Party of One (58 page)

The Harper government has a different answer: the Joint Personnel Support Unit (JPSU). The JPSU is the umbrella unit for a network of support for injured veterans. It takes them through a complex treatment regimen known as the “three Rs”: recovery, rehabilitation, and reintegration. The three Rs are in turn anchored to the “universality of service” rule, which dictates that after treatment is over, soldiers have to be physically fit, employable without significant limitations, and deployable for operational duties. Those who don’t meet this standard are mustered out of the military and channelled back to a civilian life for which many of them are unprepared. And if they happen not to have ten years of service when that happens, they fail to qualify for an indexed pension.

That is what happened to Corporal David Hawkins, a reserve combat engineer released from the military before qualifying for an indexed pension at the ten-year mark. His PTSD diagnosis means that he is unable to be deployed overseas. Hawkins spent a tour in Afghanistan from September 2008 to April 2009 as a member of the “quick reaction” force, soldiers who were called out to deal with suicide attacks and roadside bombs. For his own safety, Hawkins slept in a light-armoured truck while deployed in Afghanistan. When he came home, the only place he could sleep was in his own truck. He was prescribed thirteen medications for his PTSD. Jennifer Wild, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University who treats British soldiers suffering from PTSD, said that was the wrong way to go: “Medication is not recommended— there is no good medication for PTSD. A pill does nothing for their PTSD symptoms.” Instead, Wild uses cognitive behavioural therapy in her practice, which is the most beneficial treatment for PTSD. She observed, “Soldiers may feel ashamed or excessively guilty about an action they took or didn’t take, and may be judging themselves on superhuman standards.”

After Hawkins’s time limit for recovery was up, he was given an ultimatum: either go back to work or “we can drop your funding right now.” Knowing that he was not ready for an operational redeployment, he declined the option to return to work. He was then released from the military with nine years of service, and didn’t qualify for his indexed pension. Lost in the no man’s land of PTSD, he has filed a grievance against the military, which can take four years, sometimes even longer, to review.

Like Hawkins, Corporal Glen Kirkland did not meet the universality of service rule. Kirkland was injured in a Taliban bombing attack that killed three of his comrades in 2008, and was subsequently diagnosed with PTSD. Leaving the army before the ten-year mark would have meant no pension for Kirkland. Defence
minister Peter MacKay told him that he could stay in the army until he qualified, despite his diagnosis of PTSD. Kirkland refused to accept the offer unless it also applied to other veterans. As Kirkland told the
Toronto Star
, “I joined as a member of a team, as a family. So, when I was offered an opportunity when no one else was, it just goes against everything I joined for.”

Even after the vote in Parliament, in which the entire Conservative caucus voted against an exemption for Veterans Affairs from government-wide cuts, soldiers had a hard time believing what was happening to them. It got harder when they learned that Ottawa had pledged $557 million to Afghanistan, including $330 million for the Afghan Army between 2014 and 2017. At home, the Harper government was cutting the budget of Veterans Affairs and reducing veterans’ benefits. It was hard to understand. One person who was not surprised about the cuts was former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae. He noticed that as support for the war in Afghanistan waned in Canada, so, too, did the prime minister’s commitment to the troops. “He is very coldblooded about these things,” Rae told me. “Harper’s objectives and methods tend to be pragmatic. . . . I find him one of the most deeply partisan and divisive people in Canadian history. I’ve never seen a politician act with less compassion, or so intent on never going beyond partisanship.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs had been forecast to spend $163.2 million more on disability awards and allowances, and $10 million more in earnings loss benefits than originally expected. But there was a big problem. Senior bureaucrats in the department were reluctant to ask the Treasury Board for more money, knowing the Harper government was hell-bent on balancing the budget in time for the 2015 election. In the final analysis, Stephen Harper made no distinction between ending postal delivery, closing scientific facilities, and cutting veterans’ benefits.
They were all simply steps on the road to his party’s re-election. Bureaucrats were so afraid of him that even money that had been allocated to departments routinely went unspent.

So instead of fighting for more funding for medical care for the troops, senior managers in Veterans Affairs earned $700,000 in bonuses in 2011 for coming up with cuts.
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Bureaucrats reported that the department would be spending more on memorials and monuments, and less on activities with veterans’ groups. That raised the ire of the Royal Canadian Legion, which implored the Harper government to exempt Veterans Affairs from the proposed spending cuts, just as President Obama had once promised in the United States. Veterans affairs minister Steven Blaney then said he would make reductions by cutting red tape. That way, soldiers would not feel the impact. It was pure rhetoric, but for a while it looked like it might be true. Rear Admiral Andrew Smith, chief of military personnel, told CTV News the government was only considering cuts for now: “It’s more an advisement there may be changes. It’s not a hard determination of changes. It remains under reviews, and we’re going to continue to study it going forward.”

Admiral Smith and the Forces’ top commander, General Walter Natynczyk, insisted that everything was being done to protect front-line health services. Opposition MPs and unions representing government employees called on defence minister MacKay to intervene and stop the proposed cuts. MacKay claimed the Forces had 378 full-time mental health professionals and that the department was working diligently to hire more. But the cuts would not be rolled back. The Harper government’s true intentions became clear after it lost the only committee vote since forming a majority government in 2011.

Liberals on the Veterans Affairs committee managed to win a motion demanding a study of planned cuts of more than $226 million to veterans’ services in November 2011. The department’s plans
and priorities report, which outlined spending to 2014, showed that financial support for ex-soldiers would see the biggest reduction. The number of Second World War and Korean vets was declining. Veteran Affairs Canada (VAC) pays out about $3.1 billion in transfer payments to veterans and their families, out of a total budget of $3.5 billion. The $226 million in cuts over two years is from the operations budget of about $380 million. At $113 million a year, that is almost a 30 percent reduction in operational funding.

The Liberal committee win was made possible by Conservative Eve Adams, the then parliamentary secretary to the minister of veterans affairs. It was Adams’s job to monitor the committee, but she herself had been late for the vote, causing her party’s loss. The Liberal victory was short-lived, however. The Tories quickly put an end to the study of the budget cuts at Veterans Affairs at the very next committee meeting. No amount of rhetoric could dissuade angry soldiers that the government no longer had their back but had stabbed it.

The opposition agreed. NDP MP Sylvain Chicoine opened debate in the House, saying that as many as twenty thousand veterans would be affected by the announced closure of Veterans Affairs Canada offices, and said such a move showed a lack of respect for the people who had fought for the country. NDP veterans affairs critic Peter Stoffer stated that if the NDP won the next election they would reopen the offices. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau made the same promise. The opposition argued that veterans needed one-on-one support that only experienced VAC case managers can provide, not a 1-800 number.

The Harper government’s answer was that veterans could have their needs met through Service Canada Centres—general referral offices for anyone seeking a government service. It showed a lack of understanding of the problems that veterans were facing. At the Service Canada Centres, men and women suffering from
PTSD would be lumped in with people inquiring about employment insurance and parents applying for maternity benefits. The sessions with veterans often ended with breakdowns, hard enough to bear in any venue, but next to impossible in such a public one. The veterans needed the privacy and professional attention provided by the VAC offices, and they set up a meeting with Veterans Affairs minister Julian Fantino on January 28, 2014, to say so.

The minister turned up seventy minutes late for the scheduled meeting in Ottawa. The veterans wanted him to reverse the scheduled closure of nine VAC centres across the country. Some of the veterans at the Fantino meeting were in their eighties, and had been travelling non-stop for twelve hours to get to Ottawa. They were hungry, weary, and upset that the minister had stood them up. Upbraided by the angry veterans when he finally did show up, Fantino stormed out as if he were the injured party. Compounding the political damage caused by the minister’s arrogant exit, Fantino then accused the vets of being duped by unions fighting to keep their VAC centres open. Eight centres were closed three days later, on January 31, 2014; one in Prince George, British Columbia, had already been closed. According to the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), approximately seventy union jobs were lost. Included in that number were twenty-five case managers who worked on the most complex cases, often doing home visits to deliver their highly specialized help. The wait times, already long for home visits, had just become much longer.

Stephen Harper tried to downplay the VAC closures. He said that these “duplicate” veterans offices had “very small caseloads.” But figures presented to Parliament in 2012 showed caseloads of between 2,065 and 4,113 for each of the closed offices. The remaining Veterans Affairs offices would now be saddled with huge new caseloads due to the closures. The Halifax office had just inherited over 4,000 new client files from the shuttered Sydney office, a third
more than its present caseload. Already down five client agents since cuts in 2012, the Halifax VAC was only given three more case managers to deal with the influx of thousands of new clients.

The Harper government argued that the same service would be offered by Service Canada Centres, staffed by experienced VAC officers and backed up by online help. Employing Orwellian logic, Julian Fantino claimed that the cuts would actually improve services. He dismissed the public outcry against the cuts as union manufactured. “One group in particular has questioned our loyalty to veterans,” Fantino said. “I’m speaking of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. They’ve tried to paint themselves as the champions of veterans. Let me be absolutely clear, they are anything but.” After trying to demonize the union, a spokesperson from Fantino’s office was forced to acknowledge reality. Case managers who had thirty-one clients before the closures would now have forty. That number was certain to rise with the 2014 end of the Afghanistan mission. No one knew how many more troubled vets would be coming forward in years to come seeking service that had just become a lot harder to get.

The day after the disastrous meeting with veterans, Fantino issued an apology: “Due to a cabinet meeting that ran long, I was very late in meeting a group of veterans that had come to Ottawa to discuss their concerns. I sincerely apologize for how this was handled. Today, I am reaching out to those veterans to reiterate that apology personally.” Ron Clarke, for one, wasn’t impressed. The veteran from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, was disgusted at Fantino’s late arrival, and rejected the minister’s apology. He told CBC News, “I thought he would be a lot more professional than what he was. As a matter of fact, I found him very disgusting. . . . I want to see him resign, that’s what I want to see. Either he resigns or I’d like to see his boss fire him. He’s not a very compassionate man. He was ignorant, forceful, and actually disgraceful.” Alphie
Burt seconded that assessment. Speaking from the lobby of his shuttered VAC centre in Cape Breton, the veteran of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps was blunt: “What the frig is wrong with that guy?”

Bruce Moncur, a veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan in 2006 by American “friendly fire,” was also at the Fantino meeting and blogged that it was easier fighting the Taliban than being a wounded veteran fighting for benefits back home. On September 4, 2006, Moncur was having breakfast with his platoon in Panjwaii when at about 5 a.m., a US A-10 Thunderbolt fighter jet mistook them for the Taliban and opened fire. A private was instantly killed and two dozen soldiers injured. Moncur took shrapnel to the head and lower back. He was told by fellow soldiers they could see part of his brain. Blood ran from the wound, and yellow liquid trickled from his ear. He lost control of an arm temporarily, and had to have two brain surgeries.

For the shrapnel wound to the head, Moncur received $22,000, payment for what the military calculated was the loss of 5 percent of his brain. He was also diagnosed with PTSD, a condition he believes was aggravated by the failures within the Department of Veterans Affairs since he returned home. He wrote, “I am not the only soldier who feels they have not been taken care of when coming home.” After weeks in hospital, Moncur needed help to learn to read and write properly again, as well as to walk and talk. When he returned to Windsor, the VAC office referred him to physiotherapists, occupational therapists, doctors, and specialists.

The greatest help came from his VAC case manager. She had read a story about his struggle in the local newspaper and asked to meet him. The office became a “lifeline” as Moncur recuperated physically and mentally. His VAC centre in Windsor was one of the offices that closed. Help was now two hours away in London, Ontario. Before the cuts, the London office had a caseload of
6,400; with the clients from Windsor, the load ballooned overnight to 9,000.