Little did Jim Scott know he was starting a multi-year legal battle with the federal government on behalf of his son and thousands of other modern veterans when his son was nearly killed by an anti-personnel mine in Afghanistan in 2010.
The fight took the form of a class action lawsuit for a major overhaul of benefits and services for sick and injured veterans in 2006 that offered less support and compensation to today’s ex-soldiers than those in previous generations.
For Scott’s son Dan, that meant a one-time payment of $ 41,000 from Ottawa in compensation for the loss of his kidney, spleen, and part of his pancreas in the explosion, rather than the life pension that has been granted to similarly disabled veterans since World War I.
“And my son said to me, ‘You know, we all get these letters for very small amounts and we have significant injuries,'” Jim recalled from his home in Vancouver.
After some early successes, the high-profile Equitas lawsuit would hit a wall when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in August 2018. But more than a decade after his son was injured, Scott and others say they are still fighting for justice and fairness for all veterans.
Parliament first passed the Pensions Act in 1919 to help injured veterans and their loved ones. At the heart of the law was a lifelong pension for disabled veterans. Its worth depended on the injuries suffered by the veterans and their domestic situation.
It was only when a new wave of troops left the military for medical reasons in the early 2000s that proponents began to argue that the existing system did not meet the needs of modern veterans, including support for re-entry into civilian life.
The New Veterans Charter was introduced in 2005. As a radical overhaul, it replaced the pension with a lump sum payment for service-related injuries, as well as training and rehab programs to help veterans have a better life after retiring from the military.
As the number of troops returning injured from Afghanistan increased, the charter was sent through parliament with the unanimous consent of all parties, but many now agree that the review is inadequate. Instead, Ottawa promised to visit regularly.
It didn’t take long for veterans to complain about problems with the new system. Not only were many of the promised training and rehabilitation programs difficult to access, the charter did not even come close to providing financial support for the Pension Act.
Successive federal governments, first Stephen Harper and then Justin Trudeau, have since made numerous changes to the new system. The Liberals renamed it “Pension for Life” when they last changed their content in 2019.
Veterans, as well as the Royal Canadian Legion and others, say these alleged fixes have not addressed the underlying inequality between the two systems or the lack of financial stability in the current system.
“We call it the elephant in the room,” said Brian Forbes, chairman of the War Amps Executive Committee. He is also the chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations, an umbrella organization that represents 68 veteran organizations across Canada.
“How is it possible that veterans injured before 2006 have a far better compensation package than those injured after 2006?”
The financial discrepancy emerges from a report by the National Council of Veterans Associations. It shows that an unmarried veteran with no children who was completely disabled prior to 2006 could have received up to $ 6,441 a month under the old pension system.
For veterans with the same disability after 2006, this amount is $ 3,779 per month. The differences are even greater when the veteran is married and has children to support. In the old pension system these additional costs were taken into account, while this is not the case in the current system.
Both amounts include money for accompanying care and additional expenses due to a service-related disability. Families and proponents have said that the old system made far more available to caregivers than the current one.
The Liberal government has pointed to the changes it made in 2019 as a significant improvement over the system that existed under the previous Conservative government.
The parliamentary budget office confirmed in early 2019 that the Liberals had brought more benefits to most veterans.
However, the PBO report also found that “almost all” veterans would be better off under the Pension Act, while the changes introduced by the Liberals severely neglected some severely injured ex-soldiers. At the same time, parliamentary budget commissioner Yves Giroux showed that returning to the old Ottawa system would cost billions more.
Matthew Kane, who served as an intelligence officer before retiring from the military in 2014 with PTSD, tinnitus, and back, hip and neck problems, says he gets 16.4 percent of what he would have under the Pension Act.
“So it shows the discrepancy and financial hardship veterans can get into,” says Kane, who now lives in Vancouver and sits on the board of directors of the Equitas Society, which continues to advocate a “social bond” between the government and its military personnel.
Trudeau promised in the 2015 election to end Ottawa’s battle with the Equitas lawsuit and bring back old pensions. Two and a half years later, his government was still on trial with veterans.
During a town hall-style event in Edmonton in February 2018, six months before the Supreme Court refused to hear the Equitas case, Afghan war veteran Brock Blaszczyk asked Trudeau why.
“Why are we still fighting certain groups of veterans in court?” The Prime Minister replied to Blaszczyk, who lost a leg in Afghanistan. “Because they ask for more than we can give at the moment.”
That answer still sucks in many parts of the veteran community.
But that does not mean that everyone wants to fully restore the Pension Act. The National Council of Veterans Associations, the Legion, and others have instead advocated bringing the old and new systems together.
“You can’t have everything that is in the Pension Act, and you cannot have everything that is in the (Pension for Life), but you can take the best of both worlds and get married together,” says Ray McInnis, veteran services director of the Legion.
“We’re always going to have the negative veteran community out there because … there are two systems where (veterans) can be months (injured) in the same operation and one person under the Pension Act and one person not.”
Scott fears the problem with the disappearance of Afghanistan has gone off the radar and that it will remain unsolved until the next group of young Canadian men and women return home from the war.
“We’re going to have this new generation of young kids coming back, and we’re going to walk another Highway of Heroes, and my position is that we’ve wasted all this time trying to make a better system,” he says.
“When we see soldiers with disabilities and so on coming back when they are not very well looked after, it hurts all of us as a nation.”
—Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press
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