The Dominion - veterans

Building Heroes

Tim McSorley — Mon, 31 May 2010 05:41:55 +0000

Professors protest Project Hero as military PR ploy

Montreal—Project Hero, a military-supported, private sector scholarship program with the mission to “provide undergraduate scholarships to children of fallen soldiers,” has become the target of growing criticism across Canadian campuses. Since professors at the University of Regina spoke out against the program in March, 661 people have signed a growing petition which calls on people to “stand against Project Hero.”

Over the past year, former Canadian Forces chief of staff, Retired General Rick Hillier, and Kevin Reed, the head of the Grey Horse Corporation, have spread Project Hero to 26 campuses across Canada. The program’s tag-line is “Gifting education to the children of our fallen soldiers,” but many critics see the program as both a dangerous encroachment of the military into universities and a tool to drum up support for an increasing military presence in Canadian politics and culture.

“So let's be clear about this: Project Hero is not about these children's education,” explained Martin Hebert, associate professor in the department of anthropology at the Universite Laval and member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace (AJP), who have been active in opposing Project Hero. “The real beneficiary of all the hype that this project has created for itself are the Canadian Forces, not the soldiers' families.”

Public resistance to the program began last March, when 16 professors at the University of Regina sent an open letter to the president of their university to express dissatisfaction and opposition to the university joining Project Hero.

“A few of us didn’t want our university to participate in [Project Hero], so we put together a letter outlining our objections and asking what we would like to see happen in place of it,” Garson Hunter, associate professor of social work at the University of Regina and signatory of the letter, explained. “It has to do with the encroachment of the military into the university structure...what we objected to here was the idea of signing onto what is basically a propaganda campaign.”

The open letter called on the University of Regina to take three actions: withdraw from Project Hero, push for government funding for universal access to post-secondary education and hold a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian imperialism.

“We’re absolutely fine with our faculty and staff disagreeing with some of the things that happen at the university,” said Barb Pollock, spokesperson for the University of Regina. “A university is absolutely the place where diverse opinions and debate happen all the time, the fact that 15 or 16 of our faculty, out of about 400 disagree with something is fine.”

Despite this belief, the university is moving ahead with Project Hero, with no plans to hold the public forum called for in the letter.

While university administration has made neutrality the party line, media and local Conservative politicians—including Regina MPs Tom Lukiwski and Andrew Scheer—attempted to turn the 16 into pariahs. Scheer called for the professors to withdraw their letter and write a public apology, calling their actions “disgusting.” The signatories received messages such as, "If you can't get behind our troops, get in front," and, "You deserve to be taken to Afghanistan and strapped to a roadside IED."

Hunter considers the belligerent Conservative reaction to have been an attempt to deflect oncoming criticisms from the Afghan detainee commission, which he points out could implicate General Hillier. The retired army chief of staff also sits as the chancellor of Memorial University in Newfoundland, the first school to sign onto Project Hero.

Interview requests to both Hillier and Memorial University were not returned.

Project Hero is what Hunter calls an “unfunded scholarship,” in that it exists without any external financial backing and asks universities to waive the fees for these students. This is augmented at a number of schools by a bursary to offset the cost of books and living expenses for the children of fallen soldiers.

The University of Regina is one of the schools that offers extra funding for living expenses of these students. Barb Pollock explained that the money for this extra bursary would come from the university’s scholarship and awards fund, which funds around 3,000 awards each year. Critics are asking whether this funding could be better spent, pointing out that tuition fees are climbing across the country, making university education increasingly difficult to afford and raising the potential debt load of prospective graduates.

“With Project Hero, they are asking universities to cover [tuition and fees],” Hunter explained. “Project Hero doesn’t actually contribute ten cents...students here are facing rising tuition, for example our students are facing a five per cent tuition increase this September.”

Beyond questioning the origin of funding for the program, only a handful of students have actually been funded through Project Hero raising questions about the motivations behind the program,

“In fact, the University of Regina may never see one [such] student,” Hunter said. “It’s silly, you would have to be 15 years old right now to benefit from Project Hero...and I don’t know why you would, you would actually receive more from Veterans Affairs.”

Another major critique which has been levelled against Project Hero is the effective redundancy of the program to reach its stated goal of “gifting education.”

Act C-28, the Children of Deceased Veterans Education Assistance Act, has existed since 1985 as “a program to help children carry on with their education past high school if they have a CF parent who dies as a result of military service.” The program, funded through Veterans Affairs Canada, provides up to $6,700 per year to pay for post secondary education and the associated living expenses of the children of deceased veterans. Project Hero thus exists to fulfill a role that the Canadian government has been filling for over 20 years.

“If the only preoccupation of the Canadian Forces in this matter were to see that deceased soldiers' children get a university education, the matter could easily have been addressed by simple, private, and dignified measures, such as an increase of the soldiers' insurance policy,” said Hebert.

Politicians and the mainstream press took the 16 professors' opposition to the program as symbolizing their complete opposition to any aid going to the children of deceased soldiers. Dr. Maximillian Forte, associate professor of anthropology at Concordia University, described his colleagues' treatment as a “shocking degree of bullying” by the mainstream media, politicians, and extreme right-wing bloggers.

“Like the 16 University of Regina professors...AJP does not argue that students who have suffered the financial impact of a parent lost in war should be banned from getting scholarships,” explained Forte, who also works on the steering committee of AJP. “Instead, we argue that all students in dire financial straits should receive similar opportunities, including those who have lost a parent for whatever reason; universities should not be in the business of sanctifying one death as more heroic than another.”

Concordia was the first university in Quebec to sign onto Project Hero in 2009, followed shortly by McGill. In a press release, Judith Woodward, president of Concordia University, called the program “a fitting way to honour the memory of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice through military service.”

Project Hero is also an example of how, off-campus, the links between corporations and the military are increasing as well, says Hunter. Kevin Reed, executive director of the program, was made an honorary lieutenant colonel of the 31 Service Brigade of the Canadian Forces in December of 2008, part of an expanding program which ascribes honorary military titles to corporate leaders in exchange for their support of the military.

“We’re getting this really close connection between the military and the corporate interest who benefit from these budgets,” Hunter said. “You don’t get the Canadian public sympathetic by showing them the body parts of children killed in Afghanistan, you get support by having a Highway of Heroes and with programs like Project Hero.”

Reed is also a member of Canada Company, a registered charity founded in 2006 with the self-professed aim of providing “outreach between Canada’s Armed Forces and the corporate world.” Members of Canada Company are required to donate a minimum of $1,250 to join the ranks, receiving a pin with the group’s motto “Many Ways to Serve.” Canada Company also provides a scholarship for the children of deceased soldiers, which it has given out since 2007.

Calls to Reed were not returned.

The roll-out of Project Hero comes as Canada’s annual military budget, according to a 2008 study by the Centre for Canadian Policy Alternatives, is at its highest point since World War II—and rising. Canada has pledged to pull combat troops out of Afghanistan by next year, but as military spending increases, it poses questions about the increasing cultural presence of the Canadian Forces.

“These programs are actually embarrassing the Canadian Forces, making it look to the public that they don’t support the dependent children,” Hunter said. “We don’t call it Hero Day on November 11, we call it Remembrance Day, the name itself is jingoistic...this is a not-too-well-hidden propaganda campaign.”

Cameron Fenton is Membership Co-ordinator at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

Project Hero

No Man Left Behind

Kyle Hodnett — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:30:06 +0000

Canadian veterans failed by 2006 Veterans Charter

MONTREAL—Military training prepares you for many things.

Here are a few it doesn’t: Being utterly isolated in crowded rooms because of the nature of your experiences. Facing a lifetime of stunted potential and awkward glances because of a maimed body. The teeth-grinding rage that drives away all those closest to you. Going to funeral after funeral of once bright and strong but now unrecognizable young men and women who have died with needles in their arms in filthy alleys.

The military teaches its soldiers to never leave a man behind on the battlefield. And yet, through a lack of reintegration support and a privatized compensation program, a new generation of young Canadian veterans are being systematically left behind by their government and, by extension, their society.

The new Veterans Charter was released in 2006, promising veterans a new era of reintegration and support. One of the motives for the change was that under the old system, governed by the Veteran’s Act of 1939, even a small pension of $1,000 a month for an expected lifetime of a 27-year-old could cost the treasury $4.5 million.

“We were spending a lot of money [prior to 2006],” explained Raymond Lalonde, head of Veterans Affairs Canada’s (VAC) national centre for operational stress injuries.

The 2006 Veterans Charter uses a lump sum model. Lalonde explained that the workers compensation programs of Australia, Germany and the Nordic countries were studied in the creation of the new charter.

Robert Oliphant, Liberal critic for veterans affairs, stated in an interview that these lump sums are an inadequate way to deal with the payment system because the Government of Canada should have a lifetime relationship with veterans. Under the new system, the burden of support is passed off to Service Income Support Insurance Plan, what some allege is simply a thin veil for Manulife Financial, the multinational insurance giant. The most a veteran can expect today is a one-time lump sum of $276,079.70.

"My instincts tell me the last thing you want to do when a young soldier comes back from overseas, perhaps with an operational stress injury, or with a dependency on alcohol or drugs, is give him $250,000 to self-medicate," said Veterans Ombudsman Col (Retired) Pat Stogran, a veteran of Afghanistan and missions in the former Yugoslavia, in an interview with the Ottawa Sun.

Many of the soldiers and their families are not receiving the social and psychological support they need. Private Frederick Couture lost his foot to a land mine. He attempted suicide several times. Despite this obvious indicator, the Canadian Forces (of which he was still a member) left him at home in the care of his mother, in whose arms he died after shooting himself.

Dawson Bayliss, wounded in an improvised explosive device strike in 2006, spent years fighting for treatment while displaying classic symptoms of a closed head wound. He was handed a lump sum of $30,000 and disappeared into haze of alcohol and drugs. He died in his sleep at 24 beside his pregnant wife. She receives no support.

Warrant Officer Fielsamier, a veteran of Yugoslavia, Haiti and repeated Afghan tours, killed himself after asking for help at the base clinic for symptoms of Post Tramatic Stress Disorder and being sent home with pills.

This is not an exhaustive list. The Forces recorded 16 suicides by serving members of the military this year, its highest level since tracking began in 1994. (And, according to Janice Summersby, chief public relations officer of VAC, suicides of released veterans have still not been tracked accurately.)

Veterans groups have called for sweeping changes to the Veterans Charter. Denis Manogue, a veteran who returned his medals to the Governor General because of dissatisfaction with his treatment under the new system, put it most eloquently:

“The government needs to do the right thing now. The issue some say is complex is not really a complex issue at all. It is about fundamental fairness and doing the right thing on behalf of those of us souls who were willing to sign a blank cheque made out to the people of Canada for an amount up to and including our lives."

Canadian men and women are fighting a war they didn’t start and the history of the Afghan state indicates they cannot win. They return to a society that is largely indifferent to their experiences, and to their future. This is no small problem: to date, more than 130,000 Canadians have rotated through Afghanistan, and Canada is now paying the price of their neglect through social violence and lost potential.

William Ray is a writer living in Montreal and 10-year veteran of the Armed Forces.

Past Due

Remembering Bureaucracy

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:50:37 +0000

Not all war veterans are remembered

Jules Paivio receives no veterans' benefits for fighting in the Spanish Civil War. photo: Rachel Rosen

It is the year of the veteran, and as cannons blare and politicians make speeches praising the sacrifice of soliders, one group of Canadian freedom fighters dwindles without a penny in pensions or official recognition.

Jules Paivio was 19, working in a Sudbury department store when he decided to head for Spain along with more than 1,200 other Canadians, to join the fight against fascism.

The year was 1936. General Francisco Franco led a military coup against Spain's elected leftist government. Western democracies, trying to appease an increasingly aggressive Adolph Hitler, issued an arms embargo against the Spanish Republic.

"I saw the agony of the Spanish people on the news reels and it touched me," said Paivio, now 88.

The Spanish Civil War is seen by many historians as the classic case of right versus wrong: an elected government supported by peasants, workers and small business people standing against a fascist dictator backed by the military, industrialists, large land owners and Church officials.

It inspired Pablo Picasso to paint his famous Guernica, Ernest Hemingway to write For Whom the Bell Tolls and much more poetry, prose and intellectual discourse.

William Lyon Mackenzie-King's Liberal government forbade Canadians from fighting in the war, so Paivio with other young communists, anarchists and believers in the Republic bused to New York, sailed to France, and crossed into Spain joining 40,000 others in the international brigades.

"I didn't tell my folks I was going," he chuckles.

Paivio received three weeks of training with old Canadian Ross Rifles, before being shipped to the front, trying to defend Madrid, the Spanish capital, from fascist encirclement. After three months of trench warfare and some intensive training, he was put on a campaign to break through enemy lines.

According to Paivio, the Spanish Civil War was a classic example of right versus wrong. photo: Rachel Rosen

"They (the Spanish people) were always happy they had international volunteers helping them. Everyone understood 'no pasaran,' (they shall not pass) so if they didn't speak English they understand no pasaran and that fist, that salute," reminisces Paivio. In 1996, the Spanish government invited surviving veterans back to Spain, and honoured them with Spanish citizenship. Nearly half the Canadians who served died fighting fascism.

The attempts to break fascist lines were unsuccessful. And the tide turned against the anti-fascists. The left, as it so often does, turned on itself. "The Trotskyites cut our supply lines," said Paivio.

While Franco's fascists received planes, weapons and soldiers from Germany and more than 100,000 Italian troops, Paivio's Republican side had no international support, other than a few Soviet military advisers and an insufficient supply of weapons. "We always held out that the democracies would come around and provide us with weapons. But it was not to be," he said.

Paivio was captured and spent a year in a prison camp facing beatings with rifle butts, burns from cigarettes, constant interrogations and a bad case of scurvy. He was freed in a swap for Italian prisoners in 1939 as the war wound down and Spain succumbed to fascist control.

"It was in Spain, that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy," wrote French writer Albert Camus after the fascist victory.

After his release, Paivio made it to France and hopped a steamship home in secret, "so there wouldn't be demonstrations in our honour." Thousands still turned out at Toronto's Union Station to greet one group of returning vets.

"When we got back, we resumed our political activity and tried to find jobs," he said. But for Paivio, the call came again soon. When World War Two broke out, he had married but he enlisted again, legally this time, teaching map-reading in Petiwawa because the army wouldn't send him overseas.

The government and veterans' groups continue to deny official recognition for Spanish Civil War fighters. "Veterans benefits are only available to veterans who served in a war in which Canada was an official participant," said Janice Summerby, spokesperson for Veterans Affairs.

"Obviously, many Canadians went on their own to serve but did so without government encouragement. This is an issue that has been debated in the House of Commons and various governments have decided to stick with the status quo," she said.

Trade unions, student groups, and progressive entertainers have raised funds over the years for memorials in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa.

When speaking of the situation today, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the old model of socialism, Paivio, still a communist, admits, "there is not that clear understanding of right and wrong, where you can serve and do your bit. It was kind of a unique situation at the time; there were a people who you could help and support. That's why it was so easy to get volunteers to go," he said.