Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of things I could talk about when it comes to the budget from the perspective of the challenges it brings. The first thing we can look at, of course, is the fact that there is $78 billion in new debt being created for future taxpayers.
What I would like to do tonight, because I have had the opportunity to speak to some of those things before, is speak directly to the veterans in this country, to their families and to the people who support our veterans. That is because, while the government is spending $78 billion that it does not have, the one place, or one of the very few places, where it has decided to cut very deeply, frankly, are services for our veterans.
The one place where we should not have those kinds of cuts, the one place where every penny that is deserved should go, is to the services for those men and women who have served this country, in many cases have bled or given their limbs. That is the place where the government decided to find cuts. That is the one place it decided to take from: from the veterans who have given everything for this country.
It saddens me, frankly, to even have to talk about this. What we know at this point is that there are about $4 billion in cuts in the budget when it comes to our veterans. The government will not admit to that. In fact, when the Minister of Veterans Affairs was asked about the cuts that are widely reported in the media and widely acknowledged by everyone except for the government, the Minister of Veterans Affairs said the government is not making cuts but is investing in veterans.
However, it is very clear in the budget that $4 billion in cuts to veterans are coming. When the government is not even willing to be open and honest and admit to what the cuts are, it leaves veterans, their family members and the people who support our veterans wondering what they will be. What cuts are they going to face? Obviously, that has almost a worse impact than knowing what those cuts will be.
The government has admitted to one of the cuts it will be making. It has said that it is going to cut the reimbursement rate for cannabis. It has tried to claim that this would in fact make up the whole $4 billion in cuts. We are talking about a program that is a little over $200 million a year, and the government will be cutting the reimbursement rate by about a quarter. I am not sure how those numbers add up. Maybe there is some math I am not understanding. The government says it will be lifetime costs and those kinds of things, but that is a lot of pot over a long period of time. Clearly that is not an accurate representation of what the cuts are.
What we have been able to learn through scouring the budget and through some of the things we have been hearing from veterans in the veteran community is that there seem to be about about five different areas thus far where we have been able to determine there are some cuts coming to services for veterans. I want to speak a little bit to those cuts and what their impact will be.
The first one, of course, is that the government is changing pension indexing for disabled RCMP veterans, which is going to result in lower pensions over time for those veterans. This is buried on, I think, page 441 of the budget. The government is going to retroactively change the legislation to avoid paying back to veterans who were in long-term care money that they were overcharged.
I mentioned already that the government is making a cut to the reimbursement rate for medical cannabis. What we are hearing from many veterans is that this will mean the products they have been able to use, which have been helpful to them, may not be available to them any longer because of that change in the rate. That will possibly put them down paths they do not want to end up on.
We are also hearing about repayments being demanded from veterans of their income replacement benefits. Veterans, numbering into the thousands, have received letters from the government telling them they must repay immediately thousands of dollars paid to them with respect to their disability status. We have heard of instances of over $100,000 that veterans are being asked to repay. It is being taken right out of their disability pension and other things.
Imagine the impact this is going to have on a disabled veteran. We are talking about the most vulnerable veterans, the ones who need it the most, frankly. They are having it taken away from them when they are already living on a fixed budget and a fixed income. Of course, with the inflation and everything else we have seen over the last 10 years under the Liberal government, they are already in a really difficult spot. This will likely put out on the street veterans who are not there now.
This is the kind of thing we are talking about, heartless sorts of cuts, when the Liberals are spending money on all kinds of things. We heard my colleague just now talk about one example of that, but there are many, and then they choose to go after disabled veterans and those who are in long-term care. That is how the Liberals are trying to make up the money they are wasting elsewhere.
We have heard recently as well that there are layoffs coming at what is called the Bureau of Pensions Advocates. For people who are not familiar with the process that veterans go through, I want to talk about that for a moment. I am being told by the people who are involved that ultimately that is going to mean likely two years or more in delays for veterans to have their cases or their appeals heard at the Veterans Review and Appeal Board.
It is important at this point that I explain what veterans deal with when they put in an application to the government. Veterans often talk about delays, denials and being put off until, the government hopes, they give up and go away. The amount of time it can take is not measured in weeks or in months. It is measured in years, in most cases, for a veteran to get just their most basic claims they need for disability benefits or other things approved, or not. Often it takes actually going through an appeal process that then takes more years at the Veterans Review and Appeal Board before veterans finally are able to hopefully get, in most cases, at least when it gets to that point, the benefits they are entitled to.
Now there is talk about laying off people at the Bureau of Pensions Advocates. They are the people who represent veterans because the amount of paperwork, bureaucracy and red tape required to go through the process is too much to manage. These are essentially lawyers who are available to veterans in order to deal with all that. When people are laid off at the Bureau of Pensions Advocates, it is going to mean delays for thousands of veterans. Roughly 10,000 cases are heard every year there. What I am hearing is that it is going to cut in half the number of cases that can be heard, which means that thousands of veterans this year will not have their case heard, will not get the benefits they need and therefore will not be able to move on with their life.
What we are talking about is a government that is going to run a $78-billion deficit, on top of hundreds of billions of dollars it has already added to the debt. The one place the government chooses to cut is for the veterans, the men and women who have bled, given their limbs and their lives in some cases, for this country. The Liberals would tell disabled veterans and those in long-term care, once again just like Justin Trudeau once told them, that they are asking for more than we can give.
Frankly, the men and women who serve this country in uniform deserve everything they are entitled to. If this is the one place where the heartless government is going to cut, when it would spend $78 billion of taxpayer money that it does not have, that is shameful and disgraceful, and I cannot stand for it.