"Shameful Saga"

Greg Weston of Canoe writes on a Shameful Saga:

Flashback to wartime, 1941. Stewart Braden is just a kid in soldier's clothing when he suddenly finds hell, landing in the middle of a perverse military campaign that would forever scar his life and ultimately become Canada's shame.

Day after day, Braden and 3,600 other young Canadian recruits were doused in warfare chemicals until their skin peeled, jammed into narrow dirt trenches saturated with mustard gas, forced to breathe toxic poisons until their lungs bled.

Incredibly, all this suffering and sacrifice was not spent fighting Nazi armies on the battlefields of Europe, now the graveyards where some of Canada's finest hours of military heroism are being celebrated this week.

Instead, Stewart Braden and his comrades were repeatedly gassed in the fields of Alberta and in the laboratories of Ottawa as thousands of human guinea pigs in a secret, government-run program of chemical warfare testing.

[...]

Finally, on the eve of last year's federal election and barely pre-empting the release of a damning report on the issue, Paul Martin's government announced it was finally "setting things right."

The government agreed to pay $24,000 in compensation to each victim or, since the majority of the vets were dead, to their spouses and other estate beneficiaries.

Velma Braden's beloved husband having died in 1992, she applied for the promised compensation. Then it happened: Velma was informed that she would require a copy of her husband's will before her claim could be processed. But like millions of Canadians, particularly of that generation, Stewart Braden had no will -- he simply left what little he had to his wife.

Too bad, the bureaucrats told her. Without a will, there was no way the government could be sure who should get the compensation money.

It didn't seem to matter that the couple had been married almost 50 years, and that no one was contesting Braden's estate.

Nor did it seem to register with any of the bright lights in the Veterans Affairs department that they were already paying Velma her husband's military death benefit.

The regulations said no will, no money. Too bad. So sad.

"It wasn't very nice after all he went through," Velma says with dramatic understatement. No one is quite sure how many other elderly widows have found themselves in the same mess, except there are more than a few.

[...]

An official in the office of Defence Minister Bill Graham said yesterday the issue has been mired in legalities.

"The minister was briefed a few weeks ago and what he directed was, well, let's figure this out."

[Emphasis mine] Sorry to quote most of the article, but I want to make a point: this is an unacceptable situation and I'm sure everyone looking at this example can see how the regulations are too strict and not flexible enough. That's what happens when you rush something out as a PR move instead of a thought out policy. They had fifty years to set things right and waited until it was seen as a good election move before doing anything. As usual with Paul Martin, it was done with great fanfare but with little substance.

Remember when we used to have a government instead of a PR firm interested solely in boosting itself?