DO RIGHT BY VETERANS

Successive governments have failed for decades to provide veterans with the support they are owed and deserve. Our veterans have continuously had to fight for benefits, pensions and medical care, and more often than not were shortchanged.

During the late 1990s, a Senate committee called the urgent need for veterans pension reform to deal with backlogs, delays and complaints a “common thread” in government reports dating back to 1981.

Veterans groups have advocated, often in vain, for years to get medical care and hospital space for aging generations of veterans.

The federal government fought a class-action lawsuit by injured and disabled Afghanistan veterans that sought to overturn a 2007 Conservative government decision to replace lifelong pension payments with a one-time payout. The current Liberal government continued that fight, won it, and rejected veterans’ calls to restore lifelong pensions.

Meanwhile, most recently, the federal government has denied 91-year-old veteran Gordon Smith a spot in a Halifax veterans hospital — even though there are 29 empty beds there.

Smith was 14 when joined the British Civil Defence Corps during the war and carried the dead and wounded on stretchers in London, England, the CBC reports. He joined the Royal Navy at 17, spent 18 years after the war here with the Royal Canadian Air Force, then 20 years volunteering with the Royal Canadian Legion.

The feds blocked his access to a bed at the Camp Hill veterans hospital because of the technicality — Smith wasn’t with the Canadian Forces until after the Second World War.

Smith fought for all of us, served Canada for 18 years and now needs our help.

That he isn’t getting it is beyond shameful.