Mr. Speaker,
[Member spoke in Cree].
I would like to offer my sincere condolences to the family of Constable Campbell. This is a terrible situation, and we all share a sense of outrage about what occurred. However, I would also like to offer my thoughts on this debate, because I have a specific perspective on this debate.
I have been serving for 22 years in the Canadian Armed Forces, and I am still a serving member. I am a proud member of the naval reserves in Canada. I remember when I first joined the Canadian Armed Forces, and I was posted to Valcartier, in Quebec, our military base, with the Van Doos. It was a fun and exhilarating time, as a young man, to join the regular forces to serve full time. It was also extremely tough. It was very hard. I remember from that early period, in the 1990s, when I first joined, the work that was done by our leadership to make families a centre of the services, the centre of life in the military.
I remember taking medical mental health training with my fellow soldiers. We had to take this yearly. I learned that there were three components to serving well and learning to serve well. They were ensuring that we had a good personal life, a good professional life, and a good family life. They were the three principal spheres, and if one of them was not working well, we would find and encounter great difficulties in our professional life. We would not be able to accomplish the mission that had been set out for us, so we could not miss any of these elements.
As a serving member for 22 years, I have always believed that families should be at the centre of military life. In fact, I had a family when I was in the military. I believe that this is actually the Canadian Forces policy. Though sometimes it is not always respected within the Canadian Forces, because sometimes mission requirements do take precedence, nonetheless there are policies that are there to defend families. In 2000, the Canadian Armed Forces recognized this and came out with the Canadian Forces family policy.
In this debate, one of the central questions we are actually talking about is the level or amount of services actually offered to families. The central question the Conservatives are asking is not the one that is politically expedient. It is whether the minister should have the arbitrary power to deny benefits to vets and their families, not using due process and not using administrative justice. Should ministers be allowed to be politically expedient when it suits them?
Conservatives are quick to the gun to take action now and to think later. We know that Conservatives are willing to use their ministerial executive power to punish vets and their families who offer criticism of the government, because they did so under their previous administration, under the previous regime. They did so when they silenced vets and released their medical information without their consent. They shared that medical information. I am going to talk about that in a bit, because it is central to this case as well. I will say that we must stand with vets and their families, come what may.
Another important aspect of this debate is that services are important, and the question is who actually gets those services. I remember that it was very difficult to obtain the services vets were entitled to, especially when I was in the military. However, if we believe that families are important, and we have a family policy, do we use this one case to then limit the amount of services offered to families? Bad cases make extremely bad law. The Conservatives love using bad cases, because it is easy, but this bad case would make extremely bad law. It would make bad rules, and it would make bad regulations.
Decisions today actually do matter. They impact the services that are offered, and they impact how those rules and regulations will be interpreted in the future, not only by us in this House but by the bureaucrats and functionaries who actually carry out the orders of the executive branch. The Conservative motion, in my opinion, would lead to a tightening of the rules. This would have unintended consequences for vets and their families.
I remember, during the war in Afghanistan, how we needed to support our families to ensure that we had the widest opportunity to offer all services. We had the freedom to offer those services to those families no matter what their situation, because each family was unique and each veteran's case was unique.
I have asked hypothetical questions, and people have not been happy that I have asked them, but I am supposed to ask questions. What do we do with a 16-year-old who has dealt drugs? She is the daughter of a veteran of 20 years who has PTSD due to his service. Should that 16-year-old be denied services, denied education benefits later, when she gets her life in order? Let us say that this 16-year-old committed an even more heinous crime than dealing drugs, something irreparable, destroying the lives of others in ways that cannot be repaired. It is a hypothetical case, but it is possible.
Conservative political posturing puts at risk benefits for the military family. It makes it harder for bureaucrats to give them the services they require. We could tighten the rules. We could satisfy the political expediency of the Conservative Party. We could take action now, think later and regret later.
As the member for Calgary Nose Hill said, let us talk about leadership. She talked about leadership in this debate. I remember a time, in 2009, with the war in Afghanistan going full regime, that cuts were made by the Harper Conservative government, the cabinet she was a member of and where she had the opportunity of forcing her leadership on her cabinet colleagues. They made cuts to the military while we were serving in Afghanistan. There were thousands of reservists serving on army bases right across the country. At my military base in Valcartier, I remember how the contracts of reservists, who were serving full time, were not renewed, even though they were waging a war and working very hard to advance the national interest of Canada and serving the government and the people of Canada. That put the mission in jeopardy. The Conservatives did not really seem to care about what we were doing. They just decided that they were going to tell people what they should be doing and not listen to them, even though they were the experts. Those reservists filled important roles. They were an important component of mission success for many units in Afghanistan and back in Canada, and the Harper Conservatives cut those jobs. They cancelled those contracts and caused chaos in the deployed units trying to fight a war.
I like to talk about what the Conservatives did in their decade of darkness for veterans. In 2014, retired general Rick Hillier, the former head of the Canadian military, was talking about suicide and mental health anguish among Canadian solders. He stated,
I don't think we had any idea the scale and scope of what the impact would be. I truly do not. This is beyond a medical issue. I think many of our young men and women have lost confidence in our country to support them.
Why would they not? The Conservative government at that time had killed the lifetime benefit for veterans. They did it on April 6, 2006, when it was in power and enacted the new veterans charter. The Harper minister insulted veterans and closed nine veterans offices. The Auditor General found the Harper government to be failing veterans. The Conservatives slashed 900 jobs in Veterans Affairs, despite pleas from managers. There was more than $1 billion not spent by the ministry to help veterans. A judge ordered the government to pay $887 million to veterans.
I do not believe we should release the medical information of veterans, even in debates in the House of Commons. When Sean Bruyea spoke out against legislation to strip vets of lifetime pensions, he never imagined in his dreams that the government of the day, the Harper government, would try to smear his reputation by using his medical records against him. His medical and financial details had been circulated after he criticized the new veterans charter. A Veterans Affairs official said that it was “time to take the gloves off”, which was reported in the Huffington Post. The Privacy Commissioner said that Bruyea's case was alarming and that the treatment of his personal information was very inappropriate. Retired colonel Michel Drapeau, a lawyer with expertise in privacy laws, said that the government's actions were despicable, dishonourable, unethical and also illegal. However, this never stopped the government from going ahead.
We can order bureaucrats to do what we want, but sometimes we need due process and time to think about these issues to make sure that we do not have unintended consequences impacting veterans and their families. It is most important that the considerations here be deliberate and well thought out, not simply dog whistle politics to try to score easy political points on the backs of veterans, using them for political expediency to advance the interests of one political party.