Justin Trudeau Town Hall to be held Feb 01, 2018 Edmonton

Trudeau faces angry veterans in Edmonton

Jeff Wilkinson — February 2, 2018

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is just about finished with his cross-country tour. And he probably knows the public relations exercise isn’t ending quite as well as he expected.

Thursday in Edmonton he was asked why the government isn’t providing better support to Canadian veterans.

“Why are we still fighting certain veterans groups in court? Because they’re asking for more than we are able to give right now,” Trudeau said, answering a question from a veteran, who said he lost his leg to an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan.

That argument might be just a little hard to accept. In 2016, Trudeau was telling Canadians the program to bring tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to Canada could cost $1 billion. In November, 2015, the government committed $678 million over six years to resettle the first 25,000 refugees. In the 2017 budget, the government committed an additional $245 million over the next five years. It looks as if Trudeau will be spending close to the $1 billion he promised.

So when angry veterans confronted the prime minister in Edmonton about their funding problems, what was he supposed to say?

“”I have pledged, and I did pledge and I will continue to pledge that I will do right by you,” Trudeau said. “The changes that we’ve made to our support for veterans are based around recognizing where we went wrong before.”

But the veterans weren’t buying it. One of them said he didn’t think Trudeau was really listening to veterans and that his government’s restoration of the lifelong pension was a “lacklustre” effort at best.

Before the old lifetime pension was eliminated in favour of a lump sum payment, veterans could have received up to $2,700 per month. Under the restored pension plan the Liberal government introduced, the maximum a wounded soldier would ever see is $1,150 per month. Trudeau said his government’s monthly pension amount is lower because it takes into account the cost of services offered by the federal government including post-traumatic-stress treatment and psychological care, support for caregivers and family members, who look after wounded veterans, and job training for those who can still get back into the job market.

But what is really happening here? Is Trudeau starting to realize the national debt has now risen to $1.4 trillion and he’s running out of money? And when given choices to either support the Canadian veterans or bring in Syrian refugees to support his future Liberal election campaigns (he already changed voting rules to allow the earliest refugee arrivals to vote), what was he supposed to do?

And don’t forget, veterans are still smarting from Trudeau’s trade mission to Vietnam last November that forced him to miss Remembrance Day services on Parliament Hill.

So did Trudeau score any points on this cross-country tour that winds up today in Nanaimo? I guess we’ll know come election time in 2019.

https://debatereport.com/canada/trudeau-faces-angry-veterans-in-edmonton/4809