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Veterans protest disability payment deductions

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Canada AM: Veterans share their views
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Date: Thu. Sep. 13 2007 10:50 AM ET

A group of disabled veterans is appealing for deductions to their disability payments to be stopped as they believe they are unfair.

The veterans made an appeal on Parliament Hill on Wednesday where some of them claimed they were losing up to $1,500 per month because of the deductions.

The veterans said that the federal bureaucrats are ignoring the issue as the deductions have been supported by members of parliament.

"It is incomprehensible to us," Scott Bruyea told CTV's Canada AM. "We went off to fight a war to protect such values as respecting democratic will and they're being flaunted and their nose is being snubbed. But we can only assume it's certain bureaucrats."

Bruyea is a 1991 Gulf War veteran who left the military due to post-traumatic stress and various physical ailments.

In the long-term disability plan, monthly pension payments are treated as income and are deducted from long-term disability payments.

Buryea said that the discrepancy amount was around $275 million, which factored in payments for the next 20 years and seven years of retroactive payments.

"It works out if you do the math, to about $ 2,500 per soldier per year," Bruyea said. "This isn't rocket science here. It should be easy to stop the policy right now and go forward on this and give some quality of life" Bruyea said.

In November 2006, the majority of MPs in parliament voted to stop the deductions.

Military ombudsman Yves Cote wrote to former defence minister Gordon O'Connor earlier this year regarding the deductions. Cote urged that the recommendations in a 2003 report determining the deductions were "fundamentally unfair" should be followed.

The deductions are currently the subject of a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Canada.

With files from The Canadian Press

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