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- Military Police field training at Camp Borden, July 1996. The author is in the middle row, 6th from the left with his rifle pointed down. Photo: Bruce Forsyth collection.
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- Colonel James Forsyth with Royal Hamilton Light Infantry veterans of the Dieppe Raid during WWII, in Dieppe, France, May 2000. Photo: Courtesy of Colonel James Forsyth, CStJ, CD.
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- CWO (Ret’d) Jack McFarland, far right and Corporal Fred Englebrecht (green jacket far left), Royal Hamilton Light Infantry veterans of the Dieppe Raid during WWII at the Dieppe monument in Hamilton, 19 August 2006. Photo: Courtesy of Colonel (Ret’d) James Forsyth, CStJ, CD.
February 2017
I’ve openly criticized the former Conservative government for canceling life-time pensions for disabled veterans, now it looks like I’m going to have to criticize the Liberals for their flip-flop on his promise to restore the lifetime pensions.
Our service personnel do a job that most people wouldn’t want to do. We owe them a guaranteed lifetime pension if a disabling injury forces them to be medically released.
Some may say why are veterans so special? Some will say, “If I’m prevented from continuing in my job as a result of a disability, I don’t get a pension. I just get shown the door.”
That may be true, but the military is a unique job where you are subject to hazards and dangers of which most other occupations can’t even compare. Most people out there wouldn’t want to serve in a hostile area like Afghanistan or even the former Yugoslavia during their civil war in the mid 1990s.
For military personnel, any disability can make you ineligible to remain in your job, thus ending your career. There is a policy called “The universality of service”, which basically means if you have any medical or physical limitations that prevent you from performing specific tasks and being deployed anywhere in the world, you can be medically released. You don’t even get to remain in an office job because despite your occupation and where you serve, you are a soldier/sailor/aviator first and a trades-person second. If you can’t deploy , you can’t serve.
Would any of my liberal friends be willing to criticize Trudeau on this one?
