New pensions for life don’t live up to campaign promises made to veterans
The basic idea of consultations is not that hard to understand, yet despite the simplicity, government after government fails to engage in consultation on a number of important fronts. We see the consequences of this type of failure most often associated with resource projects that haven’t properly engaged First Nation communities, but that isn’t the only place that stakeholders are left out of decision making. The most recent example involves the Pensions for Life programs that new veterans will receive.
The new pensions are set to roll out this April and will save the government money by reducing the amount that new veterans will receive. The government savings could amount to nearly $2 billion over four years, which means that veterans will be short-changed. This upset veterans groups who say the government never sought their input before committing to the new pensions.
The government may be able to claim they created advisory groups of veterans to direct them in their policies and actions, but can’t say as much about listening to them, especially in this case. Although the new pensions contain elements of suggestions from the panel, a real consultative process would have had more back and forth. Instead, this is another example of the government imposing their will which intersected with advice from the panel in a few instances.
How veterans end up on the short end of the stick time and again should confound most Canadians. They were an afterthought when the previous Conservative government cut deeply into the Department of Veterans Affairs and closed regional offices that veterans relied on. The same was true when that government changed how newly disabled veterans were cared for by Canada. Now veterans are learning this government also prefers to cut costs rather than deliver on promises made.
During the campaign they were lauded by veterans groups for what appeared to be a promise to bring pensions for newer veterans in line with those for individuals who had retired before 2006. Something clearly changed along the way and these groups are accusing the government of introducing a three-tiered system where new applicants will receive less than those who applied over the previous 12 years and significantly less than those who applied before 2006.
Those changes include the loss of benefits to help retirees train for and find new careers. It also still denies new disabled veterans the kind of life-time pensions that were available before 2006. On top of this ‘pension pinching,’ there have been other instances which show how veterans compensation is not a front of mind issue for the government.
Last autumn it was revealed that the government was holding on to hundreds of millions of dollars in lapsed funding intended for veterans. A New Democrat motion forced them to use the funds to improve services and benefits for Canadian veterans. The Veterans Ombudsman also discovered an accounting error that shorted 270,000 veterans by $165 million. Somewhere along the way the government’s campaign promises melted away to the point that they could not resist trimming finances on the backs of a group of Canadians who have proudly served our country.
