Civil claims against the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence may become impossible for many former military children, not because the abuse did not happen, and not because the Crown has a strong defence, but because the records needed to prove those claims are controlled by the very institution accused of hiding the truth and the very same institution that is liable for damages and compensation.
That is not a small procedural problem. It is the entire battlefield.
The Canadian Forces spent decades keeping records about Captain Angus McRae, a military chaplain and convicted child abuser, away from the public. When the court martial transcript was finally released, it showed that McRae had multiple child victims at CFB Namao. That mattered because the official story had long been narrower, quieter, and easier for the military to contain. The Ottawa Citizen reported in 2020 that the Canadian Forces had fought to keep those details secret for forty years, including by claiming that the original charges against McRae could not be revealed to the public.
That history should terrify anyone who believes civil justice is available to former military dependants.
A civil action is not magic. A plaintiff still needs evidence. A plaintiff still needs records. A plaintiff still needs names, dates, postings, complaints, investigation files, court martial material, police notes, social-work records, command correspondence, and proof that the institution knew or should have known what was happening.
But what happens when those records were sealed, withheld, misclassified, destroyed, scattered, never transferred, or simply declared impossible to locate?
That is the danger now sitting underneath future civil claims against DND and the CAF.
Access to records is not separate from access to justice
Canada’s Access to Information Act is supposed to provide a right of access to federal government records. The Act’s stated purpose is to enhance government accountability and transparency by providing access to records under the control of government institutions.
That sounds good on paper.
But in cases involving historic abuse on military bases, the paper is the problem.
Former military children are not trying to obtain abstract policy memos. They are often trying to reconstruct childhood events from decades ago, inside a closed federal institution that controlled the housing, the schools, the police, the chaplains, the social-work referrals, the postings, the investigations, and the disciplinary process.
If DND cannot locate the records, the survivor loses.
If DND says the records were destroyed, the survivor loses.
If DND releases records so heavily redacted that the names, context, and institutional knowledge are removed, the survivor loses.
If DND delays release until witnesses are dead, memories are gone, or litigation deadlines become harder to fight, the survivor loses.
And if DND can call its own records transitory, administrative, operationally sensitive, personal, irrelevant, or no longer useful, then the survivor may never even know what existed.
That is not a fair fight. That is an evidence monopoly.
The McRae records show the problem clearly
The McRae case is a warning sign.
McRae was not an unknown outsider. He was a Canadian Forces chaplain. He operated inside the military community. His victims were children connected to that community. The institution had military police, command structures, chaplaincy structures, court martial authority, and internal records.
Yet the public only learned key details decades later.
The attached reporting shows two separate but connected issues.
First, the military fought the release of records showing that McRae had multiple child victims.
Second, even after release, DND still resisted disclosing records and explanations about who protected him, who delayed disclosure, and why the institution handled the matter the way it did.
That matters because future plaintiffs cannot build cases on rumours. They need the hidden machinery. They need the records that show who knew, when they knew, what they did, what they failed to do, and why certain people were protected while children were left exposed.
In historic abuse cases, the cover-up records can matter as much as the abuse records.
DND’s ATIP problems are not theoretical
This is not merely about one old chaplain file.
The Office of the Information Commissioner has repeatedly found serious problems with National Defence responses to access requests. In several 2024 decisions, the Commissioner found DND had failed to respond within the statutory timelines and was therefore deemed to have refused access. In one case, the Commissioner called the delay by Canadian Forces Intelligence Command in retrieving relevant records “unacceptable.”
In another 2024 DND case, the Commissioner found that delays by RCAF and Canadian Forces Intelligence Command affected DND’s ability to comply with the Act, and recommended that DND develop proper processes and performance indicators to hold senior officials accountable for delays in providing records to access officials.
That is important. The problem is not always the ATIP office itself. The problem is often that the internal military or departmental office holding the records does not provide them properly, quickly, or at all.
For survivors, that distinction does not matter much. Whether the failure happens at ATIP, inside a command office, inside an intelligence unit, inside military police, inside personnel records, or inside archives, the result is the same: the person asking for records does not get what they need.
And without records, a civil claim may die before it starts.
“No records” can become the perfect defence
One of the most dangerous phrases in any historic abuse case is: no responsive records found.
That phrase does not necessarily mean nothing happened.
It may mean the records were destroyed under retention rules.
It may mean the records were transferred somewhere else.
It may mean the request was worded in a way that missed the internal filing language.
It may mean the records exist under a different name, unit, file number, archive code, investigation number, or command structure.
It may mean the records were never properly captured in the first place.
It may mean the records are sitting in a box, a restricted archive, an old investigation file, a military police system, a legal file, or a personnel file that nobody tasked properly.
But in civil litigation, “no records” can still operate like a wall. The defendant does not need to prove the survivor wrong if the survivor cannot get the records needed to prove the defendant knew.
That is the quiet violence of institutional record control.
Record retention rules can erase the trail before anyone knows to ask
The issue becomes even more serious when government moves toward shorter retention periods for digital communications.
Treasury Board material confirms that departments are responsible for establishing and implementing retention and deletion practices based on operational needs and legal obligations. It also states that departments must preserve records with business value and must not delete information relevant to access-to-information, privacy, or litigation matters.
On paper, that sounds protective.
But in practice, it depends on someone inside the institution correctly identifying what has “business value,” what may be relevant to future litigation, and what must be preserved.
That is a major problem in abuse cases.
At the time abuse occurs, the institution may not want to admit there is a problem. It may classify communications as informal, transitory, administrative, or not worth keeping. Years later, when a survivor finally comes forward, the institution can say the material no longer exists.
This creates a brutal circular trap:
The survivor needs records to prove the institution knew.
The institution controls whether those records survive.
If the records are gone, the survivor is told there is no proof.
That is not transparency. That is managed disappearance.
The military dependant problem is worse than ordinary ATIP delay
Former military dependants face a specific records problem.
They were children inside a federal military environment, but they were not serving members. Their own records may be fragmented across military police, base schools, social services, chaplaincy files, medical systems, provincial agencies, service-member family files, and Library and Archives Canada.
The parent’s service file may not preserve the child’s story. Military dependant material may be stripped, destroyed, or never retained in a way that allows the former child to reconstruct what happened.
That means a former military child may be caught between systems.
DND may say the records are not in the member’s file.
The CAF may say the records were local base records.
Military police may say records are gone, restricted, or not searchable.
Archives may say the material is closed, redacted, or subject to long waiting periods.
Provincial agencies may say they only have partial social-work records.
And the Crown may still demand proof.
That is how a legal right becomes hollow.
Future civil actions may become impossible
The real issue is not whether survivors technically have the right to sue.
The issue is whether that right can be exercised after DND and CAF record systems have done decades of damage.
A civil action against the Crown requires evidence of institutional knowledge, negligence, failure to warn, failure to supervise, failure to investigate, or failure to protect. In cases involving historic child abuse on military bases, much of that evidence is likely to be held by DND, CAF, military police, chaplaincy structures, command offices, or federal archives.
If those records are withheld, delayed, destroyed, misfiled, or redacted beyond usefulness, then future civil actions become almost impossible.
Not because the claims lack merit.
Not because the victims are unreliable.
Not because the abuse did not happen.
But because the evidentiary trail has been controlled by the defendant.
That should concern Parliament, the courts, journalists, veterans, former dependants, and every Canadian who believes government institutions should not be able to bury liability through poor recordkeeping.
The law needs to treat missing records differently
Courts and lawmakers need to confront the obvious problem: when an institution had exclusive control over abuse-related records, and those records later vanish, the missing records should not automatically benefit the institution.
There should be consequences when DND or CAF cannot produce files that should have existed.
There should be adverse inferences where records were destroyed, sealed, withheld, or not properly searched.
There should be independent preservation orders for records involving child abuse, sexual misconduct, military police investigations, chaplaincy abuse, dependent children, and internal disciplinary proceedings.
There should be a statutory duty to preserve records once abuse allegations are known or reasonably foreseeable.
There should be meaningful penalties when records are destroyed after the institution knew, or should have known, that they could be relevant to access rights, litigation, or public accountability.
Without that, DND and CAF do not need to win civil cases on the facts.
They only need to outlast the records.
Corporal Donald Joseph Sullivan
The Donald Joseph Sullivan matter shows that military secrecy can damage civilian justice. Sullivan’s court martial records showed that he had been convicted in the 1980s for five counts of gross indecency committed at CFB Gagetown, yet those convictions did not appear on the criminal record filed as evidence in either his 2005 conviction or his later historical sex-abuse proceedings. The records existed, but they were functionally invisible. That is the danger for former military children seeking civil accountability: if even criminal courts and Crown prosecutors can miss prior military convictions involving children, then survivors attempting to reconstruct institutional knowledge decades later face an almost impossible burden unless DND and CAF are forced to disclose what they know.
The chilling effects of the Official Secrets Act
The Official Secrets Act, now continued in modern form through the Security of Information Act and its successor title, the Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act, matters because it places military information inside a criminal-law secrecy framework. The legislation does not need to expressly say that DND may hide embarrassing abuse records. Its practical effect is subtler. People who obtained documents or information while subject to the Code of Service Discipline, or through Crown employment, may reasonably fear that speaking outside authorized channels could be treated as unauthorized communication of official information. That leaves former military children dependent on DND-controlled access systems to obtain records that may prove DND’s own knowledge, negligence, or concealment. In that structure, secrecy law does not merely protect national security. It can also protect institutional silence.
Conclusion
The McRae records show what happens when the military controls the truth for decades.
The problem is no longer just what happened at CFB Namao. The problem is whether former military children will ever be able to prove what happened to them when the records are hidden inside the same institution they are trying to sue.
Access to information is not a side issue. It is not paperwork. It is not administrative housekeeping.
For survivors, access to records can be the difference between a viable civil claim and a dead one.
If Canada allows DND and CAF to become more restrictive with records, more aggressive with retention limits, more comfortable with delay, and more willing to say that records cannot be found, then future civil actions may be impossible before they are ever filed.
And that may be the point.
Because when the records disappear, accountability disappears with them.
