Party of One (59 page)

It was a story that was repeated across the country. For veterans from Thunder Bay, Ontario, the closest office was now in Winnipeg, Manitoba, eight hours by car in the best of weather. Since travel costs to visit case managers are not covered under the New Veterans Charter, veterans could easily spend over a thousand dollars getting the help they needed. As Moncur told reporter Donovan Vincent of the
Toronto Star
, “It’s like we’ve become an inconvenience. If veterans aren’t safe from budget cuts, I guarantee you, no one else is. Every Canadian needs to take notice of this.”

Moncur had always voted Conservative and believed the Harper government were the only ones “who had our backs.” But that was when declaring such support was convenient for the government. “It’s a betrayal is what it is,” he said. Referring to the Conservative boast of actually improving service with nearly six hundred “points of service access” at Service Canada Centres, Moncur practised some black humour. He suggested that the Harper government should just put the forms behind the counter of every McDonalds and have
thousands
of points of contact. He was convinced that the closures were a deliberate strategy to reduce use of services: “If you are told ‘no’ enough times, you’ll go away.” According to Moncur, it was all a part of the Harper government’s triple-D credo: “delay, deny, and die.”

Moncur suggested that instead of commemorating D-Day and the start of the First World War, the money would be better spent on veterans who needed help now. Funding for programs to honour veterans has increased by more than 20 percent to over $50 million for 2014–2015. In contrast, the government spends $38.6 million annually on mental health for the Canadian Forces. In 2012, Peter MacKay promised to make mental health a priority, announcing extra funding of $11.4 million to hire more expert
staff to treat mentally injured Afghanistan veterans.
¹³
It was a promise he didn’t keep.

Bruce Moncur made his case for fair compensation and proper treatment, “only to be repeatedly denied, called a liar, told there was not enough proof, and to be given a fraction of what I should rightfully have.” He has been denied a Permanent Impairment Allowance and has spent the last eight years appealing his pension. He felt reduced to an unwanted claim in an insurance company.

Just at the moment that minister Fantino was taking heat for his insensitive treatment of needy veterans, he announced $50,000 to fund a monument to honour veterans who fought in Italy in the Second World War. Meanwhile, flesh-and-blood veterans were losing their VAC centres—and money. Under the cuts, funding for disability and death compensation, health care, and re-establishment services for veterans decreased by 4 percent. Even though the mental health treatment system was in crisis, the DND actually planned to reduce the number of medical professionals involved in suicide prevention and the treatment of minds that had been wounded in Afghanistan. It was a risky move.

Psychiatrist Neil Greenberg at King’s Centre for Military Health Research in London headed a study that found a correlation between PTSD and suicide. Greenberg said, “We found high rates of PTSD and risk of suicide in those who are on deployments longer than six months. We also found reservist combat troops are also at a higher risk.” Veterans’ advocate Michael Blais reported that Canadian Forces men and women can wait five months to get to see a psychiatrist, a dangerously long waiting period: “This could end in catastrophe if we don’t provide treatment in an expedient and effective manner.” Liberal defence critic John McKay told reporters, “[Peter] MacKay loves to wrap himself in the military, and as long as these guys are healthy and look like they can take on the world, he’s happy to stand beside them.
When they return and they have to transition to civilian life and they’re no longer deployable because of mental health issues, then he’s nowhere to be found.”

The military surgeon-general, Brigadier-General Jean-Robert Bernier, testified before the all-party House of Commons defence committee on April 8, 2014, that depression, especially among male members of the Forces, was “a major concern.” It was double the rate of the civilian population. Depression is also one of the symptoms in the diagnosis of PTSD. Soldiers were exposed to many triggers for that condition in Afghanistan. They saw their comrades and Afghan children blown to bits, and witnessed Afghan troops sexually abusing small boys without consequences. Drug use in Afghanistan’s national army was routine and rampant. Those same Afghan “partners” also killed their NATO allies at the rate of about one per week. A Canadian soldier never knew who most to fear—the Taliban or the Canadian military’s supposed allies. And the ubiquitous and depressing spectacle of abject poverty was also acutely affecting. When all of these things were mixed with survivor guilt, it often led to Canadian soldiers becoming addicted to the only thing that kept the horrors in check— Oxycontin and Percocet as well as street drugs and alcohol. None of this is surprising, as it is common for PTSD sufferers to engage in high-risk behaviours.

The impact of the cuts to Veterans Affairs on the prime minister’s credibility was like a direct hit from a mortar. Retired sergeantmajor Barry Westholm, the director of Armed Forces Engagement for Canadian Veterans Advocacy, quit the Conservative Party. He said that the government showed a shocking lack of respect toward veterans. Westholm told Chris Cobb of the
Ottawa Citizen
, “There are so many red flags flapping across the country, but the government doesn’t appear to see them.” He informed his MP, Conservative Cheryl Gallant, that he was severing all
ties with the Conservatives with “great regret—regret not for my actions, but regret in that the CPC has strayed so far from the path of reason and respect regarding our veterans. . . .” Westholm was particularly upset that MP Gallant had said soldiers with mental injuries weren’t getting help because they chose not to, rather than because help wasn’t available. He wrote to Gallant, “When you spoke before Parliament recently to chide our veterans and promote a dysfunctional organization, the Joint Personnel Support Unit, I was left in shock, disillusioned and most certainly dismayed.” While Westholm was still working at the JPSU, he had written to MP Gallant, “Many soldiers have committed suicide since my first email to you, and I can only ponder those that could have been better supported, assisted or saved if action was taken— but no action was taken.”

Westholm, who had served in Cambodia, Syria, and Haiti, said he had received messages of support from other veterans, also brimming with anger about the Fantino meeting and statements by Conservative cabinet ministers and MPs in the House of Commons. Westholm couldn’t understand why the government blamed the union, or made the Orwellian claim that closing VACs to save $3.78 million would improve service. When the narrative that closing VACs would actually improve service didn’t work, the Conservatives had gone on the attack, accusing the veterans of being duped by the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Veterans Affairs spent an additional $4 million on advertising in 2014, including expensive spots during the NHL hockey playoffs, to tell Canadians what a great job the department was doing helping vets make the transition to civilian life—more than they saved by closing the centres. PSAC was trying desperately to save eight hundred jobs on the chopping block at Veterans Affairs. The government’s belligerence came across as thuggish arrogance—just like Julian Fantino’s performance in front of the vets and the TV
cameras in Ottawa. But this group had been under attack before and wasn’t about to buckle.

A
S
REPORTED
BY
Scott Taylor in the Halifax
Chronicle Herald
, Corporal Stuart Langridge took his own life on March 15, 2008. He had served in Bosnia and then in August 2004 was deployed to Afghanistan. Langridge had been involved in reconnaissance missions for seven months, and was described as “a member of a crew that put a lot of Taliban in the dirt.” When he returned to Canada, he began a metamorphosis from an easygoing, sports-loving young man to a depressed recluse. He spoke very little about his time on patrol in the mountains, but his mother told reporters, “The incredible poverty bothered him.” Langridge also battled addictions to both drugs and alcohol. He began having night terrors. His suicide note explained why he was ending his life: “Sorry, I cannot take it any more. Please know I need to stop the pain.” The military withheld his note from his family for fourteen months. It also contained his wish for a small funeral, “just family.” Instead, he was buried with a full military ceremony. Paperwork to change payment of his benefits from his former girlfriend to his mother was lost behind a filing cabinet.

On January 20, 2014, the Canadian Press reported that the eighth member of the Canadian Armed Forces had taken his life in a period of just over two months. Lieutenant-Colonel Stéphane Beauchemin, who served in Haiti and Bosnia, died on January 16 in an apparent suicide. The helicopter pilot had been a client of the Joint Personnel Support Unit in Ottawa. Another former soldier, Corporal Leona MacEachern, committed suicide on Christmas Day in a car crash that was an “intentional final desperate act,” according to her husband. MacEachern had been receiving monthly disability payments. The military’s letter of condolence to the family included a request for a repayment of $581.67.
Veterans Affairs explained, “Earnings Loss benefits paid under the Canadian Forces Members and Veterans Re-establishment and Compensation Act are payable up to the day of Mrs. MacEachern’s death.” After the letter was made public, veterans affairs minister Julian Fantino told CTV News on January 28, 2014, that the decision to collect the money had been reversed. He also expressed his “deepest condolences to the MacEachern family during this difficult time.” Her husband accepted the apology at face value, but said in an email to CTV News, “Of course it’s a very small amount of money considering a life was lost that should have been saved.” Leona MacEachern had suffered from PTSD. Her family felt she had “slipped through the cracks of a system that barely exists.”

Another apology was in order after a soldier’s mother received a one-cent cheque from the government two and a half years after her son, Corporal Justin Stark, committed suicide in October 2011. He had returned from a seven-month tour of Afghanistan earlier in the year. He was twenty-two years old. Several tribunals were held to try to determine whether his suicide, at the John Weir Foote VC Armouries in Hamilton, was related to his tour. The results were unclear. Canada’s defence minister, Rob Nicholson, said an “insensitive bureaucratic screw-up” was the cause of the one-cent cheque. The cheque, dated February 28, 2014, was sent marked “Canadian Forces release pay.”

Despite the “Support Our Troops” message from the Harper government, the Canadian Armed Forces published numbers documenting that twenty-one Canadian soldiers killed themselves in 2011, an increase from twelve the previous year. There were ten suicides in 2012. Ascertaining the true number of suicides is difficult because the Canadian Forces do not include army reservists, retired soldiers, or female soldiers in that sad statistic. What is known is that suicide rates in the Canadian military are higher than those in Britain’s armed forces. Thirteen Canadian soldiers
killed themselves in 2013, compared to five in the British regular forces. The British military is three times the size of Canada’s armed forces. Nor is the trend slowing down. As of January 30, 2014, at least eight soldiers had taken their lives in the previous two months. And by mid-April, five suicides had already been recorded in the Canadian Forces for 2014.

It is important to note that the statistics for suicides only include those who kill themselves while deployed. Canadian soldiers are fighting a less defined enemy than their grandfathers were. No one knows what the long-term psychological impact of serving in Afghanistan will be, although Statistics Canada is scheduled to release a comprehensive study on mental health in the military in November 2014. Although nothing can be said with certainty until that study is published, many experts in the mental health field believe the death rates are much higher than reported. Mental health facilities for Canadian Forces are chronically short-staffed, although the Harper government has been promising an increase in staffing levels since 2012. So far, the promised fifty-one additional psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and addictions counsellors haven’t been hired.

According to December 2013 staffing figures, the Forces’ medical facilities had only 388 mental health professional and support staff to deal with troubled soldiers and veterans. The military’s former chief medical officer, retired surgeon general Hans Jung,
¹⁴
blames the staff shortages on the Harper government’s hiring freeze—one of the grimmer realities of balancing the budget through cutting services. Meanwhile, an estimated seventy-five boards of inquiry into possible military suicides remain outstanding. Despite the Harper government’s boast about the excellent care afforded to wounded Canadian soldiers, many veterans face long waits for help as stress injuries multiply, and the suicide rate keeps going up.

People who know what war can do have demanded action. In a discussion about military suicides and the psychological after-effects of war, retired general Rick Hillier told CBC Radio, “I don’t think we had any idea of the scale and scope of what the impact might be.” Hillier had commanded troops in Afghanistan, and became chief of the defence staff. The general from Newfoundland affectionately known as the “Big Cod” asked for a public inquiry to find out why vets with mental health problems were being let down. The public was angry that cuts to the budget were more important than the well-being of former soldiers. Hillier said, “This is beyond a medical issue. I think that many of our young men and women have lost confidence in our country to support them.”

Corporal Alain Lacasse committed suicide just as the last troops returned home from Afghanistan in March 2014. He was found dead in his home. He had served six tours of duty, including two in Bosnia. Master Corporal Tyson Washburn was found dead of apparent suicide over the same weekend. Both men had done tours in Afghanistan. Lacasse had been stationed in Kandahar from July 2007 to February 2008, and had several brushes with death. A suicide bomber had jumped in front of his vehicle just days before the end of his mission.