Thank you very much.
I would like to reiterate that we really appreciate this opportunity to appear before your committee, first as the parents of a veteran, and second, in my case, as the president of the Equitas Disabled Soldiers Funding Society, which is a non-partisan, volunteer, and now national organization.
With my wife Holly, I am a parent of a Canadian Forces Reserves soldier, Master Bombardier Daniel Christopher Scott, of the 15th Field Artillery Regiment, a reserve unit in British Columbia, who was severely wounded in Afghanistan on February 12, 2010. The second of our three children, Dan did two tours of duty in Afghanistan, coming home badly injured.
At the age of 24, in the service of Canada and because of an accidental bomb blast that took the life of Corporal Josh Baker and injured four other Canadian soldiers, my son had to have one of his kidneys removed, his spleen removed, and part of his pancreas removed. As a result of that, his life has been changed. For these injuries, he received a settlement under the new Veterans Charter of $41,500, with no other benefits such as retraining or earnings loss benefits.
It was difficult for me to believe that my son's life-threatening injuries were deemed to be worth so little. I should add a bit here. My wife actually works for an insurance company. Her job is to take litigated files and determine the one-time lump sum cash value. She has 200 files at any one time. We just couldn't understand why this was so disproportionately low. I also learned from my son that this was not unusual. Many of his fellow soldiers who were coming back from the Afghan conflict were being seriously disadvantaged by the lump sum payment under the new Veterans Charter.
I approached the government directly and was given assurances that the enhancements to the new Veterans Charter under Bill C-55 and additional funding for soldiers would address all these problems. However, I haven't seen this promise fulfilled as far as the compensation goes for the individual soldiers affected. I still see these small lump sum payments.
As a result, I sought legal advice and collaboration, which eventually led me to Don Sorochan, with the law firm Miller Thomson. As a consequence of Miller Thomson's agreeing to represent the soldiers legal interests pro bono, somebody had to pay for their disbursement costs. Mr. Sorochan convinced me that we would have to form a society that would raise the disbursement costs to go forward with this program, and that was the beginning of the Equitas Society. It was strictly to fund the disbursement costs.
However, soldiers started to contact us with their cases. It was an awful lot of work. Sometimes for three hours a day we would have to respond to e-mails and phone calls. I know that Don Sorochan is in the same boat. We received hundreds of calls and e-mails.
As a result of these examples, we found three key issues with the new Veterans Charter that were somewhat troubling. We divided the cases into the severely disabled, the moderately disabled, and the partially disabled.
For the severely disabled who receive their lump sum payment and monthly benefits support, we found that, compared to the previous Pension Act, they could be financially disadvantaged by approximately 30%. This is due to the new Veterans Charter reduction of benefits at age 65, and the fact that there are tax and clawback considerations to their monthly settlements, which is not normal for a workmen's compensation monthly payment.
Also, we found in talking to the soldiers that the clawback is actually a disincentive for these severely disabled members to find other employment. We encourage all of them to go forward with their lives, but for some reason, getting their money clawed back starts to make them want to just collect money. So we have some issues with the way that's being administered.
Secondly, we have the moderately disabled. These are Canadian Forces members who will be discharged because they don't meet the requirement of universality of service and who will receive two years or more of earning lost benefits as they're retrained. But they can be disadvantaged tremendously by up to 65%, because if you take the total cash value they would get over their lifetime under the old system, they have said to us that under the new system—and we believe them—there is a big gap in the benefits.
But what I would really like to emphasize is the Canadian Forces reserve members—especially from the province of British Columbia where we don't have a standing military base, so we raise the army with reserve soldiers—have been sent into harm's way. They have injuries. They've come back and these injuries are not such that they will be removed from the reserve unit. They're not discharged, so none of these programs come into play. However, they have to take their injuries into the civilian workplace and try to get employment.
It's quite sad because a lot of them say that they were going to be police officers and so on, and I ask them, “Can you run” or “Can you walk”? No. But then how are they going to do that? Their settlements are $26,000 or $40,000. It's just not enough to compensate them for the fact that they're going to have a permanent disability for the rest of their lives. But they aren't discharged from the reserves so they don't trigger any of these other programs.
When the program first came in it was supposed to be that they would remain in the military so it wouldn't really have been an issue.
The last issue we found, which is somewhat different from the promise in the new Veterans Charter is that a lot of the home units are making special deals with their soldiers so they can compensate them directly. Although this is very commendable, the individual soldiers know that this guy is getting this deal at this unit and that guy is getting this deal at that unit. It actually creates a lot of issues while people try to compensate for the fact that the new Veterans Charter is not accommodating to them.
The other issue is that some of these side deals are quite questionable if you were to look into them. It puts a tremendous amount of stress on the soldiers who are supposed to be reintegrating into society to know that the light of day cannot really shine on how the rehabilitation programs work. I can talk more about that offline.
In summary, the settlements under the new Veterans Charter in many cases do not equal the settlements under the previous Pension Act or under the Workers' Compensation Act, or even lump sum payments awarded by the courts.
I've left a 30-page document, in both French and English. There are some factual changes to this document but it does outline the issues here when we compare the new Veterans Charter payments to workers' compensation, to court settlements, and to previous pension acts.
I'm not saying that the new Veterans Charter doesn't work, but there are cases that have been outlined to us where it simply has failed or where there are major gaps in the program.
Don.