Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my good friend from Elmwood—Transcona this afternoon.
I would like to give proper credit and due to my friend from Courtenay—Alberni who followed John Rafferty, the first one to pursue this question. John was an NDP MP for Thunder Bay—Rainy River. He was able to ask this specific question, an important technique we have here as parliamentarians, to essentially to follow the money. We see the promises.
Governments are self-congratulatory and self-promoting. When they make an announcement of a certain amount of money going toward a certain cause, they like to talk about it. Many Canadians are left with a feeling that the money will actually be spent. Not always. When it comes to veterans, not ever. It is what we have now discovered is lapsed spending. Sometimes lapsed spending can be just almost a rounding error. A large department spending a lot of money can be off by less than half a per cent and money one way or the other needs to be lapsed back into the government.
When we look at Veterans Affairs in particular, we start to see a pattern where year after year it has a large amount of lapsed spending. I will quote the Prime Minister, which is always helpful to do in debates like this. When he was campaigning for the job of Prime Minister in 2015 in August, he said, “They” meaning the Conservatives, “left unspent more than $1 billion that Parliament allocated for veteran support. Canadians know that this is wrong.” Canadians knew this is wrong and they kicked the Conservatives out of office.
It almost becomes cynical when the government year after year allocates a certain amount of money without any intention of spending it. Then at the end of the year, it says that lo and behold, it has some extra money which it can shuffle out the door to something else and announce money once, or twice or three times and leave Canadians with the impression that the job is being done.
However, veterans are coming forward year after year, saying they phoned the hotline to look for those services they were promised to deal with incredibly serious things. People coming back from theatre of war face physical challenges. There are enormous mental and spiritual costs to our veterans. They phone the hotline and when they eventually get through, after the labyrinth of things that can sometimes take weeks, they are told to wait weeks or months more. We have to understand that when the funding is not there, when there are not the workers available to help that veteran out and delays are caused, that whatever difficulty the veteran is dealing with gets worse, be it physical, be it mental, be it spiritual, and the costs can be extreme.
In my riding in northwestern B.C., I will be attending Remembrance Day ceremonies this year in Kitimat with Branch 250 in Terrace with my friends of Branch 13. The stories we get from our veterans, particularly from the more recently returning veterans from the Afghan mission and from some other deployments, are more than heartbreaking. It is right to be broken and to feel the pain of what these veterans have gone through. It is infuriating when we find out, because of that lack of funding or those delays, that pain, which is devastating in its initial form, becomes so much worse. Veterans end up not fighting one war but two. The first one is the engagement that we asked them to undertake on our behalf. I do not think there is anything more sacred or more serious than the vote we take in Parliament for the deployment of our troops overseas and put them in harm's way. The second battle they go into is often with their government, not for anything extra, not for anything special but simply what they were promised.
My friend from Courtenay—Alberni has revealed to us the lapsed spending just since the Liberals came to office, money that was promised to be spent but was not spent. It now totals $372 million. That is pretty terrible. However, we also heard the Prime Minister say this ast year to a wounded vet who lost a leg in Afghanistan. He was asking for the services he and and his comrades were promised. The Prime Minister of Canada, talking about court cases the government was continuing to fight, said, “Why are we still fighting certain veterans groups in court? Because they're asking for more than we are able to give right now.” The argument of why the government was taking veterans groups to court, fighting them there and spending money there, was because there was insufficient money to provide for those veterans and their comrades the services they were promised. That is brutal in and of itself. It means the government was not allocating enough money to meet the service commitment it has made to our veterans.
However, then we found out that the statement was not even true. There was money that was allocated that was not being spent, year after year, in a cynical pattern. They wonder why a prime minister would say this to a wounded vet who is standing in front of him at a town hall. Town halls are good and it is good for the Prime Minister to be out, but then to turn to a wounded vet who is missing a leg and say that those people are asking for too much, that they were asking for “more than we can afford”, was his specific comment.
Meanwhile, we knew in that year when he was talking, money was being returned back to Ottawa that had been promised to veterans. Clearly, that was not true. That the Prime Minister was accusing the Conservatives of using that same tactic, and saying how wrong that was and how Canadians disagreed with them, and campaigning that he would be different and change it, was infuriating. The Conservatives came in saying they were going to do better for our vets, and they did not. The Liberals came in saying they were going to do better for our vets, and are not.
We see now today, finally just in the last five minutes after four hours of debate, the Liberals got the note that the pressure had been sufficiently building. We have been hearing about it in my offices in Skeena in the northwest of B.C. and I am sure Liberals have as well. People are asking how can they not support this motion. It simply says to spend the money they promised for veterans services, and if they do not, then to not send the money back to the treasury but to hold the money and start to change the way they are delivering programs.
As I just pointed out for my Liberal colleague, the government set 24 standards and it is meeting 12 of them. One would suspect that maybe a lack of resources is the problem, the reason for not meeting the other 12. These are the standards that the government set for itself and it is meeting half of them. We think that if it is resources, is there something we can do about that? We can then actually put some true meaning to the words we say at the beginning of Remembrance Week that we seek to honour our veterans, we seek to serve them, we seek to give them a bit back after they have given so much to this country.
The words are important. I do not know about my colleagues, but I find the Remembrance Day speeches that I do to be some of the most difficult because they are often in front of schools. We are often talking to young people who, for the vast majority, thank God, have no experience with war whatsoever. Now there is a growing group of young Canadians who are coming from conflict zones. We speak to them on Remembrance Day and it has a significant meaning. However, to many Canadian children, thankfully they have no experience, nor do their parents or in many cases their grandparents have any experience at war.
To try to talk about Remembrance Day, 100 years after the ending of the First World War for example, is to try to bridge a gap, so we use big words: we honour; we remember; lest we forget. We make a commitment, year after year on the 11th month, the 11th day at the 11th hour, to each other as Canadians, recognizing not just the sacrifices of the past but the sacrifices of today. There is no real compensation we can give these veterans. There is no amount of money for the damage and the hurt they have gone through because perpetrating a war is unbelievably difficult, painful and excruciating in many cases, so we do not celebrate that. We do not celebrate war; we commemorate, we honour the sacrifices made.
One of the small things we here in Parliament can do is try to keep our promises. We in opposition are not here just to oppose a government that is failing on whatever services we deem to be necessary, but to also propose, as my friend from Courtenay—Alberni did, a solution to a problem that has been systemic year after year, that Veterans Affairs is unable, or worse unwilling, to get the money out the door.
If all veterans were receiving the services they were promised and there was just too much money being allocated, that would be one problem. That is a good problem to have, but that is not the problem we have in this country. All of us in our offices have had veterans come in and say to us that this is what was promised, that these are the services they were expecting and that with the delays, the services are not coming to meet that promise.
Therefore, on this Remembrance Day and in this Remembrance Week, let us know that we are doing something right together. Let us know that we are going to make things better together, because that is what they did for us. They did something together that was so important that we respect and we honour. Let us back up those words with actions. Let us support this motion and make veterans as proud of us, a little bit, as we are of them.