One thing that I didn't mention in yesterday's post, simply because I wanted to cool down a bit before writing anything, was the fact that at long last, after nine and a half months, I got a response to my redress of grievance. You may remember that when I retired I was one of the first reserve officers who had been on active service to apply for my pension benefits and as such I expected it to take a while before the cheques started to roll in. I didn't expect it to take as long as I did but was prepared to accept the delay because I had been assured that the pension payments would be back dated to the date of my release. What I didn't expect was that because I had agreed that if needed they could recall me, that they were going to say that I had not truly released and they would not start my pension payments until the date that my recall expired. This was a totally new development. I must hasten to add that there is no financial compensation for agreeing to be recalled unless you actually were. In the past everyone went on the recall list. In fact many members of the regular force, when they retired went into the reserve force and drew their pension and a salary as a reservist. So, this development totally blindsided me. I submitted a letter to the Minister of National Defence and to the Chief of Defence Staff, for former produced a Ministerial Inquiry and the latter a Redress of Grievance.

Months rolled by - seven and a half to be specific, and I called Ottawa to find out what was going on. After over a dozen phone calls I got a note telling me that someone would be in contact to tell me the status. A month and a half later with still no contact I sent off a rather edgy e-mail that finally got some response. Apparently the grievance had been delayed pending the ministerial and the ministerial had been finished a month ago and the response mailed out to me. Well, that was interesting since both the ministerial and grievance were being processed by the same department in Ottawa, and I had not received any such letter. Typical bureaucratic bumpfh!

Well, I finally go the response to the ministerial, signed by the minister no less. Basically it tells me that there is nothing that they can do. Great, eh?

But it ain't over yet. I can tell them to restart the grievance process which I am planning to do today.

Yesterday one of the bureaucrats, a rather pleasant lady who must be employed for her calm and nice telephone personality, told me that they wished I hadn't been so aggressive in the tone of my e-mail that finally got things rolling for me. Well, sweetie, you haven't seen anything like aggression yet! Hell, I have nothing to loose. If I don't get a better response to my redress perhaps the newspapers would like to hear my story.