Canada’s army ombudsman is asking on the Division of Nationwide Defence (DND) to make an exception and provide particular compensation to former language and cultural advisers who served alongside Canadian troops in Afghanistan.
Gregory Lick is issuing his name for compensation as Canada marks the tenth anniversary of its army withdrawal from the nation’s longest-ever conflict.
In a letter despatched final week to Defence Minister Invoice Blair, Lick stated there’s precedent for particular compensation. He cited the federal authorities’s determination in 2017 to pay cadets injured in a 1974 grenade explosion at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier in Quebec.
“Ministerial authority has been used up to now to deal with gaps in care and protection for many who discovered themselves in conditions the place they didn’t have entry to commensurate advantages and companies to those that they served alongside,” Lick stated within the letter, dated March 8, 2024 and obtained by CBC Information.
Lick and Blair met on the finish of February to debate the plight of the advisers, who’re Canadian residents of Afghan descent.
They had been recruited immediately by the Division of Nationwide Defence between 2002 and 2009. Many Canadian troopers and consultants say that with out their assist in the sector, the military couldn’t have engaged with guerilla warfare in Afghanistan.
Regardless that they wore uniforms, the advisers had been civilian contractors, not troopers. A lot of them returned house from Afghanistan injured and damaged.
They had been permitted to use for federal well being advantages solely inside six months of their return. Not like troopers, they didn’t qualify for Veterans Affairs companies.
CBC Information first profiled the plight of the advisers within the fall of 2019. DND subsequently agreed to assist an effort to get them advantages via the Ontario Office Security and Insurance coverage Board (WSIB), which is the place injured federal workers get despatched.
However most of the advisers’ claims had been denied by the WSIB. Critics complained that the board had no expertise in coping with accidents sustained in a conflict zone.
The Canadian Forces ombudsman is coping with about 65 instances of advisers whose claims had been denied.
“I strongly imagine that we’ve got an obligation for his or her well being, well-being, and monetary assist,” Lick wrote. “They made a decisive impression to CAF operations, however many have suffered considerably, and in silence, since then.”
The Afghan-Canadians who served as civilian advisers for the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan, serving to in a number of the most harmful missions, say they got here house to little or no assist from the federal government.
The declare adjudications that passed off earlier than WSIB “weren’t constructive, nor consultant of their sacrifice to Canada,” Lick added.
The WSIB is masking some advisers’ medical prices going ahead. However it’s not reimbursing them for out-of-pocket medical bills, misplaced earnings or different advantages associated to the time earlier than their claims had been permitted.
Diana Ebadi, a spokesperson for Blair’s workplace, advised CBC Information the minister is “conscious of the problems that former language and cultural advisers are at present dealing with and is actively how we are able to handle and assist them.”
“They deserve entry to the psychological helps that they want, and the minister’s staff has labored with the division on participating the WSIB on this situation, in order that these claims are permitted,” she added. “Former language and cultural advisers had been crucial to Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.”
On Sunday, the army and Veterans Affairs Canada marked the tenth anniversary of the top of Canadian army involvement in Afghanistan. Greater than 12 years of troop deployments got here to an finish in Kabul in 2014 when a army coaching mission ended.
Talking at a ceremony of remembrance held on the foot of the Nationwide Struggle Memorial in Ottawa, Gen. Wayne Eyre, the nation’s high army commander, mirrored on the lingering impression of the conflict.
“[The] Afghanistan expertise has left none untouched,” Eyre stated. “Many — together with households — had been scarred bodily, mentally and morally from it. Many people have requested and have been asking, ‘Was it value it?'”
