Veterans are pressing Ottawa to formally recognize Canada’s Afghanistan mission as wartime service as the federal government prepares public consultations on legislation that would change its legal designation.

According to reporting by CBC News defence writer Murray Brewster, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight announced that consultations would take place in the coming months on Bill S-246. The Senate bill, now before the House of Commons, would designate service in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War as wartime service.

Canada’s Afghanistan deployment remains classified as service in a “special duty area,” CBC reported. About 40,000 Canadian troops served over 13 years; 158 died and an estimated 2,000 were wounded.

Retired colonel Mark Gasparotto, who led combat engineers during Operation Medusa, challenged that terminology while speaking on Parliament Hill last week.

“The Afghan mission was a war by every metric, and the current terminology of ‘special duty area’ rings hollow and judged against the life-and-death realities we faced on the ground,” he said.

For retired corporal Bruce Moncur, those consequences remain physical. He told CBC that an American warplane mistakenly strafed his position during Operation Medusa, leaving him with a catastrophic brain injury.

The recognition debate comes during a year of significant anniversaries: 25 years since Canadian troops first arrived in Afghanistan, 20 years since Operation Medusa, 15 years since the end of Canada’s combat mission and five years since the Taliban returned to power.

CBC reported that there was no major national public commemoration marking Afghanistan’s anniversaries this year, although the government marked the end of major combat and the beginning of construction of the national memorial. Military and private organizations held commemorations of their own.

The questions extend beyond remembrance. Canada has not conducted a comprehensive public accounting of the mission, despite internal assessments by the defence and foreign ministries, CBC reported.

Retired general Wayne Eyre, a former chief of the defence staff, suggested the Taliban’s 2021 victory partly explains the difficulty Canadians have discussing the war.

“My hope is that we learn from it, we continue to venerate those that we lost over there,” he told CBC.

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