Here is one for the Red Ensign
bloggers.
Last summer the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the claim in a class action
suit brought by vets and the heirs of vets who had been incapacitated and had
had their affairs managed by the Federal Government. The Supreme Court of
Canada on July 17, 2003 ruled that the claim before it was barred by a
section of the Veterans Affairs Act introduced in 1990 which barred
actions for interest on monies held and administered under the War Veterans
Allowance Act. In doing so the Court concluded:
The respondent and the class of disabled veterans it
represents are owed decades of interest on their pension and benefit funds. The
Crown does not dispute these findings. But Parliament has chosen for undisclosed
reasons to lawfully deny the veterans, to whom the Crown owed a fiduciary duty,
these benefits whether legal, equitable or fiduciary. The due process
protections of property in the Bill of Rights do not grant procedural rights in
the process of legislative enactment. They do confer certain rights to notice
and an opportunity to make submissions in the adjudication of individual rights
and obligations, but no such rights are at issue in this appeal. While the due
process guarantees may have some substantive content not apparent in this
appeal, there is no due process right against duly enacted legislation
unambiguously expropriating property interests.
So you go to war for
the country, get disabled for the country, put your property in the hands of the
country only to have the legislature of the country cut out the interest by a
few words in an amending statute. Nice.
Happy am I, then, to read two lower
court
rulings from last December (published only now in the Ontario Reports) in
which the Superior Court of Ontario court ruled that the Supreme Court of Canada
only barred a part of the relief and that there are other remedies available to
the vets and their families. The matter will no doubt work its way up the courts
again and years will pass before resolution but it is my hope that the resting
place of these assets of our disabled vets will be someplace other than the
general coffers of the national treasury.
To be fair to all sides, the Canadian War Amps came out against the court
case early on and felt interest should only be paid out in “justifiable cases“.
My feeling is that but for the disability of the vets, the interest on their
assets would have passed to successors whether children or 57th cousins and as
such was not the government’s to withhold except for the intervention of the
disability.
So…why do people presume we dislike our 57th cousins anyway?