully familiar and trained in the business of helping veterans — in each of the Service Canada centres in the communities where the VAC offices will close.
It’s his view that PSAC is using the veterans in the first wave of the fight against government public-sector cutbacks.
“This is their first wave against us,” he said, “and they have a shield that all Canadians respect for this first battle and are using it.”
He then proceeded to try to raise the level of debate by throwing out some facts: Of the 600,000 veterans in Canada (and 80,000 reservists), only 130,000 have a file with Veterans Affairs, and of them, only 7,500 have an assigned case manager — these are the folks who need extra support.
Most interesting to me was this: That it’s the Royal Canadian Legion, with its 1,400 volunteer branch service officers and 25 command service officers, which always has had most of the personal meetings with veterans.
“The Legion remains the most important face-to-face contact for our veterans,” he said.
In his riding of Durham, for instance, O’Toole said, there has never been a VAC office. Does that mean the veterans in his area haven’t been helped? Au contraire.
John Greenfield, of Whitby, Ont., is one of those volunteer officers.
Greenfield’s father was a veteran of both World Wars; one brother served in the Second World War; a younger brother spent 25 years in the navy. “I didn’t join when I wanted to,” Greenfield said, so he does his bit this way instead.
In the dozen years he’s been doing it, he’s handled more than 450 cases for veterans or their spouses. He is the first point of contact.
What happens is that he gets a call, meets the veteran at his home, fills out the forms for him. Many are for hearing-loss pensions, or “veterans’ independence” grants for housekeeping or grounds maintenance to help soldiers remain in their homes, or for service-related injuries, or for glasses or prescription drugs — or even small pensions for spouses whose husbands are long dead but who may have suffered a hearing loss. There’s even financial assistance, of $750 a month, for veterans who are going into nursing homes.
It’s complicated, in other words, and all in all, if things probably aren’t as good for soldiers as the government says, neither are they as bad as Fantino made it look the other day.