Ottawa spending fraction of the money budgeted for veterans’ funerals, report shows

We just witnessed a Conservative party convention aimed at cementing support for the governing party among its political base heading into the 2015 federal election.

But judging from Ottawa's inept approach on its veterans file, it's written off Canada's ex-military personnel and their families at the ballot box.

The latest blot comes via a report by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, released Monday, which looked at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Last Post Fund that finances the funerals of impoverished vets.

The Canadian Press reports the review shows only $18.4 million of the fund's $65-million current budget will be handed out.

This news comes in the wake of last year's embarrassing revelation the fund rejected 67 per cent of requests it received in the previous five years, CP noted.

[ Related: Feds not honouring Canada’s veterans by short-changing burial fund ]

Although the Conservative government has boosted the fund's budget, the burial program is aimed mainly at a declining population of Second World War and Korean War vets.

The program's eligibility rules and its means test exclude many Cold War-era and Afghanistan War vets, CP reported.

"A slight increase in the number of projected mortalities is anticipated to increase the incremental costs to the Last Post Fund in 2014-15, followed by a steady decline in veteran mortalities and total costs to the fund," said the report, prepared at the behest of the opposition Liberals.

The fund itself is a non-profit agency supported by Canadian veterans groups, who've increasingly had to come up with money to cover the burial of veterans who are poor but exceeded the minimum annual income needed to be eligible for the government-funded funeral.

In a statement that went up on the Last Post Fund web site last month, retired lieutenant-general Louis Cuppens, honorary fund treasurer, expressed disappointment that the government refuses to include modern-day vets in the program.

"It saddens me that the Government of Canada has not stepped up to this sacred obligation and that the Last Post Fund must rely on charity to bury Veterans who are financially challenged at the time of their death," Cuppens wrote.

In an accompanying plea for donations, Cuppens noted Veterans Affairs Canada's own figures show that 400 modern-day vets die in poverty each year.

"Did you know that Correctional Service Canada provides for a funeral and burial and headstone for a convict who dies while in prison or on parole if the financial means to provide for such are not existent at time of death?" Cuppens said. "Convicts are provided for, yet Canada’s Veterans must rely on the Last Post Fund."

[ Related: Ottawa rapped for booting wounded veterans before they qualify for full pensions ]

The government, for its part, thinks it's doing right by deceased veterans.

Some 57 per cent of applicants qualify for the maximum $7,376 funeral benefit, Joshua Zanin, spokesman for Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino, told CP.

"Our government continues to work with stakeholders in order to ensure funeral programs continue to meet the needs of veterans and their families," Zanin said.

Given the bad publicity generated from the government's policy blunders on veterans' pensions and disability payments to wounded soldiers, the last thing the Conservatives need is to be seen as miserly when it comes to burying veterans.

Look for a well-timed revision to the eligibility criteria that embraces more modern-day vets as we head into the spring 2015 election.