The widow of a Canadian veteran is urging the federal government to redress a filing error that left her to raise her children on $200 a month.

Annie MacKenzie, 84, should have received her husband's disability pension after he died in 1968, but because of a mistake at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Cape Breton woman never received it.

"We believe that our family was unnecessarily impoverished by the department," MacKenzie's daughter, Cheryl Deveaux, told CBC News.

Deveaux, the youngest of MacKenzie's six children, said her mother raised them in Glace Bay with lots of love and very little else — the family income was less than $200 a month.

After Melvin MacKenzie died, Annie MacKenzie asked the department numerous times about receiving her husband's disability pension, but was repeatedly told he didn't have a disability.

In court documents, MacKenzie said her husband was totally disabled in the final years of his life.

It wasn't until Deveaux began making calls on her mother's behalf that government officials discovered that information in MacKenzie's paper file had not been transferred into a computer.

The family should have received the payments all along, Deveaux said.

"My mother will never recoup the last 40 years of her life, but they are certainly in the position to put my mother in a particular area that she deserves to be right now."

In a ruling this month, a federal court judge said the department let MacKenzie down and made "negligent misstatements."

No one at Veterans Affairs refuted the facts in court.

Federal legislation governing the Pension Act requires only that Ottawa pay MacKenzie retroactive payments going back five years. But her lawyer is appealing directly to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the $100,000 she says MacKenzie is owed.

The lawyer urges Harper to do right by MacKenzie so the 84-year-old woman won't have to go through a lengthy lawsuit.