My perspective on Veterans Affairs is not unique. I see Veterans Affairs Canada as an organization within the Government of Canada that deals primarily in commemoration and insurance of veterans benefits.
When I talk about insurance and I talk about pensions, I'm very specifically talking about the monthly tax-free disability benefit. If you want to show a Canadian that their service has equality with that of wartime service veterans, then you pay those injured the same amount. When I'm talking about insurance and pensions, I'm simply reminding you that the pension we are getting is not a pension because we served. This is not a service pension. This is not money that Canadian veterans are getting for being good people. This is because we've lost a leg.
I came back from Rwanda with PTSD, multiple intestinal parasites and parasites in the topical skin, and these things stuck with me for a decade. You don't get a pension for that. You get injury insurance for that, and that is managed under various pensions.
Veterans commonly refer to “pensions”, which often misleads people into believing that this is something other than injury insurance. It is, in fact, injury insurance.