Honourable Chair, committee members, thank you very much for the privilege of presenting before you. I'm here with mixed emotions because my case of abuse is still ongoing with the government and I think it's horrible. However, I will do my best to present and stick to the facts and the reason why I'm here.
I would like to start with a quote: “The biggest thing in Canada at the present time is the whole pensions question.” That was written by Major J.L. Todd, a member of the militia pensions and claim board in 1915. He said if this question was not removed from politics, we would have pension troubles in Canada. So here we are with those problems.
The blueprint to the problems we face today with the new Veterans Charter started in my estimation in 1995 with pension reform. As we know they had a whole new look at the World War II Veterans Charter as it was applied to World War II veterans and veterans who served in Korea as well. They realigned and got rid of some of the programs that were no longer usable or no longer required by the aging veterans.
But what they didn't do...and there were only two Canadian Forces veterans who presented during that whole pension reform. It was me and a gentleman named Luc Levesque from the Gulf War veterans. We didn't know what that whole study was all about. We presented on Gulf War issues.
Had we known what it was about and that they were taking away benefits, there would have been a different outcome because the alarm bells would have sounded then.
However, that changed the whole way that the government did business with veterans. Canadian Forces veterans are not considered in any of those reforms. In fact, benefits like the pensioner training regulations that specifically state right in it what Canadian Forces veterans qualify for were taken away.
If we fast forward a little bit and not too far forward, in 1999 there was a review of the veterans care needs study conducted by Veterans Affairs and part 3 was done on the Canadian Forces. What they found is that Canadian Forces had immediate transition needs. What was also happening is that the SISIP program was failing with National Defence. So Veterans Affairs made a conscious effort to overtake SISIP. That's why today the new Veterans Charter is an actual duplicate of the SISIP program. So now we have two programs in place when we only need one.
The new Veterans Charter was not designed to look after veterans in aging. Veterans Affairs said they would look after our aging needs after they sorted out the new Veterans Charter. Here we are, this many years later and they still haven't looked at them. In the meantime, the programs that we qualified for like long-term care and others are being sunsetted. They're being taken away from us while we're being distracted by this constant struggle with the new Veterans Charter.
During our time with the Canadian Forces advisory council, I did some research and I found.... I dug up all the orders in council that sent men and women in Canada to World War II, to Korea, and to the Canadian Forces operations on peacekeeping missions and wherever. I came out with a matrix and I put it together. According to this, we're all equal under the laws of Canada: Canadian Forces veterans, Korea, World War II, we're all equal.
Veterans Affairs brought that to the Justice Department. Justice Department came back with a legal opinion saying I was absolutely right. The bureaucrats at Veterans Affairs said they didn't have to treat us the same. When that was said, representatives from the Legion, the army, navy, air force, National Council of Veterans, Canadian Peacekeeping Veterans Association, Canadian Association of Veterans in United Nations Peacekeeping, and Gulf War veterans were in the room. Every one of them except for the Canadian Peacekeeping Veterans Association, which I was the national president of, said that they would follow the Legion's lead.
Now, prior to that, the National Council of Veterans, the Legion, the army, navy, and air force boycotted the Canadian Forces advisory council and anything to do with Canadian Forces veterans to ensure that World War II allied veterans got access from our government to the long-term care veterans independence program at World War II level and the Last Post Fund burial benefits. That's knowing that we were in consultation with the government of the day and they had clearly said that we qualified for those benefits. It's just a matter of opening them up to us.
In the final analysis, we didn't get those, and it's right on the Treasury Board's website. It says that we didn't get those benefits as a calculated risk for giving them to allied veterans.
We've been treated as second-class citizens since then in the veterans community and, to be quite frank, we've been discriminated against by those veterans' organizations that should have said, when the Department of Justice came back with their legal opinion, that “regardless of our bias towards World War II veterans, we believe you should all have the same benefits”. We wouldn't be here today if that had happened. Another travesty of justice is that the veterans who were sitting around those tables were collecting Pension Act benefits if they were disabled, so there you have veterans collecting Pension Act benefits advocating a lesser benefit for any who came beyond us. I opposed it from the beginning.
When the clause-by-clause came out for the new Veterans Charter, we were called to Ottawa with the minister and told, “Okay, here's the clause-by-clause: have a look at it.” We said okay and asked when we could discuss it. We were told that it was too late, that we couldn't talk about it, and that if we wanted to make any changes, what would happen.... This was from the minister of the day, and I'm not discriminating between one party or another one when I speak of ministers and government. I served for the Government of Canada and I sacrificed under the Government of Canada and it doesn't matter what party is in, because in my opinion, and I believe in the opinion of a lot of people, veterans issues should be non-partisan. We were told that we couldn't refer changes to the clause-by-clause, but we would be called back when the bill went through the legislative process at the first and second levels of both the parliamentary and Senate committees, and we could make our changes and there would be consultation.
There was absolutely no consultation and, as we know, the bill was rammed through the parliamentary process. Edgar Schmidt from the justice department worked in that area, and he has been on the record as saying that for years before the previous government, and for the years following into the current government, new bills were not given the scrutiny of the charter. That's one of the points that's being argued in the courts in Vancouver: the honour of the crown. So the new Veterans Charter as it stands now, and the enhanced new Veterans Charter, do not meet the smell test of the Canadian Charter of Rights.
I'm not going to go on. We've heard enough of what other people have said. I personally believe that you are not getting good advice from the veterans organizations. There has been no consultation from day one. In June of 2013, I sent throughout the broader veterans community some facts, as I'm laying them out today, and I put them out there to get veterans engaged in a dialogue. It was successful right up until August, when I decided to close it down. I engaged the veterans organizations. One or two of them came back and were involved, but the major organizations would not consult. If they consult with their members, which is rare, they will not consult outside of their groups, so if they call themselves a consultation group, they're consulting among themselves.
I know for a fact that they didn't come up with those points that they put out on the urgent issues of the new Veterans Charter. They didn't come up with those through study or consultation with the broader veterans community. They came up with them...what I've been told by some very respectable people is that they decided that those were important issues. Because the reality is—and we've heard some statistics from Sean—that when Veterans Affairs was putting this thing together, this new Veterans Charter, they knew that 80% of veterans were collecting 20% or less for disability benefits. They knew that figure, but what they did is they promoted the higher rate of 100% disability.
What I also have to say is that I remember what the minister of the day said when I questioned why they were ramming this new Veterans Charter through when it hadn't...at least let's make it a regulation so we can work on it and do something.... But they said, “Look, we've put it by the Chief of the Defence Staff and we had consultation with all of kinds of people.” I asked, “Did you tell the Chief of the Defence Staff what you're taking away?” She said no. The minister said, “No, we didn't tell what we were taking away, but he's agreed to it, and he's no dummy.” Those are the kinds of words they were saying. So the fact of the matter is that Veterans Affairs created the lump sum to rob disabled veterans of their lifelong disability benefits to pay for all the programs of the new Veterans Charter.
The new Veterans Charter is designed only for transition, not for lifelong, so the enhanced new Veterans Charter benefits and the recommendations of ELB beyond the age of 65, that's not what the new Veterans Charter is all about. The new Veterans Charter looks after transition into the work force and civilian life.
One of the things that Veterans Affairs did, after the Justice Department came back with their legal opinion, is they did a cost analysis of treating Canadian Forces veterans equally with World War II and Korean veterans. They found that it would cost $4 billion to treat us equally under the Pension Act alone. So they used that figure and their first figures with Treasury Board were, “We will build a suite of benefits for $4 billion”, because they knew that would be the cost payoff for the Pension Act benefits.
Now we have to separate out the disability benefit of part 3 from the new Veterans Charter because the Pension Act was not a problem. The problem that the bureaucrats were using is that since the government allowed currently serving Canadian Forces members to collect benefits while they're still serving, the bureaucrats said they are putting a burden on the Pension Act, which is not true.
They also said veterans are putting a burden on the Pension Act. What they weren't saying is that the government was negligent in providing Canadian Forces veterans with supporting benefits for transition and onward living since 1947.
So the whole this was built, in my opinion, on a whole bunch of misinformation. The misinformation continues. Although I'm having a great struggle with the current minister over my personal issue, I've gone to them and said, “Please ask these people to stop misleading Canadians”.
The ombudsman put out information in his report on the new Veterans Charter. He gave scenarios where the benefits would be $2 million for a person aged 24 over their lifetime. What he didn't say—and he left out of there purposefully because it was broached before the report went out—was that the same person collecting Pension Act benefits, which are still alive and well today, would get an additional $2 million over his lifetime and a lot of these other problems that we're talking about wouldn't exist.
So the ombudsman is putting out good information but only partial information. We have the veterans organizations doing the same thing, and we have misinformation coming from the government as well. Where does that leave the veterans?
You folks sitting around the table will be engaged in this as long as you're elected officials. We have to live with the consequences of these decisions and since the new Veterans Charter came out, it's been nothing but a fight.
Thank you.