After reading the story, my reflexive X response to the state-owned CBC’s post on X about this story was: Blame Big Government:
It was reflexive but I was confident it was true. Now I’ve delved into all the articles about it over the years and my reflex proved accurate. Big Government did this. The question answers itself: Make government smaller and simpler and less involved in our lives.
The state-owned CBC (talk about Big-Ass government!) did lots of reporting on this in 2019. As usual, they appear to yearn to blame it on Conservatives as I’ll show you below. But to blame Conservatives would be a real, blatant, hideous fallacy — at least based on what we all know today.
– https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-pensions-tax-credit-error-1.4973891
– https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-affairs-class-action-suit-1.4981240
– https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-class-action-1.5877892
– https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-affairs-lawsuit-settlement-1.7130245
– It started in 2002 (Liberal era). But Liberals didn’t know what was happening. Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) — a huge government bureaucracy — either didn’t know they were doing their calculations incorrectly, or they did know and hid it.
– In 2010-11 (Conservative):Â VAC discovered their own error (assuming with great generosity that they didn’t already know). They quietly/sneakily fixed the error, but didn’t acknowledge they’d been doing it wrong all this time. See “Anatomy of a blunder: How Veterans Affairs quietly buried a $165M accounting error.”
The VAC admitted to an accounting error to the Minister in charge, but VAC covered up the actual extent of the calamity. “Veterans Affairs officials tried to gloss over the benefits calculation error when it was discovered.” And “[C]overed up and downplayed the error to the former Conservative government…“, according to the CBC in 2019.
(This is where the CBC fouled up journalistically: The CBC added to that above sentence that the Conservative government “…was at the time engaged in a massive deficit-cutting exercise” — which I find to be a gratuitous political adornment meant to fallaciously cast blame on the Conservatives (for those who are interested in the philosophy of logical fallacies, it’s a “Genetic Fallacy” or maybe a “Strawman Fallacy”). It’s terrible, biased reporting, is what it is.)
– In 2017-18 (Liberal) a VAC “whistleblower” came clean, and the Liberals promised action, as in payouts of what vets were owed, to make good the $165 million error. “Former veterans ombudsman Guy Parent originally uncovered the accounting error in 2018.” …
But the Liberals slow-rolled the payouts and only 48% of the funds were paid out to date (like, to 2024). Many have died waiting for the payments they were owned, which is deeply disturbing to me.
– December 2020: The court certified a class action lawsuit by veterans.
– February 2024: Federal Court accepted a settlement on the class action lawsuit which adds $817 million on top of the original $165 VAC error.
So it’s bitter-sweet: The taxpayer must now pay up — by a magnitude of five times the original amount — to cover for the government’s bungling, which is the bitter part. But sweetly, vets will reap a deserved reward for the government bungling.
The Court’s class action certification order indicated that the class action lawyers, through federal information access law, could collect government documents. According to the CBC, they’ve “amassed a trove of federal documents about how the federal government dealt with the enormous error.”
Good. So a reckoning can and should be at hand in our future. Sadly, it’ll likely be too late for many of our old Vets who won’t see the day.
Corollary:
The financial news site BNN reporter Sakchi Khandelwal took a stab at the problem today, and she had this to say:
“The Veterans Affairs Canada accounting mistake serves as a stark reminder of the consequences of bureaucratic oversight and the importance of rigorous financial management.”
I’m afraid that’s true but is woefully inadequate.
This was a Big Government bureaucratic blunder, with taints of cover-up corruption in the VAC bureaucracy. The fact that nobody saw what was going on is a testament to the fact that government is so big, so complicated, so overarching, and over-reaching, that nobody — no elected officials — even saw what evils were going on in Government Department #9,722. And apparently, not even the bloated federal government had enough overseers to oversee it. This is what evolutionary biologists and particle physicists call “Big-Ass Out Of Control Government.”
You can try to “oversight” it more, but that’s setting yourself up for failure. Or you can reduce the size and scope of government so it’s humanly oversightable. That way leads to success.
I don’t see any Conservative responsibility here, to the chagrin of CBC reporters who sneakily try to infer it. That is to say I don’t see any responsibility save for their failure to vastly reduce the size of government and therefore the complexity of government.
I don’t see much Liberal responsibility either, except perhaps in their failure to be more publicly vocal and more publicly alarmed about the bureaucratic error (moreover, the apparent coverup) when they were properly informed of it, addressing it more openly, possibly setting up an inquiry, and paying out much faster — immediately — to make it right for our Vets.
And firing people galore.
Given the information we have today, I am loath to blame the Liberals for (yet another) coverup — ie., politically covering up the bureaucrats’ coverup just to save their hides from (yet another) lambasting by a now thoroughly overwrought public. But if that’s what they did, then, well, that’s… I’m speechless. And afraid.
If there was a coverup in the bureaucracy, I expect charges to be laid.
Blame Big Government. It’s too big. Too complicated. Too much meddling in every facet of Canadian life. Too many rules, too many regs, too much tax complication and confusion (even for Big Government bureaucrats, apparently), too much government.
And for that — if we’re trying to find “root causes” as Justin Trudeau once claimed (falsely) to want to find — blame progressives. Big Government is what progressives acknowledge desiring. The current Liberal/NDP party has grown it more than any government to historic proportions. And they — progressives — want to grow it even more with more “investments” (barf), more national welfare schemes, and more rules and regulations and more taxation and more meddling and intrusion.
Reduce government. Reduce government meddling which we can now find in every single facet of Canadian life. Simplify taxation. Reduce taxes. Reduce rules, regulations, and red tape, and mostly, reduce the size and scale of the clearly bloated and out-of-control bureaucratic workforce, most of whom evidently do nothing but add to the bloat — or, indeed, the corruption.
Veterans deserve better. Canadians deserve better.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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