Don’t think
for one moment that Chris Mitchelmore’s absence from the podium for the 100th
Anniversary Ceremony at Beaumont Hamel
was anything but a deliberate snub by the Federal Department of Veterans
Affairs, of a lowly Minister from “the boonies”.
Telegram reporter
Barb Sweet reviewed 300 pages of materials obtained under
access to information legislation for her story in the Saturday edition. They contain an indictment of a Federal
Government all too willing to lie and to engage in cover-up.
The
conversation described by the reporter between the local Honour 100 lead,
Melanie Martin, and Peter Mills, project manager for overseas events at
Veterans Affairs Canada, would have us believe the affair was an “oversight”. But
the truth is something far different.
Mills,
undoubtedly with senior officials in Veterans Affairs in the loop, dealt with
provincial officials as if they were a group that had — to use the idiomatic
expression — ‘fallen off the turnip truck’.
