Veterans Affairs emerged as one of the federal departments hardest hit by funding cuts in the 2025 budget, leading to accusations that the Carney government was abandoning veterans just as it massively expands the Canadian Armed Forces.
But according to Veterans Affairs, almost all of the cuts can be explained by a new plan to rein in the skyrocketing costs of government-supplied marijuana.
According to the 2025 budget, over the next four years Veterans Affairs will be required to find $4.23 billion in “savings targets.” In raw numbers, the new budget deletes more money from the Veterans Affairs budget than almost any other corner of the federal government.
The only department to have more money removed from its budget was Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, which had $5.4 billion pulled from its spending over the next five years.
In that case, however, part of the funding cuts were due to the fact that programs were simply being spun off to other federal departments. This is particularly true of housing programs, many of which are now under the purview of the new federal agency Build Canada Homes.
That isn’t the case with Veterans Affairs. As the department wrote in a statement to the National Post, even after the budget cuts “the suite of benefits and services provided by Veterans Affairs Canada remains the same.”
Rather, the savings are expected to be found almost entirely by tweaking a little-known program supplying tens of thousands of kilograms of cannabis to veterans of the RCMP and the Canadian Armed Forces.
Starting in 2008, Veterans Affairs began funding federally licensed cannabis for veterans who could supply a doctor’s note prescribing it for medical purposes.
For the first few years, only a few dozen veterans were counted as beneficiaries of the program. In 2011, Veterans Affairs counted just 37 clients for this cannabis program, and paid out $103,424 in cannabis.
But particularly after Canada’s legalization of recreational marijuana in 2018, the program exploded in both the number of users and the quantity of cannabis being supplied.
Read the full article at National Post
