Tens of thousands of Canadian veterans who sustained long-term injuries from their military service and are now waiting to find out whether Veterans Affairs Canada will approve their disability claims.
OTTAWA -- Nearly a dozen years ago, Micheal McNeil was hit with an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. The former combat engineer, who is now a 40-year-old father of three in Saint John, N.B., has traded a fight with the Taliban for a constant battle with the federal government instead."They want you to walk away from the benefits. They don't want you to get them. And that's why they make it so hard.
The government has blamed the backlog on an explosion in the number of claims from injured veterans over the past six years, as more benefits became available and more former service members heard about them. Veterans Affairs acknowledges the existence of a backlog, but says the actual size is much smaller. It only counts the total number of complete applications that have been officially assigned to a staff member and been left unresolved longer than 16 weeks. Most experts and advocates say such a breakdown misstates the real extent of the problem.
Amy Green has been waiting since September 2019 to hear whether Veterans Affairs will approve her claim for a traumatic brain injury, which she says was sustained after an Afghan civilian intentionally crashed his motorcycle into her G-Wagon in Kabul in 2004. But that shifts the financial burden from the government to organizations such as the Vancouver-based Veterans Transition Network, which relies on fundraising to make ends meet.
The number of outstanding claims has fallen since the 49,000 peak recorded last March and stood at just over 40,000 as of June. But there are concerns the progress will be fleeting. The department has since said it has approval to extend some of the temporary staff past March, but did not say how many.
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