Just One More Reason for a Commission of Inquiry into Veterans’ Issues

The article below was first published in Ottawa’s Hill Times on January 23, 2012

For Canada’s injured military, veterans and their families, there are few government agencies so singularly reviled as the Veterans Review and Appeal Board. The federal quasi-judicial body which hears reviews and appeals from injured soldiers and veterans applying for disability benefits has stolidly played a leading role in cultivating such scorn.

For almost a century, Canada’s injured soldiers have been awarded benefits for disability and living assistance. From their inception, awards and benefits have not always been justly granted to those who have sacrificed in our nation’s name.  This is where the VRAB or the “Board” comes in. Serving members, veterans, RCMP and their survivors (collectively called “applicants”) seek recourse through VRAB when the Department of Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) has failed these applicants in need.

The board has existed in various incarnations over the past century with its latest version morphing in 1995. In all of its incarnations, it has attracted much vitriol from the military, veteran and family community. In fact, Canada’s most prominent veterans’ organization, the Royal Canadian Legion, grew rapidly and came together largely as a result of leading the public outcry widely condemning VRAB’s predecessor in the 1920s. At that time, the Board was comprised of highly-paid political appointees who had never served in the military, setting up endless red tape for injured veterans and widows to negotiate. The legion’s more pro-active and public advocacy has largely disappeared. However, recently emerging veterans’ organizations are more willing to take on the sacred cows of Ottawa, such as VRAB.

“The problem with the Board is that its patronage at its worst” explains Mike Blais, president of Canadian Veterans’ Advocacy, “…people are appointed to that board not for their ability to educate or understand the issues that Canada’s sons and daughters are encountering overseas or the repercussions of war and peace. They’re placed there because they are political, they’re friends of the government at the time.” Like the legion of the past, in 2010 and 2011, Canadian Veterans Advocacy held the first national public demonstrations by veterans in almost a century.

Of the 24 members of the Board, only two have any medical experience, both as nurses and only five have served in the Canadian Forces, one as a musician in the reserves. The remaining members are predominantly lawyers with the remaining being career political appointees, politicians, political staffers or bureaucrats. For their appointment, they are paid from 104,300 to 122,600, about the same as a Lieutenant-Colonel commanding a 200-person fighter squadron, a battalion of infantry or a Commander of a modern helicopter frigate with more than 200 sailors and aircrew.

Perhaps the predominance of lawyers in VRAB is most telling. Like most federal agencies, VRAB and Veterans Affairs Canada have become increasingly complex, creating what Gilles Paquet, Ottawa expert on governance, terms the “arrogant logic” of bizarre internal processes in the federal government. The result is a bureaucracy which baffles and intimidates many injured military members and their families to give up.

Such complex red tape “demoralizes” the veteran, says long-standing NDP Veterans Affairs critic Peter Stoffer who enjoys passionate loyalty from the veteran community for his dedication to veterans’ issues. Such a system, Stoffer says, “does what the Department wants you to do. If they say no long enough, you might go away.”

By the time an applicant ends up in front of the Board, he or she has already been turned down by Veterans Affairs Canada at least one or more times. The board offers two advertised avenues of recourse: a review hearing held in person and, should the review hearing be unfavourable to the applicant, an appeal hearing, which is essentially a paper trial with the applicant having no right to appear in person, making the “hearing” somewhat absurd.

Last year, the board rendered 3,497 review decisions, 1,745, or 50 per cent, of those turned down the applicants’ request. The stats on appeal hearings are even bleaker: out of 970 decisions, 647, or 67 per cent, were turned down. “If you have to end up at VRAB, that means a whole group of people before them don’t trust you, or don’t believe you, or don’t believe the medical evidence. If an individual has peer reviewed medical evidence, that’s all they should have to have in order to receive a benefit from the government of Canada,” says Stoffer.

Disturbingly, that is not what is happening. Take the case of Steven Dornan, a CF veteran who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2002. CF medical doctors attributed his cancer to depleted uranium dust Dornan encountered during his tour as a weapons inspector in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Canada’s top court directed VRAB to recognize this fact. The board has instead repeatedly denied Dornan’s application. It wasn’t until sheer desperation and despair drove his wife, Roseanne, to stage a sit-in at the office of former Parliamentary Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Greg Kerr, that the board relented and sent Dornan’s file back to the minister last year for “reconsideration.” Dornan has since been granted a disability award for his condition.

What is so troubling about the Dornan case is that legislation governing both the board and the Department of Veterans Affairs Canada clearly state that “reconsideration” by the minister is an avenue open to applicants. However, VRAB has repeatedly failed to advertise this option or provide clear criteria as to how an applicant might exercise the option in sending a file back to the minister. The reality is that the board feels they have “control” over the file and that the “minister loses jurisdiction and cannot regain it unless the board so directs” as written by the previous chair Victor Marchand in correspondence to a veteran attempting to seek a reconsideration.

“That’s just stupid and undemocratic. What right do they think they have that they can own a veteran’s life and refuse to send it to the Minister? Does the Board work for the Minister or the Minister for the Board? The Board certainly doesn’t work for the veteran,” says Perry Gray, chief editor of VeteranVoice.info, a veteran community with more than 100,000 subscribers. “People in VRAB do not even know what they can and can’t do. They just make it up as they go along. It really is quite ridiculous.”

The stats tell an even more troubling story of a board thumbing their nose. Setting aside a special court order for all hearing-loss claims to be returned to the minister, in the past five years, the board has permitted just two files to be sent back to the minister for reconsideration. Such smug proprietary over the lives of veterans easily rankles the innate sense of justice of most veterans.

“This is wrong. Once VRAB has finished with a file, the veteran should have right to have that file returned back to minister. The veteran should always have a right to reconsideration by the Minister,” emphasizes Don Leonardo, president and founder of VeteransofCanada.ca, an internet-based social networking community for veterans.

The laws that created the house of VRAB installed a number of doors, with review, appeal and reconsideration by the minister being doors one through three. Door No. 4 is an even less advertised option, called a “compassionate” award under the VRAB Act.  The board may grant a “compassionate award” when doors No. 1 and No. 2 are exhausted (the board pretends that door No. 3, reconsideration by the minister, effectively does not exist). In the past 10 years, there have been a total of six applications for compassionate awards, granting just one “compassionate” award.

“It makes the blood boil,” laments Perry Gray.

Don Leonardo says “I would hate to be the chair when he tells the judge he is standing in the way of door numbers three and four.”

The chair, John Larlee, receives between $168,500 to $198,200 for managing what has become a nightmare for far too many disabled Canadian Forces members, veterans, RCMP and their families. Mr. Larlee is not a veteran, but a career lawyer.

“I don’t think we need a VRAB. They cost the taxpayer $11-million a year and that $11-million can be going into veterans’ benefits and RCMP benefits and their families,” says Stoffer.

Prime Minister Harper at one time thought with equal rationality and compassion. The Conservative election platform of 2005-2006 promised to “fix” VRAB and remake it into something which better served veterans and families.

VRAB has begun a round of information sessions. Veteran groups are hopeful change will come about. Such hope is naively misplaced. An email from VRAB’s communication section confirms that these sessions are not “consultations” but merely the board is “interested in finding ways to share information about its program and values opportunities to hear from Veterans organizations.”

Such ‘feel-good’ sessions with stakeholders are a plague in Ottawa these days, from VAC and VRAB, to the Public Service Integrity Commissioner’s Office, and Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada. Departments and Agencies condescendingly share information with the public whom public servants assume could never understand the complexity of the bureaucratic rationale. Senior officials politely listen and then provide more red-tape justification as to why the status quo is unchangeable.

The next time Canada feels overwhelming compassion to send our military into a war-torn or disaster-ridden nation, can we imagine Forces members politely listening and ignoring the order to enter harm’s way? Perhaps not, but the military and the public will eventually realize just how “compassionate” federal agencies like VRAB are towards those same military when disability forces them to sadly depend upon Canada’s compassion.

Sean Bruyea is a columnist, former intelligence officer and graduate student of a master’s in public ethics at St. Paul University in Ottawa

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by on January 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Abuse of Authority, Accountability, Editorial, Ethics and Integrity, In the News
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Posted by SeanB on January 28, 2012

http://canadians4accountability.org/blog/2012/01/28/just-one-more-reason-for-a-commission-of-inquiry-into-veterans-issues/

It’s time Ottawa fix its broken trust with Canadians

The article below was first published in Ottawa’s Hill Times on December 5, 2011

It has become a sad truism that Canadians’ faith and trust in our federal government has been consistently declining.

This is hardly news. Over the past decade, federal government studies from the likes of Public Works and Government Services in 2001 and independent studies from the World Economic Forum in 2005, Conference Board of Canada in 2009 as well as the Nanos and the Manning Institute reports both in 2011 show how prevalent and persistent is Canadians’ declining trust and faith in government.

What to do about it is of greater importance. Ottawa’s own Gilles Paquet (University of Ottawa) offers a hope-fired torch to lead Canadians from our growing “malaise” and disaffection with Ottawa into a new era of “collaborative” government. His often colourful diagnoses of the problems are matched by his inspiring call to duty of all levels of society including citizens, bureaucrats, and intellectuals.

Should we care that we have lost substantial faith and much trust in Ottawa and its institutions? Not only should we care, the foundations of a modern democratic society depend upon such trust. Declining trust in government not only results in adverse economic impacts (witness the growing economic crisis in Europe) but trust is fundamental to creating a peaceful and productive society. All our interactions, be they with companies, government institutions as well as with each other, require trust in some form. Ultimately, trust in government is inseparable from the sense of trust we feel with institutions or one another in our communities.

Canada’s federal government has suffered a rash of distressing crises over the past decade which have justly shaken our confidence in government. The tainted blood scandal, the sponsorship scandal, the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner scandal, and the Veterans Affairs privacy scandals are seen increasingly as the tip of an endemic iceberg. They represent actual and perceived widespread public service incompetence and associated arrogance centered principally at the senior levels of the bureaucracy.

How does Paquet propose to guide us out of Canada’s crisis of trust in Ottawa? A number of his more than 50 books and hundreds of articles carry a similar theme: government must stop perpetuating the myth that any government institution or person is in charge. In a diverse modern democracy, no one can be “in charge.” However, over the past 40 years, Ottawa, like many seats of western democracies, has managed to convince its citizens that we must pay our taxes and vote but otherwise shut up.

How has Ottawa accomplished this? The growing distrust of government in the 1960s resulted in many, including Ottawa, finding a way to legitimize its own existence while imposing a “top-down” scientific model of management. Ottawa immersed itself in ever-increasing complex technical processes to control not just Canada’s growing federal public service but an increasingly centralized version of federalism.

The legitimate moral concerns, passions, interests, and even outrage felt by active citizens came to be lost in labyrinthine Treasury Board and other departmental processes. Most Canadians could never hope to have the time to understand such technical complexity in order to have their voice heard. In fact, most public servants in Ottawa are at a loss to understand the full gamut of what we have come to see as mountains of red tape.

As very few, mostly senior bureaucrats, claim to understand the ‘big picture’ of such technical barriers, Ottawa has effectively hijacked the human concerns of a nation and placed them in the “mental prisons” that Ottawa is in charge and only her “leaders” know what is best for us.

This amounts to a coup d’état of our sense of right and wrong, robbing us of all but the most simple of our duties and responsibilities as citizens. All we are left to do is pay taxes and vote and we haven’t exactly been enthusiastic about doing the latter.

Ottawa has made the Canadian public feel like a “nuisance,” annoying in our apparently naïve wish to have the public service actually serve the public through collaboration and cooperation. Since the mid-90s, the public service has been bolstered in its “special status” to be our “guardians.” Jane Jacobs’ 1992 book, Systems of Survival has decorated many a senior mandarin’s desk and, according to Paquet, is seen as a “gift from the gods.” As self-proclaimed guardians of our destiny, bureaucrats no longer see themselves as carrying out a job. Instead, their “exceptional qualities” are required for their “missionary” work as Canada’s “state clergy.”

Such arrogant detachment from and patronization of Canadians does much to explain the multiple scandals in Ottawa’s bureaucracy. Jacobs’ emphasis upon bureaucrats’ loyalty to the public good naturally leads to a consequence which is highly destructive to a healthy democracy. Since the bureaucracy ultimately designs, interprets, and implements public good, bureaucrats are led to wrongly believe that they are “obviously much better-suited” to this vocation than the “non-descript bunch of individuals churned out by the electoral process,” i.e., Parliament. In this manner, misleading or managing the perspective of ministers and the PMO (not to mention the public) through acts of omission or commission is not seen as being disloyal to the public good.

Paquet rightly emphasizes that neither the politicians nor the bureaucracy is or can be in charge. Our quest for the mythical leader to take us to the Promised Land is doomed to fail. No leader can negotiate the overwhelming complexity and diverse viewpoints of modern democracies. Perhaps this is why the current government has focused instead upon unprecedented centralized control. Canadians have contributed their share as we have the impossible expectation that leaders must hit the ground running, knowing all while being infallible.

How can innovation and learning occur when government is centrally controlled by the infallible? Innovation is clearly squashed in such a rigid top-down structure and risk aversion becomes an epidemic. The symptoms of this plaque are all too well-known: cushy foreign postings and cash payouts (remember Christiane Ouimet) to reward the incompetent while punishing success and crucifying through “organizational violence” those who would otherwise speak up to defend the public interest (Allan Cutler, Joanna Gualtieri, Brian McAdam, Ian Bron, and Shiv Chopra, to name a few).

Repairing trust in such instances is crucial: those who commit serious wrongdoing must be seriously punished.

Clearly, encouraging a culture of retribution and punishment for the victims and rewarding the culprits is not working. What we need instead are public officials who act as facilitators of community-building and consensus, not leaders terrified to allow innovation and experimentation. These facilitators or “stewards” are needed to guide the collaborative process which coordinates a diverse collection of interests, points of view and shared destinies.

For instance, government often applauds its role in encouraging multicultural diversity. Yet, Ottawa does very little if anything to bring these communities together. Instead it perpetuates the isolation of cultural and ethnic groups from one another creating undesired ghettoization.

Citizens are not blameless in this process. Yes we have rights but we also have a “burden of office” as the most important players in our democracy. Our right to speak out must fully respect that others have that same right to engage in robust, yet respectful debate. Our points of view may not have equal validity, but they do have equal merit to be heard. Listening to one another while having government required to listen and act upon what we say is key to building trust in a new Canadian approach to government.

We must shake off the learned helplessness of 50 years of a burgeoning welfare state. We cannot wait for government to find the money for and initiate programs which embrace our concerns. We must be creative and innovative while we seize upon the lessons we learn from inevitable mistakes along the way.

With the public service acting as facilitators, we must work within communities of common interest while collaborating with other communities. This is the new horizontal world of “multi-logue” which must replace the ineffective vertical world and “condescending ear” of dialogue. Such dialogue (usually held behind closed doors) has allowed bureaucrats and politicians to easily play communities off against one another.

One final key component in this new collaborative process is the renewed importance of the public intellectual, someone much more than an academic. He or she is an individual willing to confront taboos, authority and the despotism of political correctness in order to “reveal an alternative reality that people were not aware they were missing.” There was a time when the great independent minds of Marshall McLuhan, George Orwell, Milton Friedman and Alvin Toffler spoke and the government and the public listened.

Since then universities have increasingly become bastions of political correctness where open debates are often stifled and administrators exile those who do not conform to a particular viewpoint. Rousseau understood this more than two centuries ago when he anticipated that individuals would not be physically beaten in a democracy for holding different ideas, they would merely be ostracized.

Intellectuals must come down from their ivory towers and speak to us in plain language. We need them to be the pebble in the government’s shoe or the sand in the oyster that irritates until the idea becomes a treasured pearl. We need intellectuals to make sense out of what politicians would oversimplify and bureaucrats would overcomplicate. In a political era where education is often condemned by elected officials and ignorance is lauded, we need the public intellectual now more than ever. And government must stop treating ideas like a terrorist bomb or a virulent infection.

Paquet challenges us to trust that Canada’s cherished democracy is a solid building sturdy enough for us to remove the “scaffolding pretending to hold it together—the state.” Our democratic building can withstand removing the bureaucratic and political façade which fails to cultivate trust through collaboration, coordination and cooperation.

Ultimately, each of us needs to cultivate trust in ourselves, our rights as well as our “burden of office.” Through such self-empowerment we can learn to not only trust in our right to speak out but show and compel government how to trust and thereby become trusted by the Canadians it claims to represent.

 

 

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by on December 13, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Abuse of Authority, Accountability, Ethics and Integrity
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Posted by SeanB on December 13, 2011

http://canadians4accountability.org/blog/2011/12/13/it%e2%80%99s-time-ottawa-fix-its-broken-trust-with-canadians/

The Age of Unaccountability

I’ve been trying to find a topic to write about these past two weeks, but haven’t found something that really inspired me into outrage. I’ve just become too jaded.

There have been stories of incompetence and abuse of authority – the rising aviation accident death rate due to Transport Canada’s refusal to act as a regulator, the RCMP’s growing sexual harassment scandal and more instances of flagrant privacy violations by government officials trying to discredit critics.

I wasn’t always this cynical.  Back in 2006, when the Harper Conservatives won their first majority, I penned an op-ed entitled “The Age of Accountability” and pitched it to the Ottawa Citizen. It was an op-ed full of hope and expectation – the Conservatives were going to bring in new legislation to protect whistleblowers, rules were going to be tightened and information made more accessible to the public.

The Citizen didn’t buy the piece, but did rip off my title for an editorial. But that was to be the least of my disappointments.

Within a year, the government had passed a deeply flawed whistleblower protection law and appointed a new Commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, who (probably correctly) interpreted her mandate as one of suppressing whistleblowing. There were numerous reports of people going to her office to file a complaint and getting called on the carpet when they returned to their own. Her only mistake was that she was too brutal and clumsy, forcing the government to punish her with a $534,000 termination payout and gag order.

On the public’s right to access to information, too, the government came partway on their promises but immediately began undermining the principles they had espoused. Political interference in access requests hit the headlines. Delays in answers grew longer and longer until it has now reached the point that anything politically sensitive will only be released years after the issue has faded from memory.

Not that there would be anything embarrassing under the current regime, of course. Communications control has become so tight that scientists can’t speak on subjects in their field without first getting a green light from the Prime Minister’s Office.

And, in an Orwellian twist, officials are being told that they can’t even be honest in internal communications. If the official line is that security is improving in Afghanistan, for example, bureaucrats are supposed to tell each other that as well – even if it isn’t true. I have seen this in my own work, and heard it from others as well.

Even Parliamentary Committee work is being turned into a secret as more and more doors are shut.

As to culture, what is happening now at the RCMP will be buried in a pseudo-investigation. Abuse is all the vogue with this government – we’ve seen it from Bill Elliott at the RCMP, with the handling of Richard Colvin in Parliament and at Veteran’s Affairs when dealing with critics such as Sean Bruyea. Senior bureaucrats love to protest that they have it tough, too, but don’t hesitate to mirror this behaviour and destroy whistleblowers and dissenter within their own ranks.

And all the while, the Canadian public sleeps – apparently believing that this government is the architect of our economic stability (it isn’t) and that it makes them more credible than the other parties. But things are going to get worse from here. Because, as a wise and experienced friend told me, this kind of environment is a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. So hold on tight, Canada. The next four years are going to be a rough ride.

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Veteran alleges another privacy breach at department
CBC News, November 4, 2011
Summary: Another veterans’ advocate says government officials breached his privacy by unnecessarily going into his medical record hundreds of times, one year after Sean Bruyea settled a similar complaint.

Sexual harassment claims top issue for new RCMP head
CBC News, November 14, 2011
Summary: Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said Monday he is concerned about allegations of sexual harassment recently made by RCMP officers and plans to raise the issue with the force’s next commissioner. CBC News has been reporting on Mounties who say they experienced years of sexual harassment on the job. In an internal RCMP complaint, Cpl. Catherine Galliford makes serious allegations about misconduct inside the RCMP. She shared the complaint with CBC News and spoke with reporter Natalie Clancy about her claims.

Government spies on advocate for native children
Toronto Star, November 15, 2011
Summary: Why is the federal government spying on Cindy Blackstock? When does a life-long advocate for aboriginal children become an enemy of the state? The answer, it would seem, is when you file a human rights complaint accusing your government of willfully underfunding child welfare services to First Nations children on reserves.

On access to information, Canada is a developing country
The Globe and Mail, November 20, 2011
Summary: Canada’s access-to-information laws are not working, in spite of the country’s avowed commitment to open government. In an Associated Press study, researchers filed access-to-information requests for government documents on terrorism and convictions in 105 countries. Canada asked for a 200-day extension, and then only gave a partial response. The U.S. stalled for 10 months before releasing two spreadsheets and one piece of paper with all names blanked out.

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by on November 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Abuse of Authority, Access to / Freedom of Information, Accountability, Dissent, Editorial, Ethics and Integrity
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Posted by Ian Bron on November 21, 2011

http://canadians4accountability.org/blog/2011/11/21/the-age-of-unaccountability/

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