Prince George is one of nine regional Veterans Affairs offices that will be reopened under the new Liberal budget.
The office was shuttered by the previous Conservative government, and the Liberals promise does not say precisely when the offices will open their doors again.
Bruce Gabriel, past president of Prince George’s Royal Canadian Legion who has been leading the charge for a returned office, said he was not surprised by the move.
“I trusted that they would. You got to have some trust in people and they said they would.”
Gabriel said his sense is that the office, closed in 2012, will reopen within the year.
“I think it will be in the near future. They had said before the time frame would be very close,” Gabriel said. “It’s good. Our veterans deserve it.”
Prince George’s regional office serves a lot of members, he said, stretching to Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Burns Lake and down to Williams Lake.
“(The office) covers all the northern area. A lot of people don’t realize that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are veterans too.
“We cover a huge, huge area,” he said. “All these people they were expected to go down south. No one cared about us up here. The Conservatives didn’t care because they had such a strong hold, they thought.”
Gabriel, a long-time Tory, said he last voted Conservative in 2011.
“I told them why. I was ashamed of the way they treated their veterans,” said Gabriel, a 21-year veteran.
The face-to-face is essential, Gabriel said, especially to older people who may not be accustomed to using computers to access support.
“That does not work. People get frustrated but the bottom line is the person who needs the help can’t get it. I think this is the big step in the right direction and I applaud (the Liberals) for doing it,” he said.
Having a veterans office in his home city was about the only positive Cariboo Prince George MP Todd Doherty found in the Liberal budget.
“That’s an area that I’m very supportive of and so I applaud them for that,” said Doherty, a Tory who was elected to his first term in 2015.
He wouldn’t say whether the previous Conservative government made a mistake removing the northern B.C. office.
“I can’t speak to the previous Conservative government because I wasn’t part of that parliament and I can’t tell you what were the deciding factors because I wasn’t part of the decision making. I can tell you as I campaigned I met with veterans,” Doherty said. “Some are receiving all the benefits they needed and some really needed to have that office where they could go into.”
The budget said "Canada's veterans and their families deserve our care, compassion and respect."
It was the only time Prince George was mentioned in the budget, which also promised to reopen offices in Charlottetown, Sydney, Corner Brook, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon, Brandon, and Kelowna. It said it would open an additional office in Surrey and “expand outreach to veterans in the North by working with local partners. This will make it easier for veterans to access services across the country."
Doherty said since he was elected, he had his constituency assistant go to the legion once a week to make sure support is there.
“This is a step in the positive direction,” Doherty said.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said Bruce Gabriel is the president of Prince George’s Royal Canadian Legion. While he held that position in November 2015, he is now the past president at the legion.
According to The Canadian Press veterans emerge as big the budget winners:
OTTAWA - The promised re-equipping of the Canadian military has essentially been postponed until after the next election in a maiden federal Liberal budget that shifts billions of dollars in capital spending to 2020 -- or later.
The Trudeau government's new fiscal plan shoves $3.7 billion in planned defence purchases -- ships, planes and vehicles -- off into the future, but Finance Minister Bill Morneau insists the move does not represent a cut to military funding.
Morneau said the Liberals need a year to figure out Canada's defence priorities.
"In order to make sure we have the funds available at the time when they need those funds, we've reprofiled some in the fiscal framework," he told a news conference prior to tabling the budget in the House of Commons.
"So, when we need the money, the money will be in the fiscal framework. So, we believe that is the appropriate action to take to ensure our military has the appropriate equipment, the planes and the ships they need."
Instead, it was the veterans community that emerged Tuesday as one of the biggest winners in the Liberal spending spree.
Canada's ex-soldiers will see enriched disability awards, expanded access to permanent impairment allowances and a more generous income replacement program for the wounded -- measures totalling $5.6 billion over six years, starting this year.
The budget also retreads a previous commitment to reopen nine regional Veterans Affairs offices shuttered by the previous Conservative government, but does not say precisely when that will happen.
The Liberals promised each of those measures during the fall election campaign.
What was unexpected was the decision to defer big-ticket procurement spending -- a serious issue for a military facing serious rust-out issues.
The Conservatives did the same thing in two previous budgets. The cumulative total of postponed defence purchases has now reached $10.4 billion, said defence analyst Dave Perry of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
For the previous government, the postponement had a lot to do with the balancing the budget, said Perry. To be fair to the Liberals, they need to figure out their defence priorities and fix the broken procurement system, he noted.
"This is reflecting in budgetary terms that they can't buy things," Perry said.
"I don't know if this government really had much of a choice. They walked in and these projects were not going to move."
The political significance, Perry said, is that National Defence will be expecting its money at time when the Liberals will likely have to get serious about cutting the deficit, which is projected this year at $29.4 billion, falling to $14.4 billion by 2020-21.
"They're literally going to have an issue five years from now because that's when the bill arrives," said Perry, who noted that the military is at the point where it needs concrete guarantees that the money will be spent.
"I think if I was National Defence, I would hope you'd already have the money in the bank, instead of having to rely on a promise of some year, some time in the future they'll be able to acquire this stuff."
Although not mentioned in the budget, finance officials say the previous Liberal commitment to maintain annual increases of three per cent to the defence operating budget to offset inflation will stand.
Federal budget documents, released ahead of Tuesday's fiscal plan, suggested that baseline defence funding overall will drop by as much as $400 million when compared with the current budget year, but finance officials say the allocation is routinely topped up throughout the year in supplementary requests.
The budget earmarks $200 million for infrastructure repairs and upgrades at military bases, including reserve armouries.
Just over $586 million has been set aside for promoting international peace and security over three years.
Of that, $450 million goes towards the foreign affairs-run global peace and security fund and $106 million for international police peacekeeping and peace operations programs.
But finance officials say that money is simply being renewed and is not new.
