The justice system in this country is broken, of that there is absolutely no doubt.
And sadly, it’s the victims of crime that get the proverbial boot to the balls.
Most, if not all, victim assistance programs are geared towards victims in which a conviction has occurred or where there exists the likelihood that a crime was committed.
But what if the police department that is conducting the investigation is compromised?
What if the system that you are ensnared in is not set up for dealing with civilian victims?
If you’ve followed my blog you’ll see that I’ve been engaged with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service since March of 2011.
March of 2011 is of course when I decided to deal with the babysitter.
Yes, I had from 1980 to 2011 to deal with the babysitter, that is true, but if you’ve followed along with my blog you’ll realize that from 1980 to 1983 a military social worker was blaming me for allowing myself to be abused and for allowing the babysitter to molest my brother.
In March of 2011 I was finally ready to deal with the babysitter against the wishes of my father.
I made my complaint with the Edmonton Police Service. The EPS passed the matter off to the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service.
As the certified tribunal records illustrate, that investigation was an absolute joke. But that wasn’t surprising at the time as the military police were being dragged through the mud for their inability to investigate sexual assaults involving women in the military.
And if it hadn’t been for a series of questions that Master Corporal Christian Cyr asked me on May 3rd, 2011 I would have never put 2 & 2 together with respect to the babysitter and Captain McRae, the base chaplain. Nor would I have known that the babysitter had sued the Minister of National Defence for the sexual abuse at the hands of Captain McRae.
The investigation concluded on November 4th, 2011 with Petty Officer Steve Morris calling me and telling me that the CFNIS couldn’t find any evidence at all to indicate that the babysitter was capable of what I accused him of.
In December of 2011 I filed a complaint with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The MPCC conducted a ‘review’, but during a review the MPCC relies solely upon documents submitted to it by the Provost Marshal. The MPCC is not allowed to subpoena documents. In fact, during an MPCC review the MPCC cannot administer oaths.
In 2012 I filed my first of many FOI requests to obtain the court martial transcripts of Captain McRae.
In February of 2013 the MPCC gave the CFNIS a solid TWO-THUMBS-UP for a very detailed investigation that spanned 30 years.
However, what the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal failed to hand over to the Military Police Complaints Commission in 2012 was the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the transcripts from the July 15-18 courts martial of Captain Father Angus McRae. I know about this paperwork because an investigator with the CFNIS would later inform me about the existence of this paperwork and that it corroborated everything that a retired military police officer had told me on November 27th, 2011.
After the MPCC review was over I quickly assessed my options. I tried to obtain a lawyer with federal court experience, specifically experience with dealing with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The clock ticks pretty fast when one wants to file for judicial review. You literally have 90 days from the day the findings of the tribunal are released to file your application.
The lawyers that I was speaking with all wanted retainers in the neighbourhood of $15k to $20k.
But more importantly, most of these lawyers were hung up on why a civilian wanted to have the federal court quash the findings of a military tribunal.
Something doesn’t make sense.
You’re not telling us the truth.
You’re hiding something.
The military never investigates child sexual abuse
The military police never investigate civilian on civilian sexual abuse.
You should get the RCMP to look at this matter
You should get the Edmonton Police Service to investigate this matter.
So, I ended up representing myself in Federal Court.
When I received the certified tribunal records from the MPCC it was very obvious that the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal had excluded a vast amount of documentation and records from the records that were given to the MPCC.
Could I introduce my copies of these documents to the federal court? Nope. Well, I could, but I’d have to put the federal court matter on hold and appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Any lawyers willing to take that on?
Nope, not a single fucking lawyer wanted to look at this. Retainers for this were quoted around $20k
So in the end all of my documentation was excluded and the justice could only take into account documents that were before the MPCC and not documents that were withheld from the MPCC by the Provost Marshal. So the justice found in favour of the MPCC. The DOJ sent me a bill for about $2k for wasting their time.
In 2017, during the second CFNIS investigation into my original complaint against the babysitter, the investigator the with CFNIS let slip the existence of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork both of which heavily implicated the babysitter and both of which verified what Cunningham had told me in 2011 and that Cunningham was in a position to know exactly what he was talking about.
I started new FOIs for the CFSIU investigation paperwork and the Court Martial transcripts.
In 2018 the 2nd CFNIS investigation was concluded, so I filed a request for a MPCC review of the 2nd CFNIS investigation. The Provost Marshall objected to this.
Due to the MPCC requesting copies of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork, DND could no longer refuse to give me a copy. It took some bad publicity from David Pugliese with the Ottawa Citizen to finally get DND to cough up the documents.
What did the documents show:
- The babysitter’s molestation of children is what triggered the investigation of Captain McRae
- The investigation of the babysitter occurred in his family’s PMQ and was conducted by military police officers Mossman and Clark.
- Much like what the babysitter’s father told me in June of 2015, the military police had received complaints from numerous parents.
- The babysitter had forced anal intercourse with three 10 year old boys behind the recreation centre.
- The babysitter was known to have had sex with children much younger
- The babysitter was receiving psychological counselling for his attraction to young children.
- It was colonel Daniel Edward Munro’s decision as to what charges Captain McRae was charged with, this shows that the summary investigation flaw in the National Defence Act had very real world consequences for child sexual abuse matters.
- The court martial transcripts also proved once and for all that the Canadian Armed Forces could and would conduct courts martial for child sexual abuse matters.
The MPCC released the review in October of 2020. And they observed a few things.
- The babysitter had more criminal convictions for child sexual abuse than what the CFNIS indicated in their documents to the crown.
- The CFNIS relied on the Crown’s reluctance to prosecute on insufficient evidence as their being “no evidence”.
- The CFNIS didn’t inform the Crown of the CFSIU paperwork that showed that there was an investigation of the babysitter at the time for sexually abusing children.
- When Master Corporal Christian Cyr kept telling me on May 3rd, 2011 that the babysitter was only 12 or 13 at the time of the abuse, he was obviously getting this wrong age from the CFSIU paperwork as that is the only place the error occurs. The babysitter was born in June of 1965 and was 14 in the spring of 1980 and was fully within the jurisdiction of the RCMP and the juvenile delinquents court. But more importantly, the fact that Mcpl Cyr was quoting the wrong age showed that the CFNIS did have these documents from the start of the investigation.
It was only after I received the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU paperwork and the October 2020 MPCC findings that I was able to finally obtain a lawyer willing to take this matter on, and on a contingency basis.
But this isn’t the way that it should be.
No one in this country should have to square off against a tax payer funded agency like the Canadian Armed Force on their own.
No government agency should be allowed to use the short timelines provided by the various tribunals to stickhandle complainants.
I think the most significant reason why lawyers were willing to take on my matter so far as it related to the CFNIS and the MPCC is that these lawyers make a metric fuckton of money representing military members. When these ex-JAG lawyers represent members of the Canadian Forces, their bills are guaranteed to be paid. And paid at very well-off rates. A piss-ant civilian like me? What the fuck can I offer them?
And believe me, when you are going up against the Canadian Armed Forces, the Department of National Defence, and the MIlitary Police Complaints Commission, you need a lawyer not only with federal court experience, you need a lawyer with a very good and detailed understanding of military law and the various iterations of the National Defence Act over the years.
To this day I still get lawyers who are outright adamant that the military could never investigate child sexual abuse and the military courts sure as fuck could not conduct a courts martial for child sexual abuse. This even though I have Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts, and a good dozen decisions from the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada in which service members were appealing their charges of child sexual abuse.
So when the military law lawyers can’t even get their shit together, what fucking chance do I stand?
None.
Does the justice system work?
Nope, it’s fucking broken.
Victims are left on their own to navigate the systems, systems that quite often do not work.
Victim rights are often an afterthought.
Legal aid for victims? Doesn’t exist.
Pro-bono assistance with federal court matters? Nope, doesn’t exist.
Civilian lawyers set up to assist civilians with navigating the Canadian Forces justice system and the peculiarities of the National Defence Act? Nope, doesn’t exist.
The fact that the babysitter doesn’t even have to apologize and in fact gets to keep playing the role of the sole victim while I’m condemned to the role of the bad guy is what irks me the most.
Car driver willfully runs a red light, causes a collision, and kills a 2 year old on the sidewalk and the judge is practically tripping over themselves to absolve the driver of any fault because the driver didn’t intend to kill the baby even though it was his foot on the accelerator and his hands on the steering wheel. And our fucked up no fault insurance system ensures that the parents are only getting about $20k for the death of their child.
Another car driver runs over and kills a police officer in Toronto and a jury of 12 people with no legal training and no legal back ground decide that a car driver shouldn’t have to be aware of their surroundings and that if someone “fears for their life” it’s okay to run anything over.
I just wish that victims had this much sympathy from the justice system.
Sure, locking up the wrong person is never a desirable outcome, but letting everyone walk because of the most tenuous of plausible arguments is absolutely wrong as well.
We seriously need to revamp the justice system.
No more jury trials. Juries should be replaced with panels of lawyers. Trials should not be left up to the whims of people with no legal understanding who are easily manipulated by the appeal to emotion. Anyone could have run over a bump on the ground……
Courts should be allowed to find guilt or assign guilt, without having to assign a sentence. If incarceration places the bar of evidence so high that the International Space Station is at risk of crashing into it, drop incarceration.
If your hands are on the steering wheel of a car that ends up running over someone, you shouldn’t be able to skip out of court scot-free.
Did my babysitter molest my brother and I and at least four other kids that I am aware of? Yes. The odds of probability lean very heavily in that direction. It’s not like I made my complaint against someone with no criminal record. And it’s not like I had access to the courts martial transcripts or the CFSIU investigation paperwork. The babysitter was under investigation for molesting children and the only reason he never went to juvie for what he did is that the base commander refused to allow the RCMP to be called in. So it wasn’t that the babysitter was innocent. Other issues at play allowed the babysitter at the time to escape responsibility. The problem with that is the Canadian Armed Forces chucked us under the fucking train.
Anyways, that’s my rant for now.
Beeshive 