By Colin Kenny
On Remembrance Day the hearts of Canadians will go out to the families of those who have been killed on the battlefield over the years, with particular grief for those who have died in recent years in Afghanistan. But Remembrance Day should also be a time to pay tribute to the young men and women who have returned home badly wounded.
Most Canadians know all too well that 132 of this country’s soldiers have died in Afghanistan. Perhaps fewer of them know that nearly a thousand have been wounded, and at last count about 180 of them have suffered the most serious kinds of injuries that Veterans Affairs Canada describes as some combination of “amputations, significant brain trauma or complex psychological injuries.” This number may grow. Psychological injuries sometimes show up months or even years after return.
The pain wounded soldiers and their families suffer often goes far beyond the physical trauma of healing and rehabilitation. Coming home physically or psychologically wounded often damages treasured relationships, established ways of life and prospects for climbing any kind of ladder to financial success. Bad wounding often wrecks your life.
Canada has improved many of the ways it compensates wounded veterans in recent years under the New Veterans Charter, but much remains to be done.
Allow me to attempt an analogy with the way we honour our dead soldiers.
When we honour our war dead, we don’t separate them by rank in our minds. We know that many thousands of Canadian lieutenants may have died. We know many more thousands of Canadian privates and corporals may have died. And we honour them all without the slightest thought of what rank they might have held when they were taken from their families.
We treat the wounded differently. By the end of 2008 nearly 969 Canadian soldiers had been wounded in Afghanistan. Of these, 404 were wounded in action, and 565 suffered non-battle injuries.
If the list of those soldiers who have died in Afghanistan is any indication, a large proportion of those injured have come from the lower ranks. Of the 132 Canadian military personnel killed to date in Afghanistan, 104 were classified by rank as privates, corporals or master corporals. So the injured list is undoubtedly similar.
Now consider this: the base pay for a private serving in the Canadian Forces is $31,488. For a corporal, it’s $52,920 and the highest pay for a master corporal is $58,200. Some make a little more money if they are technical specialists, but not a lot more. These aren’t big bucks.
When veterans cannot be rehabilitated due to serious injuries and are unable to hold a job, Veterans Affairs Canada provides them with earnings loss compensation to age 65, which amounts to 75 percent of their salaries.
Combined with lump sum payments received when they leave the Forces, this may seem fair. But when you look closely, I think it’s a raw deal. For a start, why does this compensation stop at age 65? Does anyone think that most of these people are going to have enough money to invest in RRSPs?
And why is this compensation being taxed? Is this a country that’s so short of money that we need to tax the people who got blown up for us?
And is 75 percent really enough for people whose salaries, even when indexed for inflation, are so low?
But, because the compensation formula is based on paying out a percentage of what these people were making when they were injured, the lower ranks get a lot less over their lifetimes.
To me, the lost legs of a corporal shouldn’t be valued at one penny less than the lost legs of a sergeant.
Anyone who has lost a limb – or become mentally debilitated – knows that the damage can never been compensated for in dollars. But at the very least every soldier who comes home badly wounded should be compensated equally, not according to rank. Hell, the 19-year-old private who gets his brain smashed in a roadside bomb explosion could have ended up as a colonel some day. Why punish these people for paying the incalculable price they ended up paying in their youth, rather than their middle age?
We can honour our dead, but we can’t bring them back. That’s beyond our capability as human beings. But we do have the capability to honour our wounded by giving them all a healthy benefits package that will give them a fighting chance to rebuild their lives and maintain their families.