With Industry Canada's approval of Burger King's takeover of Tim Horton's, Oakville officially became the home of the Whopper. But Gerald Caplan writes that the real home of the Whopper is Ottawa. And, while several past governments might lay claim to telling the biggest whoppers, the Harper government is certainly in the running for the gold medal:
But last week the government finally won the gold medal for perhaps the most despicable act ever of deceit and outright lying. And wouldn’t you just know, given the Harper record, that it was Canada’s veterans they lied to.
Stephen Harper and his government have seemed inexplicably indifferent to vets returning from war zones with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the latest Defence Department stats, 160 military personnel committed suicide between 2004 and March 31, 2014. That compares to the 138 Canadian soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014. It’s a stunning comparison, isn’t it? By any measure it’s a crisis of epidemic proportions, and yet the government refused to take it seriously. Rhetoric? Of course; a great deal. Money? Some. Yet no serious attempt to deal with the problem. It’s truly baffling.
So, two days before the auditor general lambasted the Harperites for the delays in getting services to the victims of PTSD, Julian Fantino announced that $200 million dollars were going to be spent on providing those services. However:
The $200-million money is not for the next six years at all. It’s for the next 50 years, as the government was soon forced to acknowledge, maybe $4-million a year. According to Scott Maxwell, executive director of the activist Wounded Warriors Canada, the 50-year figure “has never been mentioned in any briefing, in any press release or conference.” The government wilfully covered up the truth from beginning to end.
Othello got it right. One may smile and smile and be a villain.
