Royal Canadian Legion / Topics & Posted Articles

I D card very important! Legit!

March 14, 2017

Advocating for Life-long Financial Security for Canada’s Ill and Injured Veterans

Canadians are hearing more and more about the deep gaps in care and benefits for Veterans. At the forefront of discussion is the New Veterans Charter, a set of benefits adopted in 2006 without clause-by-clause review in Parliamentary Committee and in the Senate because of a perceived view that the Pension Act did not meet the modern needs of many injured and ill Veterans. For many, the Disability Pension did not provide enough for the basic necessities, and the Pension Act did not adequately look after ill and injured Veterans and their families or facilitate their transition to civilian life.

When the New Veterans Charter (NVC) was established, replacing the Pension Act, it brought a holistic approach to Veterans’ care and benefits. The NVC offered a number of benefits that the Pension Act did not provide including additional financial benefits, disability benefits, rehabilitation services, health services, education assistance, and job placement assistance to address not only financial support, but also continuing care and quality of life. However, the NVC did not come without its faults.

When the NVC was introduced, the Legion, as part of a multidisciplinary group which included representatives from other Veterans’ organizations, medical specialists, government, the Canadian Armed Forces and others was invited to participate in the New Veterans Charter working group. The Legion was behind the New Veterans Charter because it was promised that the charter would be a “living charter” which could be amended as flaws or gaps were identified. Once the Charter was adopted, the New Veterans Charter Advisory Group was formed to help identify issues and make recommendations to the Senate and Parliamentary Committee on gaps in care and benefits. Recommendations for change were identified early on, yet, despite assurances the Charter would be amended as gaps were identified, the government left it neglected for five years before making the first amendment. Progress has been excruciatingly slow since, and now we see the massive holes left as our Veterans return from conflicts in dire need of support.

The men and women who serve our country sign up voluntarily, knowing the risks and dangers of the job. The government has an obligation to ensure all who served, and their families, are cared for. There are significant and critical faults in the NVC that must be addressed for Canada’s Veterans. Of particular concern is the need for lifelong financial security for ill and injured Veterans. Some Veterans have been calling to abolish the New Veterans Charter all together, and reinstate the Pension Act with its Disability Pension. While some argue the Pension Act and the Disability Pension provided more financial compensation and stability than the New Veterans Charter, the Legion disagrees.


Comparing the Pension Act with the New Veterans Charter

Comparisons continue to be made between the Disability Award (sometimes referred to as the lump sum payment) paid out under the New Veterans Charter and the monthly Disability Pension paid out under the Pension Act. At the core of the comparison, the old Disability Pension appears to provide greater compensation and more lifelong financial stability to ill and injured Veterans. What is often missed in the comparison between the NVC Disability Award benefits and the Pension Act Disability Pension are the additional lifelong and short term financial benefits awarded through the NVC, as well as the non-financial benefits the NVC offers in addressing care and quality of life. The NVC provides a new approach to Veteran care that focuses not only on providing financial stability, but also supports wellness and quality of life.

Comparing Financial Compensation

While there are significant additional benefits in the New Veterans Charter, there are critical faults and inequalities between the two systems that must be addressed, and that is what the Legion has been advocating for. Below we look at the benefits and gaps in compensation for ill and injured Veterans.

Life-long Financial Security for Seriously Ill and Injured Veterans

Proponents for the Disability Pension argue that the Pension Act provided a secure, fixed monthly payment for life, while the New Veterans Charter provides a lump sum payment that may be spent all at once, leaving the Veteran with nothing afterwards. In addition, proponents argue the Disability Pension gave eligible ill or injured Veterans a monthly payment for life that is greater than the one-time Disability Award received through the NVC.

For the most seriously ill and injured Veterans, those who are unable to work again and whose quality of life has been drastically impacted, their ability to lead a financially secure life and to reintegrate into civilian life has been dramatically affected. It is these Veterans are who are suffering the greatest under the NVC, and the Legion has long been advocating to ensure they have access to lifelong financial security. While on the surface, returning to the Pension Act may appear to be the best choice, it is the Legion’s position that the benefits offered under the NVC, along with the recommendations we are advocating for to strengthen the Charter, can actually pay out more in lifelong benefits for the most seriously ill and injured Veterans and their families.

As a start, through the New Veterans Charter, if the Veteran is taking part in VAC rehabilitation services, they may qualify for the Earnings Loss Benefit (ELB), a taxable, monthly benefit provided up until age 65 that ensures total income will be at least 90% minimum of the gross pre-release military salary. The Legion is advocating both to increase the ELB benefit to provide 100% of pre-release income and also to continue this benefit for life. In essence, this will provide an income for life for seriously ill and injured Veterans, and guarantee their future financial security.

The NVC offers the Permanent Impairment Allowance (PIA), to be renamed the Career Impact Allowance (CIA) in April 2017. The PIA provides a taxable, monthly benefit, payable for life for those whose career options have been limited because of a service-related illness or injury.

Financial Compensation for Ill and Injured Veterans

Proponents for the Disability Pension argue that the Pension Act provided greater financial compensation over the NVC, thereby better compensating them for their injury. However, when looking at compensation for injured Veterans, it is important to look not only at financial compensation, but also quality of life. The Charter provides additional benefits that, in terms of achieving optimal health and quality of life for the Veteran, exceeds that which the Pension Act provided. In the case of Veterans whose illness or injury is not incapacitating, these additional benefits help Veterans transition to civilian life, manage or overcome their injury or illness, and live healthy and well.

The Pension Act did not provide the supports or programs to help an ill or injured Veteran achieve their optimal health and wellbeing, meaning they could function well in society, transition to civilian life and return to work. The payment awarded under the old Pension Act was a fixed monthly payment that was determined by the type of injury the Veteran sustained, and did not take into consideration the full extent of the disability. For example, if a Veteran lost a leg, they received X amount each month. If a Veteran injured their back, they received Y amount each month. The disability was not assessed in terms of the ‘impact’ that injury may have on the individual’s life. It did not look at whether the individual would have difficulty returning to work. It did not consider whether the individual may require expensive rehabilitation services.

Under the NVC, in addition to the ELB and PIA, the programs outlined below provide additional financial stability and supports to achieve quality of life. These programs, along with the recommendations the Legion is advocating for, will ensure ill and injured Veterans can achieve financial security, as well as career, social and emotional wellbeing.

Canadian Forces Income Support
Supplementary Retirement Benefit for Veterans and families
Retirement Income Security Benefits for Veterans and families
Critical Injury Benefit
Death Benefit
Rehabilitation services for medical, psycho-social and vocational needs
Financial assistance to help Veterans remain independent and self-sufficient in their home and their community
Monthly income to replace lost wages while participating in a rehabilitation program
Operational Stress Injury support and mental health services for Veterans and families
Long term care
Access to group health insurance for Veterans and families
Career counselling, education, training and job-search support for Veterans and families
Educational grants for children
Family caregiver relief benefit for respite services for families
In addition to the benefits listed above, the Legion continues to advocate for further support and benefits for ill and injured Veterans.

The Legion Continues to Advocate for Change

While the Legion supports the concept of the New Veterans Charter, we continue to advocate for a full review of the Charter and press the government for changes. As it stands, the Charter is not sufficient to meet the needs of today’s Veterans and their families.

There is still financial inequality in standard of living when comparing the two systems, and the NVC does not adequately compensate the most seriously ill and injured Veterans in the long term. It is this group of Veterans and their families who must be financially compensated for their inability to work again. And it is this group that desperately needs financial support to help the Veteran and their family manage and live with the injury or illness.

The financial compensation and quality of life benefits outlined above, along with the recommendations the Legion is advocating for below, will address the financial disparity for those with incapacitating injuries or illness and will give the most seriously ill and injured Veterans lifelong financial security and care support that exceeds what was offered through the Pension Act. For Veterans whose illness or injury is not incapacitating, the programs above, along with the recommendations below, will ensure they will be financially secure and have the ability to achieve a high quality of life.

The Legion is currently focusing on advocating to improve the following deficiencies:

Increase the Earnings Loss Benefit (ELB) to provide 100% of pre-release income and provide ELB for life (not terminated at 65, as is currently the case). The projected career earnings of a CF Member should determine the minimum ELB.
Conduct essential academic research in the areas of Veteran physical and mental health to ensure an integrated approach to establishing Veterans Affairs Canada Entitlement Eligibility Guidelines. Research will guide the development of comprehensive support for ill and injured Veterans.
Provide financial compensation, support, education, and training to enable a family member to become a primary caregiver.
Provide recognition and a family identification card for spouses and dependents of serving members and Veterans.
Expand the Military/Veteran Family Services Pilot Program to all Military Family Resource Centres and make available to all Veterans and their families.
Streamline access to long term disability process and vocational rehabilitation programs to ensure all Veterans have easy access to rehabilitation and income support.
Through the Legion’s advocacy efforts and the efforts of others, our recommendations combined with the supports and services already available through the NVC will ensure that all Veterans and their families will have lifelong financial security, and the resources and support to live healthy and well.

For those who served to protect the very rights and freedoms we enjoy today, we owe our Veterans our commitment to work on their behalf. We stand committed, working to ensure the care and benefits of Canada’s Veterans are the best they can possibly be and that all governments honour their obligations to the men and women who serve in the Canadian Armed Forces.

http://www.legion.ca/article/advocating-for-life-long-financial-security-for-canadas-ill-and-injured-veterans/

WOW! Hope the Legion is wearing their cup cause that was the swiftest, hardest kick to the groin they have ever taken!

Questions over future role of Legions

Bill Tierney

March 13, 2017


Members of the 234 Legion hoist their flags aloft. Veterans and members of several military units gather at the Dorval Cenotaph to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Britain in September 2007.

I was thinking about the role of the Royal Canadian Legions in our towns. What do they do for our communities? Do they still serve or help veterans?

Some people think the Legions should just die out with the generation of soldiers who came ashore in Normandy. They’ve served their purpose. We beat Hitler. We survived the peace, more or less.

Even Legion people can sound negative about the future. I had just received an emotional and sad response to a couple of columns I wrote about Montreal withdrawing tax exemptions from local Legions. This veteran was writing from New Brunswick. He told the story of his Montreal father, Bill Glover, who was a World War II veteran with several medals to his credit, including a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Glover ran the bar and was treasurer for years at the Otterburn Park Legion. The Legion was central to his family. Right up to his death, he was a Legion man and a major volunteer in his community. You would recognize the type. They were as confident and courageous as the type of warfare they practised.

Now the veteran writing to me, his son, had also been in the military before the Afghanistan conflict with three overseas tours of duty to his credit. He does not think that the Royal Canadian Legion today is the same as it was for his father.

“Never,” he writes, “has the Royal Canadian Legion been a place for me. It never helped with my (post-traumatic stress disorder) PTSD and never will they see me cross their steps; don’t ever say that they’ve fought for the current veterans.”

I didn’t know what to write back. I don’t know what he would be looking for at his Legion. The Legion hall is obviously not a place of comfort for this veteran.

“How can I feel comfort in a place which holds more civilians than service members?” asks my New Brunswick veteran. He remembers his father’s Legion. “They stood for something,” he says. “This is not the same Legion my grandfather had.”

Now he’s undoubtedly right: the Legion has changed because the thousands of servicemen and women who populated them have died. It isn’t even the same Legion I remember joining as a civilian in the 1990s.

I joined for mixed reasons: the Legion had local political clout. There were a lot of local residents who were also members of the Legion. But I stayed in the Legion because I loved people like Jimmy Horan who lived just round the corner, a completely bilingual Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue resident, proudly Irish by descent, very kind, very connected to life on our streets.

Our Legion was full of men and women like Horan and over the next 20 years that World War II generation slowly slipped away, one by one. They’d get sick and then move into the Ste. Anne veterans’ hospital where I’d visit them with my students from John Abbott College and then they’d die as thousands of military souls had died on that ground before them.

The next wave of military which found its way to our Legion was much more specialized, not the result of a World War conscription process. The new veterans did not come in battalions: they came in very small groups, often associated with treatment for PTSD at Ste-Anne’s hospital, which was the last veterans’ hospital managed by Ottawa. Like Lionel Desmond, the young Nova Scotia soldier who recently committed suicide after killing his wife, mother and daughter in Upper Tracadie, Nova Scotia. Desmond was traumatized by his military experience and spent eight weeks at Ste-Anne’s hospital being treated last summer for PTSD. He was even invited to an employee’s home and spent evenings in our Legion. I was chatting about him with the president of the Legion, Kevin McCready, who is the service officer.

It is a service officer’s responsibility to find solutions for veterans in need. Every Legion has a service officer. McCready says the Legion can reach out to wounded servicemen, but there just aren’t enough resources.

Camille Raymond, a Ste-Anne city council member in the 1980s, is a Legion man whose son had gone out with the first Reservists to Yugoslavia and come back with a life-altering case of PTSD.

So, tell me, what is left for other victims of military trauma at the hospital in Ste-Anne? Ten beds for two months of treatment at a time? And what happened to Desmond at that the hospital in Antigonish, where they couldn’t find a way to calm him down before he brought catastrophe on his family?

Are there enough resources to care for all the PTSD victims coming back from our so-called peace-keeping missions? Are our political masters taking this seriously enough? What happened to Lionel Desmond that he was allowed to get so desperate?

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/west-island-gazette/bill-tierney-questions-over-future-role-of-legions

Trooper no gov't would ever step in and change or overhaul the Legion. It's not their job.

BUT the gov't can let them know by stopping Legion Service Officers from accessing veteran's files on VAC's DSN server. Stop inviting them to meetings and have CRA audit their charity status. The Legion would have a batch of kittens over the last one.

All that said above until the veterans who are Legion members scream at the top of their lungs, go on tv, letters to the editors at HOW veterans are actually being ignored by the now, IMO, Legion Social Club things within the Legion will not change.

I agree with you all, and I would think a lot of the problems their facing comes from within.

When an organization refuses to show their expenses, they are putting their heads down and admitting corruption.

No president of any Legion should be a civie, period. I can certainly see some civilians put in for some admin, and I can also see the need for civilian members, but voting has to be left to Veterans only. The Legion needs to be run by Veterans and an outside oversight department needs to be put in place for all accountability.

I think like most here said, the Legion is fading, and I also agree the government should step in and change or induce change of making a complete overhaul of all Legions.
As it stands today, the Legion has a best friend, the government, and the poppy funds collected, are collected by the Legions across our Country which makes the Legion look good in front of the government and the general population.

That said, I'm sure there's good Legions out there, and also some good Veterans who are members of the Legion, but I don't think that in itself would save the Legions reputation, and perhaps the downward spiral to becoming non existent. JMO

thats the thing they want you to come in drink play bingo and gamble so many injured vets suffer from addictions and last place they need to be is a place that only wants to you spend money on things you struggled with to give up while looking for answers that made you fall into this downward spiral they don't want u to just come in and be social they care about the bottom line how can they get whats in your pocket in to there balance sheet.

Sometimes people just have to accept that things are slipping away and put a stop to it before it completely dies out. The Legion is in a death spiral and the best thing to do would be shut it down. I am sure some newer more relevant organization could be formed that could take over the some of the good things the Legion does. Is the average day modern veteran actually interested in a bricks and mortar drinking hole? Don't think so.

Probably more awkward for you nemo, but I concur the same darn thing as a guy after I joined in 78.
Very cold stares and not felt welcome... never went back. Was it my haircut? They should just close and not be replaced. Heck, the fleet club was a much better riot for me lol.

But perhaps some of their service officers (screened) could complement the 400 new VaC hires/cm's that need training...

Legion was not welcoming to me as a woman in the military when I joined in 79. And it was not welcoming to anyone that was not a WW2 veteran. The Legions were once useful decades ago. But the fact that so many are closing or in financial difficulties shows that the Legions are just not relevant to newer veterans. Maybe it is time for the Legions to close all their places...unless they actually make money. And then just have one office that they operate out of.

Bosn 181 - that's a awesome line, and so true "they looking for compassion from me the military did not issue it to me so i have none"
Lol. Johnny Out.VVV...

i would like to know how many of there members are vets i am sure there can't be to many and i agree with teentitan trying to make the community feel guilty if they looking for compassion from me the military did not issue it to me so i have none

She said they only keep 20 percent of the 60.00 membership fee. Time for the fat cats at the legion HQ to show everyone the books. I would say the legion is slowly fading into the sunset.. Johnny, Out..VVV...

Well this is a new low....trying to make the community feel guilty.

Sooke legion in financial crisis

by Octavian Lacatusu - Sooke News Mirror
Sooke posted Mar 11, 2017 at 10:00 AM


Sooke Legion Branch 54 president Jan Watson points towards the building’s ancient heat pump that will cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace.

The Sooke Royal Canadian Legion is in a bit of financial trouble and now after decades of helping vets and the local community, it’s now turning to the community itself for help.

“We’re broke,” said Paul McTavish, Sooke Legion branch manager, adding the legion has nearly zero operating funds, which means paying bills and staff every month is now a significant challenge.

Sooke’s branch 54 has seen similar swings like this in the past, where its operating needs well surpassed what it brought in at the end of the day. Ironic, as last year alone, $42,000 went through the Legion to various community groups, noted the branch’s secretary Merle Fulton.

Only, the Legion doesn’t keep any of it, as it is technically the community’s money.

Fulton said one of the main issues is the stodgy public perception that all legions across Canada are desperately trying to get away from.

“People think veterans come to drink and smoke, and it’s this dark place, and you can’t come and you can’t be involved ... that is not what we are. We want the community to come, hold their events here, come support us, we support you.”

Just recently, the legion held a beer and burger night to support the Sooke Skating Club, as well a similar event and silent auction to raise funds for the Sooke Royal Marine Search and Rescue. It also supports the cadets, Sooke Youth Choir, even Thai Chi classes, among many others.

Problem is, there’s no money coming in to support the Sooke Legion itself, kind of like that kid on the block who gives his lunch away to every other kid on the street, but has none for himself to eat.

Majority of its membership funds don’t stay here either, as each legion only keeps 20 per cent of the $60 fees. In addition, if someone does make a donation, a local branch cannot provide a tax receipt, unless it’s for the Poppy Fund, and none of that goes to a legion branch anyway.

The candle is burning on both ends as well, as said repair bills are starting to mount due to the building’s age, noted branch president Jan Watson.

“We have rather large repair bills coming up, and that’s taking any sort of cushion that we’ve got, because we need to put it back into the building,” she said.

In the last four years, the plumbing downstairs failed, causing three major leaks, the water heater blew, ice machine was dripping on electrical equipment, and the heat pump requires major work and needs replacing, among others. Last Christmas, the heating broke down, causing thousands in repairs.

It goes without saying that, Watson added, if the local branch goes under, the negative impact on the Sooke community could be significant.

“The Cadets will have to find someplace else, the Navy League, Thai Chi, Jazzercize, everybody.”

“We’re big supporters of the community. Now we’re saying, please come and support us,” she said. “We need your help to keep our doors open. If our doors close, we can’t help the vets, or anyone.”

http://www.sookenewsmirror.com/news/415696574.html