If Ye Break Faith

Colonel Laurie Hawn of Strong and Free has posted on an article by Peter Worthington in Sunday's Toronto Sun. I recommend you read both. The specific story concerns a former military dependent named Krista Bruton-Anderson, but also affects the citizenship status of thousands of former military dependents.

She was born in the military hospital on the Canadian base at Lahr, Germany, where her father was a soldier (Intelligence Corps). A birth certificate was issued. When her parents returned to Canada, so did Krista, where she has lived ever since.

When contacted, DND public affairs at first insisted there must be a mistake -- children born overseas to service personnel, especially on a Canadian base, were automatically citizens. Citizenship and immigration in Ottawa also believed being born on a Canadian military base to Canadian military parents and possessing a Canadian birth certificate was proof of citizenship. Krista knows otherwise.

...Life was normal until she grew up, got married -- then tried to get her SIN changed to her married name. The ministry of human resources rejected her birth certificate and said no, she wasn't a Canadian citizen, and destroyed her social insurance card.

"A few weeks later I was contacted and told my application had been returned as I didn't have proper proof of Canadian citizenship, and that my SIN card had been destroyed," Anderson says. "I have been without a SIN card ever since."

It seems that Human Resources Canada (one of those Orwellian departmental names in which Ottawa specializes) changed the rules after 9/11 to require such individuals to jump through several bureaucratic hoops before their citizenship would be recognized by their government. The process can exceed eight months because of the usual bureaucratic backlogs and will cost $75.00.

Now, I happen to be an airforce brat and have had the great privilege and honour of holding Her Canadian Majesty's commission. Although I was born in Canada, many of my childhood friends were born overseas on Canadian military bases, (such as Marville France, or Lahr and Baden, Germany) where their fathers happened to be serving a four year tour of duty. Military dependents accompanied their parents as a matter of course in those days and no one would have dreamed that a child born on a Canadian base of Canadian military parents would not be recognized in the future as a citizen by the Canadian Government.

No one it seems, but the contemporary dreary dreadful dregs of the federal Department of Orwellian grotesquerie known as HRDC. In what miasmic, federal, fecal, bog of moral vacuity do these creatures breed? It is vital we find out so we can quarantine the slimy, sleazy, beastoids and their pus-brained political masters. (Steady Mad one, steady. Remember when you started this blog two months ago you promised yourself you would maintain the courtesies and not swear.... Remember!)

Ah yes, ... ahem, ... The Liberal government. Liberals have a peculiar knack for repeatedly doing exactly the wrong thing when it comes to our military forces. Once again we see this party treating its uniformed members and their families in an utterly contemptible manner.

Can their aim really be to bring the whole proud Canadian Forces to its knees and then kick each and every member where it really hurts? No? Is the goal then to abolish all the regiments, ground all the aircraft and scuttle all the warships? What is the plan? Death by rust, ... fiscal starvation, ... sneering neglect? No?

What then? One cannot attribute so many blunders to simple accidental political oversights. The Liberals are accomplishing what the whole arrayed might of the German armed forces and their allies could not do in two long and bloody world wars. There has to be an actual evil, twisted, pointy-headed, person directing this farce of public policy. There has to be a conscious decision to degrade the fighting capacity of the armed forces of this nation in such a criminal and unconscionable fashion.

Our Canadian Armed Forces survived Queenston Heights, the Somme, Paschendale, Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, Ortona, Normandy, the Scheldt, Hong Kong, the Battle of Britain, the strategic bomber campaign over Germany, the frozen convoys to Murmansk and the U boat wolf packs of the North Atlantic.

The battle honours are long and illustrious and the graves of our war dead fill foreign fields with their silent vigil. But in the end, our proud Armed Forces are being brought down by the Liberal Party of Canada and the utter refusal of we the people to demand better. "If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep though poppies grow in Flanders fields."

It must be deliberate, for neglect alone cannot account for Total, Bloody, Bullshit!

Oh hell. ... Well, two months was not a bad run.