Maj. Mark Campbell is angry. And he has every right to be.
The former St. Albert resident lost both his legs, a testicle, a lot of his hearing and some memory, all while fighting for his country, only to get home to find the government that so willingly sent him to Afghanistan to fight a questionable war has taken away nearly half his financial assistance. Is this the government’s way of rewarding soldiers?
That the Canadian government would even have considered reducing payments to Canadians injured in war is unconscionable.
Through December of 2010 more than 160 Canadians had died and more than 1,650 more were wounded in more than nine years of war. In January 2011 the Canadian military began withholding all injury reports, citing security reasons, only releasing stats at the end of a calendar year. It also refuses to disclose the nature or severity of injuries, claiming it’s an operational secret.
Whatever the numbers add up to by the time Canada finally gets out of Afghanistan, it will be far too high.
As Paul Koring wrote in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s presence in that country “was a decade of death, noble sacrifice and heroic soldiering marred by disgrace and accusations of complicity in torture. For the first time Canada’s soldiers left the field of combat in an unfinished war, neither victorious nor defeated and with no clear answers as to what they were fighting and dying for.”
Sounds like Canada’s Vietnam. There are hundreds of Mark Campbells back from Afghanistan, their lives shattered forever. And they deserve better treatment than having their financial assistance cut in half … especially when one considers that Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week committed Canada to investing another $110 million a year for the next three years, in Afghanistan.
Canada has already invested about $20 billion into the country. While it’s commendable that we are so eager to help the Afghan government fund its army (costing about $4.1 billion annually) and use some of our money to grow their economy and school their children, it should not be at the expanse of our own soldiers.
Prior to 2006, Canadian troops injured in war were offered lifetime, tax-free pensions plus supplements to support their families. But the New Veterans Charter approved by the Liberal government in 2006 replaced the pensions with a lump-sum payment, eliminated many of the family supports and made some its benefit taxable.
Campbell says his compensation is about 40 per cent less under the Charter. He says he got the maximum allowed under the Charter, about $260,000, most of that spent to make his home and car wheelchair accessible.
It’s sad that after so many soldiers from Canada, the U.S., and other NATO countries have died or been permanently injured – either physically, mentally or both – and so many billions of dollars have been spent fighting the Taliban, there is a good chance Afghanistan will fall back into its previous ways.
If and when that happens, soldiers like Campbell will be left wondering why they were even there, why friends died and why they themselves are permanently damaged for a war that ultimately changed very little … except their own lives.
