UPDATED: Something For The Harper Base To Ponder

Unless they want to add complete hypocrisy to their many other shortcomings, members of the Harper base have much to consider these days, not least of which is their leader's contemptuous treatment of military veterans. The group Harper has been quite fond of using for propaganda purposes knows only too well how shabbily they have been treated upon their return from risky, some would say foolhardy, engagements abroad. Finally, if the veterans have their way, a day of reckoning is at hand.

Two veterans with combined service of 52 years, Tom Beaver and Ron Clarke, write that the upcoming election is the perfect opportunity for those who claim to support our vets to make their outrage felt. And they have much reason to feel outrage.

[We] did not come home to peace but to another battle, this time with Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

Their shameful record of failure to properly support veterans in the last decade is well-documented.

Within weeks of entering office the Conservatives brought into law a bill which stripped from disabled soldiers the right to a lifetime pension. This was replaced by a woefully inadequate one-time lump-sum payment.

When veterans sought justice in the courts, the Conservatives spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to oppose us — saying there was no special obligation by government to its military personnel.

Despite documented evidence of increasingly longer waiting times, the Conservatives proceeded to kill 900 jobs, slash budgets and close nine veterans offices. Meanwhile, Veterans Affairs managers collected more than $500,000 in reward money for cutting costs.

More of us took our own lives than were killed in the entire Afghanistan War. The number of soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder has more than doubled. Yet getting timely help is very tough.

The veterans discovered they were dealing with a new enemy well-versed in a different kind of warfare:

When veterans protested the cutbacks and the loss of meaningful pensions, the government tried to smear the courageous soldiers who were standing up. The government was caught circulating private medical records to politicians to discredit the veterans involved.

Between 2006 and 2014, the Conservative government clawed-back more than $1 billion from money budgeted to take care of returning veterans.

Both Beaver and Clarke, however, are hopeful that redress is near:

The most recent poll by Insights West shows a startling 73 per cent of Canadians are dissatisfied with how the Conservative government has treated veterans. More surprising is that 64 per cent of Conservative voters in the 2011 election are dissatisfied, with 25 per cent of Conservative voters very dissatisfied.

One-third of Conservative voters go one step further and say the lack of support of veterans is a “reason to defeat Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives” in this year’s federal election.

It is very encouraging that the poll shows so much support for better treatment for veterans, but there is only one survey that really counts for Canada’s veterans and that’s on Oct. 19.

On that day our organization, Canadian Veterans — Anyone But Conservative — Campaign 2015, is asking Canadians to support fair treatment and respect for veterans by voting for the candidate in your riding who has the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate.

For the sake of our country and our veterans, please join us and let’s work together to defeat Stephen Harper and his Conservative government.

There are many reasons to get behind this movement. The gross mistreatment of veterans is one of them.

UPDATE: Read veteran Harry Smith's thoughts on the Harper regime's mistreatment of veterans here.

Some Thoughts From ThinkingManNeil

In response to my morning post, ThinkingManNeil offered some passionate and very interesting comments. With his permission, I am featuring them as a separate post:

I was never really interested in politics until the mid-1990's. Up to then I felt like many that it was something that politicians, poli-sci majors, and pundits busied themselves with, and through glacially slow processes it worked its way into our everyday lives with little notice. I voted regularly - usually Liberal, though I did once vote for the PC's because Joe Clarke struck me as a decent man - but my votes were never party- or issue-driven.

Then, in mid-1996 after having had to stop working due to health issues, I decided to take a new tack in my life and I enrolled in college to study commercial photography with the idea of making a new career where I could work at my own pace while doing something I enjoyed immensely, thinking that both would contribute to my overall well being. It was during this time, after just having moved into new digs in the town where the college was that I heard then Ontario Minister for Social Services, David Tsubouchi, say in an interview that people on welfare who couldn't make ends meet should dicker with their local grocery store managers over the price of low-end tuna. When I heard that - something I'd never heard before in Ontario politics - I knew things had changed.

Of course, this was followed by other Mike Harris neo-con travesties and tragedies such as the Walkerton tainted water scandal, the fire sale of provincial assets such as the 407 highway, cancellation of rent controls. defunding of hospitals and the commensurate loss of doctors and nurses, cuts to education while corporations enjoyed grants and tax cuts, the OPP assault on OCAP protesters on the grounds of Queen's Park, and the murders of Dudley George and Kimberly Rogers.

It was during this period of the Harris regime that I finally realized that politics can, and does, have a very real - and sometimes devastating - impact on people's lives. I also realized I could not go on without paying closer attention.

Since then we've seen the horrors of the Bush-Cheney years, and that we now find ourselves in the midst of our own fascist nightmare with Stephen Ratfucking Harper, whose crimes against Canada, Canadians, and, by extension, the world are legion and so familiar to all of us here that they do not bear repeating.

I still fear, however, that the fix is already in for this "election". With a needlessly early call that will stretch it out weeks beyond normal, it's clear that Harper's dirty tricks are already at work, aiming to exhaust the opposition's funding and wear down the public. That and his Karl-Rove-ian gerrymandering of electoral ridings in predominantly Conservative districts shows that Shit Head's "take no prisoners" attitude is still very much alive and well. This bastard isn't going to let the inconvenience of such notions as elections and democracy undo all that he's worked to create (and destroy) in Canada since he came on the scene. The Canada Health Act, tattered as it is, has yet to have the life choked out it by a death of a thousand funding cuts, and the doors opened to a privatized, for-profit healthcare system. And there are still privatized super prisons for protesters, pot heads, and the indigent to be built and sabres to be rattled at ISIL and Putin.

I genuinely fear what what will be left of Canada if Harper takes the next election...or the next...or the next.

He did promise we wouldn't recognize our lovely home after he was finished with it, didn't he? We're already more than half way there...

N.