The Canadian Press
Lee Berthiaume
OTTAWA–The veterans’ grave markers standing in orderly rows are clean and well-maintained on a brilliant summer afternoon.
The words on each are easy to read–even those carved decades ago–while the grey stones are all clean.
The surrounding grass and flowers are trim and manicured.
Such a sight might not be a surprise at the National Military Cemetery in Ottawa. But a new Veterans Affairs audit has found that tens of thousands of other such graves across Canada are in disrepair.
The culprit? A lack of federal funding.
The federal government has two ways it maintains the graves of the more than 317,000 Canadians who either were killed in war or otherwise served in the military.
The first is by funding the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which cares for the graves of Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian soldiers killed in the First and Second World Wars.
Canada provides about $1.25 million to the commission, which oversees the graves of roughly 110,000 Canadians whose remains are buried overseas.
The remaining 207,000 graves in more than 6,000 cemeteries across Canada are the direct responsibility of Veterans Affairs, which is where departmental auditors found significant problems.
“More than 45,000 of these veteran grave markers require maintenance, with a total of close to 60,000 repairs required [some grave markers require more than one type of repairs],” their final report said.
It added interviews with Veterans Affairs’ officials “identified that there are not enough funds currently allocated to veteran grave maintenance to address the known required repairs.”
Veterans Affairs previously received about $5 million for grave maintenance, but that amount was slashed to $1 million in 2003, according to the audit, as the department couldn’t say which graves needed work.
But while a new database was developed and implemented the following year to help track the location and condition of all veterans’ graves in Canada, funding levels largely have remained the same.
The auditors did find Veterans Affairs had managed to reduce the number of outstanding repairs by about nine percent between 2013 and 2016, but that was because officials focused on the easy stuff.
They calculated it would take 17 years at current funding levels to complete all of the outstanding repairs, the total cost of which was estimated at around $12.9 million.
