My name is Sean Bruyea. I am a retired Captain and Intelligence Officer who proudly served in Canada’s Air Force for 14 years.
This Thursday November 11, Canada will be honouring it’s almost 700,000 veterans and approximately 80,000 Canadian Forces members on Remembrance Day.
The Minister of Veterans Affairs just announced that 2005 will be the year of the veteran. 2005 will be also the year of the first ever independent veterans’ ombudsman report on how veterans are treated by the Canadian government. The report shall be a voice for all those disabled veterans who are too incapacitated to defend themselves. V….O….I….C….E…., VOICE or Veterans Ombudsman: An Independent Client Evaluation is presently being written and shall be released at the beginning of the New Year.
The Department of National Defence is fortunate to have an Ombudsman to make sure that none of the 80,000 CF members is unjustly treated. However, once CF members leave the Forces, they become “veterans”. At this point, DND is no longer responsible for the veterans’ welfare. The veteran must turn to Veteran’s Affairs Canada which presently has 210,000 clients, 150,000 of which are pensioned for a disability as a result of their military service.
The irony is that whereas healthy, for the most part, employable soldiers in DND do have an independent ombudsman, disabled and often unemployable veterans do not. Furthermore, VAC does not have any publicized service guarantees for processing claims and/or reimbursements for treatment. This is a bizarre oversight for a department mandated to provide critical and life-saving services.
Perhaps the reaction to our initiative is that the neglect of veterans is nothing new
What is new is the fact that whereas the CF makes every effort to respond to the needs of modern soldiers, Veterans Affairs is far behind. Whereas the CF has implemented a wide array of educational programs to sensitize the forces to the issues surrounding mental and physical disabilities, Veterans Affairs clings to an inflexible culture of insensitivity to the needs of disabled veterans.
What is new, is that Veterans Affairs has begun initiatives which it states are to improve client services. The result is that in less than one year, veterans who negotiated three levels of bureaucracy must now negotiate a minimum of six levels of bureaucracy. Wait times for approving and reimbursing treatment have escalated from two weeks to four months or more. Meanwhile, disabled veterans on limited incomes often have to pay out of pocket for their medical treatment. Our research has uncovered numerous medical practitioners who are considering or have already limited the number of Veterans Affairs clients they will treat. The reason for this is simple: the complexity of seeking payment from Veterans Affairs, the lengthy processing times and, most importantly, the amount of paperwork demanded by VAC.
Local Veterans Affairs case workers have apparently been instructed to minimize or eliminate personal contact with veterans in favour of a faceless 1-800 call-centre service.
In an effort to address the changes which the Department of National Defence began more than eight years ago, Veterans Affairs just this year initiated the Service & Program Modernization Task Force. One of the reasons for the initiative has been the neglect and mistreatment of the 410,000 veterans released from the military in the 50 years since Korea, at least 45,000 of which are pensioned for disabilities. Ironically, Veterans Affairs is not consulting with these clients at large. VAC refuses to ask the majority of disabled veterans for their input in developing programs to serve these same veterans.
This begs the question: Veterans Affairs Canada claims to provide excellent client-centred service. How is this possible when input from the disabled veterans is all but ignored?
The Modernization Task force will focus primarily upon those soldiers who will be released from the military in the future. The bizarre end result of the task force will be three different tiers or standards of veterans and veterans’ care. The first tier will be those of the two World Wars and Korea (know as War Veterans). The second tier will be the future veterans to be released. The final tier are those disabled veterans who have long been marginalized: the 45,000 disabled veterans released from military service from 1953 to 2004. It is this last group which has been largely ignored by the federal government.
In the early 1990’s, processing times for favourable decisions were approaching 18 months. This sparked a public scandal resulting in a complete overhaul of Veterans Affairs in 1995. The modern disabled veteran suffers from complex medical conditions which veterans affairs is, essentially unprepared to deal with. In our initial investigations we encountered over a dozen clients whose claims had process times of 36 to 60 months, or 3 to 5 years. A number of claims remain outstanding after 5 years.
Veterans Affairs client surveys over the recent years report that anywhere from 10 to 20% of VAC clients are unsatisfied by the service they receive at VAC. This would indicate that there are 21,000 to 42,000 disabled veterans and survivors who do not receive the services they need. One can only imagine the number of damaged and broken families directly or indirectly resulting from such neglect.
Another of the on-going criticisms of Veterans Affairs has been the adversarial and extremely complex process of pension application, review and appeal. Although the Canadian government is obligated to grant the “benefit of the doubt” to the disabled client, the reality is the exact opposite. Disabled clients who are often limited in their ability to complete daily personal care needs are asked to prove beyond any and all doubt that their injury is service-related.
In spite of the Auditor General’s reports on VAC, many veterans who receive unfavourable decisions from the department are still being forced to appeal to the Veterans Review and Appeal Board when other avenues are available. The Board relies upon the veteran’s military records and medical reports in deciding whether a veteran receives a pension. In spite of the Prime Minister’s promises to the contrary, the board members are still politically appointed. Out of the 31 members, only two have prior military background and none are or have been medical practitioners.
The entire process is rife with apparent conflicts of interest. The veteran is represented at the Board hearings by a lawyer working for VAC, consulting files maintained by National Defence and defending the case to a board, whose members according to the Prime Minister’s Office are recommended by Veterans Affairs Canada.
Perhaps even more bizarre is the fact that both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Minister of Veterans Affairs claim the other is responsible for the Veterans Review and Appeal Board. The bottom line is that the Board is deciding on veterans’ lives, spending Canadians’ tax dollars and it is accountable to no one.
An ombudsman’s office at Veteran’s Affairs would ensure that systemic problems would not be filtered by middle managers. Instead, key bureaucrats would be aware of concerns at all levels. A service Charter would ensure that departmental standards were followed for the benefit of the clients VAC is mandated to serve.
If the Canadian government were taking their responsibility to veterans seriously, then we would have no reason whatsoever to release an Ombudsman’s report.
We are disabled veterans. Our families are often overwhelmed taking care of us. Many veterans do not speak out because they are too ill or too frightened to lose what pension we do have. Our responsibility and debt to disabled veterans demands that the Canadian government write a service charter guaranteeing minimal processing and wait times and an Ombudsman’s Office for Veteran’s Affairs to ensure that each and every disabled veteran has a voice.
Veterans are proud of their service to Canada and Canadians, and I truly believe Canadians are proud of their veterans. I know that Canada and Canadians would want the government to take better care all its disabled veterans, especially those that fall through the cracks.
OnLine Database