A former soldier with PTSD is suing the federal government, accusing it of mishandling his case file and causing him to miss out up to $1,000 per month in benefits.
When former master corporal Charles Scott left the army in 2008, a note was scribbled in his Veterans Affairs file warning that he faced a significant risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder.
The warning was never followed up on by the department; no one ever contacted him about it and no one ever arranged for treatment. Scott himself didn’t know about the assessment until more than a decade later, after he applied under privacy law to see his file — and several years after he had sought treatment for PTSD on his own.
It wouldn’t be the last time the former combat soldier and army intelligence operative, who served with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Bosnia and Afghanistan, fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy.
Scott launched a lawsuit in Federal Court last month accusing Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) of negligence and of violating federal law (the Veterans Well-being Act) in its handling of his file.
“It gives me no pleasure to sue Canada, a country that I joined to serve for benefits that impact me and my very young family,” Scott, 45, told CBC News.
Scott said that his Veterans Affairs case manager stopped returning his calls and emails in the winter of 2019, just as the Liberal government was preparing to launch its long-awaited pension-for-life plan for Canada’s former soldiers.
Buried and forgotten
What Scott didn’t know at the time — and what it took an access-to-information request filed by him with the federal government to fully explain — is that his case manager had been gone from the department since early 2019. Scott’s file, and possibly those of others, lay buried and forgotten in the Edmonton VAC office — and no one noticed until Scott called the veterans’ crisis line in late April 2019.
“My file was abandoned and not handed over,” he said. “The veteran team service manager in Edmonton did not hand over my file to another case