Thank you very much. I think that's a very pertinent question.

In preparation to come here, I did a little bit of research. I'm going to go back to one of the previous questions. We have the legislative view of it, which is the declaration of war under the law of international armed conflict. It certainly talks about a beginning and an end, but it's a legal entity. When you start breaking it down into, effectively, the administrative processes that fall under the National Defence Act or the veterans charter, etc., this is where it becomes a noun.

Bear with me here. I thought, what is war? There is nothing that we have heard from any of your witnesses that tells you that you do not bleed red, no matter what legislation calls it. I know that sounds pretty harsh, but in the impact on families and members from injury and death, it doesn't matter what we legally call it, so I thought I'd give you a couple of interesting points.

In the Oxford dictionary, “war”, as a noun, is a conflict carried out by force of arms between nations or between parties against each other, so basically that includes the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Kosovo. Do you see where I'm going here?

What I also thought was interesting is that we know that from 1945 on, when Canada then looked at the UN charter and it became “police action” and other names, we understand that it was to walk away from global conflict as we had known it, but did you know that under the UN charter, they define war not as a declaration but as an action?

Interestingly, they define war as any conflict that meets the criteria of armed conflict according to the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols.

As a health services person in the Persian conflict, I wore a red cross, and those Royal Canadian Regiment soldiers provided force protection for us because I was only to raise by arm in defence, as opposed to any other reason.

They talk about additional protocols: “An armed conflict exists when there is a resort to armed force between States (international armed conflict) or protracted violence between government authorities and organized armed groups within a State (non-international armed conflict)”.

Why does this matter? It matters because it talks about the actions that take place. If we were to take the legislation and apply it to those of us who have served, you can be a war veteran if, administratively, we write the definition of “war” in there, but when they look at “special duty area”.... Again, I'm not an expert in this. We need very clever people who write regulations and the policies that fall out of it, along with the Veterans Well-being Act, but when you look at a special duty area—and there are all sorts of other things that come with it—why can you not have...? If I use all of the examples provided by my colleagues here and the many places that we've been, they get a war designation.

From a benefit perspective, we can do it one way, but from the commemoration perspective of a war veteran, we are asking to be recognized for the ultimate sacrifice to our country.

Why are we in dispute? It's because it's very hard to define the family that we create and the environments that we go into in a bureaucratic process. It's about recognition. It's about dignity. It's about justice.

There is potential, and I think it's worth looking into bringing the noun “war” into the regulation at the policy level, making an assessment and seeing if that works. Take it out of legislation and put it into a lower level.

Thank you.

Transcript

Discussions (0)