Why Won't Harper Support Our Troops?

To use our soldiers as political props and deny their requests for reasonable compensation is an affront to the very values they've been fighting for abroad.

The most trustworthy arm of the Canadian state is neither the Prime Minister’s Office, nor the federal Cabinet, nor disconcertingly, these days, the fabled RCMP, which should be high up on the credibility list. What tops that list now, not just on Remembrance Day, but every day, is our military. Through the great wars of the last century and now in Afghanistan, Canada’s brave front-line military men and women have been prepared to offer the greatest sacrifice – their lives – to protect our values, our freedom, and our sense of justice.

The greatest offence against these courageous and honourable men and women is to use them as props for wedge-politics propaganda and then discard them when they come home wounded or disabled – or don’t come home, leaving families grieving. Many Canadians are starting to suggest that the Harper government has been willing to treat our troops as props in the pursuit of votes, but hesitant to do them justice when they return, wounded from battle in body and mind.

Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn seemed to open the door to such criticism when he reportedly admitted that the Harper government was caught unprepared to deal with the demands for financial and other resources necessary to properly care for the veterans of the Afghan war. We have seen one courageous veteran – former veterans ombudsman Pat Stogran – prepared to lose his job to protest the mountains of red tape and penny-pinching bureaucrats keeping much-deserved benefits from our vets.

While the minister has promised higher compensation in a new package, veterans fear the pay will not be retroactive and that the lump-sum payments will deny them income security in the future. If the federal government could afford an untendered $9-billion contract for fighter jets and find more than $1 billion for a 72-hour G8/G20 summit that produced little but massive civil-liberties violations, then surely the much lesser funds sought by the veterans would not put such a dent in the federal treasury.

The prime minister has been keen use the military as a backdrop to his speeches and announcements, even donning its uniform and declaring early on in Canada’s Afghan mission that we do not “cut and run.” By the end of 2011, we will be cutting and running from our combat role, but we must not cut and run from our duty to those who stood and fought for us.

That means, at minimum, meeting their demands for a move from the lump-sum payments to more secure monthly payments or larger single payments. To deny their requests, as Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire is reported to have said, would be to sink the morale of any troops who may be staying in Afghanistan after 2011 (there is an increasing likelihood that up to 1,000 soldiers and police trainers will stay on in the safer region around Kabul as part of a training mission after the combat mission ends).

The sacrifice of those who have already gone to Afghanistan, together with pressure from a U.S. government that doesn’t want this war to be an American one, will guarantee our continual presence in the country in some non-combat form. The casualties may significantly decrease, or – hopefully – stop. But if Canada’s men and women in uniform are engaged in promoting Canadian values so far away, then it is beyond despicable that they be used as props in a search for votes before returning to a Canada that denies them the very same values.

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