I will never forget the summer after graduating high school when, struggling to find a halfway decent job in my Ontario hometown before heading off to university, my dad had a brilliant idea: “Join the army,” he suggested, “they’ll take anybody.”
Turns out, he was right. Thus began my brief but illustrious career as a Bytown Gunner in Ottawa; formally known as the 30th Field Artillery Regiment, Canada’s oldest serving militia unit; less formally known as the Dirty 30.
Don’t let my affinity for regimental nicknames fool you: like Buster in Arrested Development, the army was not for me. Be it my aversion to authority, matching outfits, or being yelled at by angry, camouflaged sergeants at the butt-crack of dawn, let’s just say the lifestyle didn’t appeal to me.
To this day, friends are usually shocked to learn of my tenure as a reservist, correctly assuming that me and military duty go together like oil and water. At first glance, one can argue Whistler and the military have a similar dynamic. With the closest base in Comox, the closest regiment in North Vancouver, the closest legion in Pemberton, and a community mostly made up of transplants from near and far, our most direct connections to the military are often layered with degrees of separation.
You see it every year at our Remembrance Day Service at the Whistler Cenotaph. While the event sees healthy attendance from locals every Nov. 11, organizers typically bring in active servicemen and women and veterans from the Lower Mainland or farther to bolster the ceremony with an actual military presence.
The reality is military and veterans’ issues are not on the radar for most Canadians. We wear our poppies every November and lay our wreaths with pride every Remembrance Day, but that’s about as far as it goes. Politicians will wax poetic about the horrors of war and the brave sacrifices our veterans have made in the name of freedom, but offer little, if anything, in the way of concrete support.
“For the last few decades, I have observed a near-continuous cycle of political deception that my fellow veterans seem to fall victim to. It is this: politicians almost universally insist that we matter and are worthy of special attention and accommodation regarding disability benefits. But in the political reality of today, we don’t matter at all,” writes retired military intelligence officer Robert Smol in the Ottawa Citizen this week. “To effect real change, veterans like myself need to wake up to the truth that, regardless of the party in power, we are politically irrelevant.”
Smol and his fellow veterans unfortunately don’t have the same clout as their forefathers who fought in Korea or in the First or Second World Wars, when veterans’ issues were still fresh in the minds of many Canadians. Today, there isn’t much practical political advantage for our leaders to expand assistance and funding to veterans, despite the dire need.
After years of neglect and ineffective administration resulting in a backlog of 40,000 veterans’ disability claims, in 2021, the federal government committed $140 million to work through them. Despite the funding injection, by the following year, the backlog had only grown worse, and wait times for first-time applicants sat at 10 months, more than twice as long as Veterans Affairs’ standard of four months, as reported by Policy Options, the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy’s digital magazine.
This year, the first of thousands of injured Canadian military veterans are set to begin receiving disability payment top-ups as part of a $238-million class-action settlement that found more than 8,600 former members that had served in certain difficult circumstances weren’t paid the long-term benefits they were entitled to.
It is yet another example in a long line of Canada’s military members and veterans falling through the cracks of a political system that doesn’t place enough value on their specific needs. Compared to the general population, veterans experience higher rates of chronic pain, high blood pressure, and long-term disability. They have higher rates of unemployment and homelessness. Suicide rates among Canadian veterans are 50 per cent higher than average for males and double the rate for females. With just 11 occupational stress injury clinics for a population of 600,000 veterans nationwide, they can also face longer waits to access mental health services—sometimes up to seven months, according to Policy Options.
Since time immemorial, young soldiers have fought at the whims of those in positions of power, their lives and, too often, deaths, dictated by the stroke of a pen. For just as long, soldiers have been trotted out as political props, with the usual platitudes and hollow promises quick to follow. The only way to change that is if we, the public, speak up and make that lack of veterans’ support politically inconvenient once more.
In the meantime, you can pay your respects on Nov. 11 at Whistler’s Service of Remembrance, with attendees asked to arriave at the Whistler Cenotaph by 10:30 a.m. The veterans’ parade on the Village Stroll sets off from the Ted Nebbeling Bridge to the cenotaph at 10:53 a.m. sharp. The Whistler Singers and Whistler Children’s Chorus will perform songs of remembrance and lead the gathering in the singing of the national anthem and “God Save the King.” The ceremony will include a helicopter fly-past, cannon firing, poetry readings, and a presentation of wreaths.
Anyone wishing to place a wreath can purchase one from the Squamish Legion or make their own. Contact Steve LeClair at [email protected] if you wish to volunteer or place a wreath during the ceremony, which will also be livestreamed at whistler.ca for anyone wishing to attend virtually.
