A veteran adjusts his medals November 20, 2014 in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec. A new report from Canada's auditor general has highlights the inadequate services provided to Canada's veterans. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz OTTAWA — The Conservative party has made patriotism and support for the military central to its brand. That makes its ramshackle, shoddy and unacceptable treatment of Canadian veterans, revealed in auditor general Michael Ferguson’s fall report, all the more egregious. It is simply not good enough. And the customary official excuses and genuflections and blathering, in ample evidence Tuesday, only add insult to injury.
It is not good enough to declare, as Defence Minister Rob Nicholson did while fending of questions that should rightly have been fielded by Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino, that Ferguson found slivers of light amid the dross. To hear the minister tell it, both in an early afternoon news conference and in Question Period, veterans are getting most of the help they need, though improvements are of course always welcome. That’s not true. Ferguson’s report says so.
“Overall, we found that Veterans Affairs Canada is not adequately facilitating timely access to mental health services,” the audit’s preamble states. “Canada has put in place important health supports for veterans, and the Department is providing timely access to the Rehabilitation Program. However, access to the Disability Benefits Program — the program through which most veterans access mental health services, is slow, and the application process is complex. We found that Veterans Affairs Canada has not analyzed the time it takes, from a veteran’s perspective, to receive a Disability Benefits eligibility decision.”
Elsewhere, the audit states: “Delays in obtaining assessments, whether through Veterans Affairs Canada or National Defence clinics, contribute to delays in the veteran’s application for disability benefits. These delays may jeopardize a veteran’s stabilization and/or recovery.”
Now, connect the dots. The Defence Department’s own data shows that more Canadian soldiers have now died of suicide than were killed in combat in Afghanistan. The government has had those statistics for months. Yet it was just Sunday — with this audit pending — that the Conservatives announced $200-million in new funding for mental health in the military.
Why did it take an auditor general’s report to prompt this action? One does not require analytical genius to link untreated operational stress injuries, which run the gamut from hyper-awareness to full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, with the suicide rate. Where was the ministerial fist pounding on the ministerial table, say one or two or three years ago, demanding that no stone be left unturned in speeding access to mental health services for veterans? And where was Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
Photographers work as Auditor general Michael Ferguson speaks during a press conference at the National Press Theatre following the tabling of the 2014 Fall Report of the Auditor General in the House of Commons, Tuesday, November 25, 2014 in Ottawa. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)
A week ago, The Canadian Press’s Murray Brewster reported that $1.13 billion in unspent money has been returned by Veterans Affairs, to the federal Treasury, since 2006. Consider that for a moment: Throughout the period when the Afghan war was at its height, even as veterans’ groups sound the alarm about their plight, even then, the full budget allocated for them was not spent.
There are two elements, in effect, emerging from this audit: The first is the incompetence and lack of care revealed. The second is the communications bungle, which may be the politically more damaging of the two. For where was the veterans affairs minister, when this emerged? Off in Europe, attending a commemoration of the Italian Campaign in the Second World War.
This is not to denigrate, in any way, the importance of that conflict in Canadian military history; indeed the Italian Campaign is the first modern instance in which Canadian soldiers faced urban combat conditions similar to those they would later encounter in Kandahar.
But history, important though it is, should absolutely not have trumped the problems facing Canadian veterans today. The responsible minister needed to be in Ottawa, front and centre. This post-audit ritual, whereby relevant ministers stand up and take their public caning and pledge fealty to the AG’s recommendations, already has lost much currency, since Sponsorship days. Nicholson, who is not among the cabinet’s strongest performers, was like a deer in the headlights. The news conference was more of a mauling than a Q & A.
Perhaps strangest of all, the Harper government does not seem capable any longer of seeing an issue through the eyes of the average, reasonable, fair-minded citizen. For obvious reasons, veterans are respected and admired by Canadians generally, whereas politicians are not. In a contest of public trust between the two groups, consequently, veterans will always win.
Therefore, even if only for the sheer political optics of it, there needed to be contrition expressed Tuesday; a sense that, based on the simple findings of the audit — the wait times of eight months or more before many veterans even become eligible to seek treatment for chronic mental health injuries sustained in the service of this country — the government has failed them, and is sorry for having done so.
But contrition and humility were nowhere to be found. The spin was all selective and misleading quotations, deflection, dodging, hedging and excuses. Here we are, supposedly, on an election footing: Yet this could scarcely have been botched more thoroughly.
It’s a far cry indeed from the calculating, annoying but efficient Conservative message manipulation of yesteryear. It does not bode well for the government as it gears up for a campaign.
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