anxiety – Page 18

Interesting day

So, I flew up to Edmonton from Vancouver this morning.

Very quick flight.

Never have flown on an Airbus before, but now I did get to hear the infamous Airbus Barking Dog noise. And as I was over the wings it was quite loud. It’s nothing to be worried about, it’s just a hydraulic pump trying to equalize the pressure between two different hydraulic circuits.

I was waiting for the 747 bus to take me from YEG to one of the LRT stations.

While I was waiting a fellow passenger came up to me and introduced herself.

She said that she had loaded my blog onto her phone and read the blog on the flight.

Skye had discovered my blog when she googled my name that I have on my carry-on luggage.

It’s odd, outside of a few people related to the CFB Namao matter, and outside of a very select few people in Vancouver, no one has ever come up to me to talk about my blog.

She offered to drop me off on her Uber ride into Edmonton and she kept apologizing the whole time reassuring me that she wasn’t a stalker.

So, we talked on the way up to Edmonton. I’m sure the Uber driver thinks that I’m insane.

Skye had just come back from Australia. She’s actually a conductor for one of the railways, can’t remember if she works for CP or CN. She took some time off work to help her sisters run the family lumber mill after her father died a few years ago.

We’ll probably meet up for coffee or lunch in the next day or two.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, too many things ruminating in my skull to let me have a decent sleep last night.

Shout out to my stepmother Sue for not wanting to help out with this, Richard would have been so proud of her.

I’m almost 100% certain that Scott didn’t have a will. The police didn’t indicate that they found anything of the such.

So the first thing I have to do tomorrow is go pick up his ashes and his personal belongings from the crematorium. The I guess I’ll have to go to his apartment and see what’s up there and see if there’s any paperwork indicating what his finances were like. If he had a financed or leased car I’ll probably have to make arrangements for the dealer to come pick it up. I’ll see if there’s any documents and paperwork or photos of interest that I want and then the rest of his belongings will be going to wherever.

And then I’ll fly back to Vancouver.

In the meantime I’ve ridden around the city on the little Lime Scooters. Those things are a blast. They’re a lot more sketchy and jittery than my Segway scooter, but in a way that lends an interesting quirkiness to them.

I don’t know what I’ll do with Scott’s ashes. I could put them inside of a Jack-in-the-box and send the Jack-in-the-box to the Chief of Defence Staff.

alt text: Executive assistant to the CDS turns the crank while the CDS awaits.

I could go up to Edmonton Garrison and sprinkle his ashes at our old PMQ and other places around the base.

alt text: Bobbie sprinkles Scott’s ashes on a Defence Establishment while unimpressed CFNIS investigator stands around.

Anyways, enough for today.

I gotta go find some place to grab a bite to eat.

Luckily Whyte Ave is just a block away.

And then there were three…..

Was at the doctor this morning for my monthly check-up.

My blood work is progressing along nicely.

He doesn’t think that the collapse that I had last month had anything to do with me being on anti-depressants or taking estrogen for my hormone therapy.

I’ve had a long running history of syncope. BP was 112 over 73. Not bad.

And my liver seems okay with the estrogen.

My testosterone results were online at the time of my appointment and they were around 1.1. I’d like to get those down as low as possible, but we’ll have to wait and see whether I can do this chemically or if I can do this surgically.

So, I’ve graduated up to three patches twice a week. That’s 150 microgram of estradiol per day. Whooo-Hoooo!

My most recent blood test revealed that I am at 479 pmol/l which is the same as a woman in her early 20s

I’m aiming to go for an estradiol level of 800 pmol/l which is about 210 pg/ml. This is equivalent to a woman in her late 20s.

Puberty to maturity in less than 6 months.

And then there’s going to be the eventual tapering off.

My body is old. Usually human bodies only undergo one sexual development and maturity per lifetime. Putting my body through a second sexual development and maturity is gonna be tough on it.

Is it worth it?

I think so.

I get a taste of what could have been.

I realize that there was absolutely no way that I could have transitioned early in life, especially not as a kid living on Canadian Armed Forces bases.

And even in my adult life, there would have been very few chances I could have had to have transitioned previously.

In a way, no matter how much psychological trauma I had to endure being involved with the Canadian Armed Forces “justice” system from 2011 until 2020, I wouldn’t have ever been able to contemplate transitioning until I came to realize just how damaged and fucked up the Canadian Armed Forces are and how as an organization they’re willing to destroy the lives of those they deem to be inconsequential so long as the CAF can persevere its public image.

Once I realized just how ethically damaged and psychologically challenged members of the Canadian Armed Forces such as Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, Captain Terry Totzke, and Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill were I began to realize that all of the hose shit that Captain Totzke and Mcpl Gill had shovelled into my head from age 9 to age 16 was nothing more that the military’s standard bullshit that was deployed to keep secrets.

As I said previously, when my brother called me in 2019 to let me know that Richard had died in 2017, I felt an honest sense of relief knowing that the silly fucker was dead and gone.

And that was when I started putting some serious thought into transitioning.

It’s all my fault……..

The fun thing about being the chief engineer at work is that bad designs by professional engineers for projects that were put in well before my time in the Captain’s chair are somehow my fault.

Friday was a 17 hour day and Saturday was a 6 hour day dealing with the A/C for a freezer room that hadn’t been designed correctly from the start, had absolutely no redundancy, and had been packed with more biological -80 freezers than it was designed to accommodate.

Had to bring in 70 kW of emergency cooling to deal with the room. This emergency cooling was comprised of four 17.5 kW water cooled A/C units.

Water hoses all over the place distributing city water to the A/C units to cool the compressors in the A/C units with the warm water going down the drain.

Had to get electrical in to install four 208 volt 3 phase plugs for the A/C units.

These units got the room under control and are cycling on and off which means that they have ample cooling capacity. More than the four 12.5 kW split A/C units that are in the room.

When sizing mechanical refrigeration for an area, if the unit is running 100% of the time and it can barely maintain its set point, the unit is grossly undersized. If the unit only comes on for 5 minutes and shuts off again, the unit is grossly oversized. For a simple reciprocating compressor with no capacity control a 20 minute run cycle with 10 to 15 minutes off between runs is about right.

So, tomorrow I gotta propose a solution for this.

Most of the system I’ll design.

I’ll propose using either four water cooled 17.5 kW units or four water cooled 35 kW units. Four 35 kW units would give the best option for redundancy. If I can get them to spring for four 35kW units, then I can have N+1 redundancy with the ability to do Lead / Lag alternating with extra capacity for out-of-the-ordinary extreme days.

I’d have to get the appropriate fluid coolers for this setup. Again, nothing too fancy, just some adiabatic coolers. I could also get some air coils put into the air handler for the Emergency Department or the 2 East unit so that the heat from the freezer room could be used to pre-heat the fresh air in the cool weather thus reducing our steam bills for these two air handlers. When pre-heat isn’t required for the Emergency Department or the 2 East unit the adiabatic cooler would just reject the heat to the atmosphere.

Pipes would have to be installed up the side of the building, but they’re tearing the place down in about 6 years, so………. And I’ve always been a function over form type of guy. And it’s not like they’d look horrible. Probably be a pair of 76mm pipes.

So, we’ll see what I’m up for tomorrow when I get in to work.

The end of my vacation

Well, next week this time I’ll be back at work.

It’s been bliss for the last two weeks.

What did I accomplish?

Sweet fuck all.

And that’s a good thing.

Work is interesting, but it’s extremely stressful. And not in a good way.

People ask if I’m going to the new site when it opens.

FUCK NO.

Three people on the committee planning the new site made it very clear that I am personna non grata at the new site, so fuck it. My life has enough shit going on in it, I don’t need to go there and take a shit shower from these three.

I love it when my ideas and suggestions and ideas are “too outlandish”, and “too silly”, and “completely unjustified”. But yet they show up in the current build as someone else’s proposal.

I was so looking forward to having made my application for M.A.i.D. this past March, but the fucking milquetoast liberals got a bad case of the chicken shits at the last moment.

Basically I’m holding on to my current job as kinda a massive “fuck you!” to certain federal agencies in Canada that decided that my mental health was expendable.

I’m also holding on to my current job to spite all of the corporate bag lickers and pole smokers from my past jobs that said that I would never amount to anything because I was too damaged.

Once operations at the new site start to wind down in 2027 I should have a better idea as to whether or not I’ll be able to undergo M.A.i.D.

If the right wing tide of hate keeps sweeping across North America then M.A.i.D. will still be unavailable for persons such as myself.

If that’s the case then my intentions are to stay at the old site until it shuts down in 2030.

By that time I’ll be able to retire and walk away from it all.

Where will I go?

Who the fuck knows.

What about transitioning?

Yep, I’ll keep transitioning.

Family tree

So, getting a little bit more details about the maternal side of the family now.

My maternal grandmother was Alma Viola Zong.

She was not Chinese.

She was German.

Even though I know Alma’s name I still don’t have a birthdate for her.

Still have no idea the name of my maternal grandfather.

But that’s the same as on the paternal side of my family.

I have a pretty good tree on the maternal side of my father’s family, but the paternal side has drawn up blanks so far.

I know the connection between Arthur Herman Gill, Ladeen Gill, and the Zwolle clan in Oshawa.

But beyond that, not too much.

So, I’ll have to keep slogging away.

In other news

My legal matter involving the CAF, the DND, and the DOJ is still proceeding.

Had a bunch of documents to read and approve this week.

Had a good phone call with the law firm.

Still awhile to go before this matter is over, but at least it’s still progressing.

Fears……

What fears have you overcome and how?

WordPress sometimes prompts me to write about a certain topic. It’s geared towards “family” type events.

There are very few that actually seem to apply to me.

Today’s prompt was somewhat interesting.

I think the biggest fear that I had in my life was my father.

I overcame that fear somewhat in 2006 during a series of phone calls that I had with him.

Then there was his death in January of 2017.

That was a major relief.

My brother thinks that I’m over exaggerating my fear of Richard, but as Dr. Gabor Maté observed, “no two children have the same parents”.

The most significant fear that I had of Richard was his temper. Richard had very poor impulse control and very poor control of his anger. He also couldn’t take into account the difference in physical strength between himself and the person he was lashing out at.

My fear of Richard only grew more intense when I became involved with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke.

Richard is dead and gone. And the world is probably better off for this. But his effects still haunt me and have left their traces upon me.

My grandmother was another person that I feared as a kid.

Her anger and her impulse control were worse than Richard’s, but at least she lacked the physical strength of Richard.

Alcohol. I’ve always feared being an alcoholic.

Both my father and my grandmother were intense alcoholics. Both were happy drunks for the most part. Conversely both were intensely angry people when they were sobering up.

I’ve had so little alcohol in my life I can almost remember every exact time.

The last time that I had a drink was back in July of 2011.

Before that it was January of 2010

Before that it was August of 2006

Before that it was September of 2005

Before that it was May of 1994

Before that it was sometime in the winter of 1990 in Gagetown, New Brunswick.

Before that it was sometime around 1986.

I can’t remember all of the “sips” that my father or my grandmother would give me when they were drunk.

I do remember the beer that grandma made me drink in the summer of 1984.

Most of these were just casual get-togethers when I was changing jobs and moving up the so called ladder.

But becoming an alcoholic has always been one of my fears.

Growing up on military bases I was exposed to a significant amount of alcoholism. It was as if being an alcoholic was a requirement to join the Canadian Forces back in the ’50s through the ’90s.

Being a “homosexual” and subsequently growing up to be like the babysitter was always a major fear of mine. Both Captain Totzke and my father would keep telling me that if I didn’t stop kissing, hugging, and being interested in other boys that I would grow up to be just like the babysitter and the priest from Namao.

Imagine the type of fear that would instil into a 9 to 11 year old.

Being told that you’d be going to a psychiatric hospital or jail for “allowing” the babysitter to do what he had done.

Class Action Magnet

You can tell that there is something drastically wrong within the Canadian Armed Forces by the sheer number of Class Action Lawsuits that have been brought against the military over the years.

Contrary to popular belief, class action lawsuits are not a “get-rich-quick” scheme.

As can be seen from the settlement in the LifeLabs class action, the more class members that come forward, the less each member of the class receives.

As I had been a client of LifeLab since the early 2000’s I was eligible for a settlement.

The settlement I received from LifeLabs was a whopping:

Not all class actions pay out this little. It’s just that when a class action has over 100,000 members, the pool gets spread out a little thin.

So, what’s the benefit of a class action?

Members such as myself get to take on entities that I would never stand a chance against.

And so far as organizations that are untouchable, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence rank up there pretty high.

How many class actions has the Canadian Armed Forces faced recently?

In addition to mine:

There’s one for Mental Health:

The CAF have a long and storied history of mistreatment of mental health issues. I should know. I endured mistreatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke.

There’s a class action for sexual misconduct:

There’s a class action for racism:

There’s a class action related to the LGBT purge.

This purge mentality affected the kids living in the military communities as well. This is why Captain Totzke was hellbent to make sure that I understood that I was to blame for being sexually abused. My father, being both a full time member of the regular forces and subordinate to the captain would have had to go along with Captain Totzke’s treatment plan for me.

Then there’s also the other issues that kinda got settled on the low-down by ex-gratia payments.

There was the 1974 CFB Valcartier Grenade incident in which an officer of the Canadian Armed Forces was in charge of a group of 12 to 18 year old army cadets and allowed the cadets to play with a live M56 grenade. The grenade went boom. Killed numerous cadets and physically and mentally injured numerous more cadets. The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence fought compensation of these victims all the way up to 2011 when the Minister of National Defence on advice of the Canadian Forces Ombudsman offered each survivor and the families of the deceased up to $250,000.00 each.

There was also the Agent Orange matter.

Imposter Syndrome

I think one of the most crippling aspects of my personality is the imposter syndrome that I suffer from.

I have absolutely no idea of what I could have done in life.

But it hasn’t just been my lack of formal education that has held me back.

Yes, I only have grade 8.

But I also obtained my grade 12 GED with absolutely no preparation and no studying.

My marks were in the low 50s. Which is actually quite good.

The final scores on a GED equal the percentage of graduating high school students that your grades were equal to.

On the GED you absolutely do not want 100% as your final mark.

I consider myself to actually be quite stupid.

Yes, I know that there is a lot of shit that I can accomplish, but still my brain is locked on to this idea of how absolutely stupid I am.

And this causes problems at work. Oh boy does this cause problems.

I’m a qualified 4th class power engineer.

I am the Chief Engineer of a 4th class power plant.

I oversee 5 shift engineers, 3 maintenance engineers, an assistant chief engineer, and some casual engineers.

But where my imposter syndrome causes me issues is with the other engineers.

I can do things that are so far above my qualification levels.

The most recent being the replacement of the soft starter on chiller #3.

Chiller #3 has a 600 volt 450 hp motor.

This motor cannot be started across the line.

Originally it had a mechanical reduced voltage Wye-Delta starter that had been replaced with a solid state soft starter in the 90s. Well, that soft starter up and died last year.

The service company came back with a quote of $32k to replace the soft starter.

I found a brand new soft starter for $7.5k, so I decided to go with this ABB soft starter.

I had to guide the electrical department through how to connect this drive to the chiller and interface it with the chiller.

Soft Starter running for first time

Absolutely none of my engineers would have been able to do this. And it’s not for a lack of training or explanation.

And this is where the imposter syndrome kicks in really bad.

If a fucking idiot like myself can understand how to interface the soft starter to the chiller so the chiller can command it and so it can send feedback to the chiller, why can’t my subordinates understand too? We’re all 4th class power engineers. Actually two of my guys are 3rd class power engineer, but still?

I have no special training.

I have no special schooling.

And there was even some eye rolling from the chiller mechanic when I told him what I was going to do with the chiller.

“Bobbie, make sure that you connect the MCR1 and MCR2 relays as they are or the chiller won’t start”.

So I hauled out the schematics for the old Wye-Delta starter and the MCR1 and MCR2 relays were only used with the old mechanical wye-delta starter that had been tossed in the bin in the ’90s. The relays actually had to be jumpered in such a way just to make them engage so the chiller would start.

This caused ‘discussions’ back and forth.

I’m happy to report that the chiller starts just fine without the useless MCR1 and MCR2 relays.

Originally the chiller used a current donut on one of the 600 volt phases to monitor how much power the chiller was consuming. This went through a little converter board that changed the AC current into DC and then put it through a divider network to obtain a 0 to 5 volt signal. This 0 to 5 volt signal was then fed to the chiller CPU.

I happy to report that the chiller works just fine without this convertor board and that the chiller amp display now matches the actual current consumption of the chiller.

Well Bobbie, why don’t you take training or courses and move up in the world?

I am literally the dumbest fucking person you’ll ever meet. I am not smart. I just read. That’s it. My magical skill is reading.

And this causes me issue.

If I am the dumbest fucking person that I am aware of, why can’t anyone else do what I can?

A few years ago I put together a networked monitoring system for monitoring the temperatures of the refrigeration systems in the kitchens, the pharmacy, and the blood bank. This system just uses a bunch of stand alone refrigeration controllers networked together with RS-485 and some web servers. When I try to show the other guys how to program the system, or change settings on the system, you can see the puzzled looks coming across their faces. It’s almost as if I’ve started speaking in a long forgotten language or there are tentacles popping out of my face.

Again, there’s no coding involved. It’s just logging into a system made from off the shelf components. The webserver is meant to be programmed by supermarket store managers.

Where could I have gone in life without this imposter syndrome?

Who knows?

What causes imposter syndrome?

Apparently having depression and anxiety set one up for experiencing imposter syndrome.

Upbringing also plays an important part in setting one up for experiencing imposter syndrome. Apparently inconsistent parenting and unsupportive parenting place one at risk for developing imposter syndrome.

In the mean time I guess I have to be content with being the asshole who won’t “share” his knowledge with others…….

2 weeks to go

Two weeks from now, at around this time I’ll have anti-androgens and estrogen coursing through my blood stream.

I received the results of my blood test earlier this week. Nothing out of the ordinary. My cholesterol is a little high, but nothing to worry about.

My testosterone levels are on the low side. Probably a side effect of my anti-depressants. But again, nothing to worry about.

I really don’t know how things are going to play out at work.

I have a pretty secure position, but still.

For the most part I don’t think that I’ll have any problem.

I know my life in the great outdoors is gonna get a little more complicated.

But complicated is what I seem to do the best.

To not be male is my primary goal.

As I’ve said, I’ve never identified as male.

But nonetheless male is what I have been.

Was never really masculine enough.

And people have always accused me of not being straight.

Captain Terry Totzke was the first person in my life to accuse me of being a homosexual.

For years after the abuse I had always wondered if Totzke was right. Maybe I got abused because I was gay or because I acted too much like a girl.

School wasn’t too bad, until grade 7 when everyone’s hormones started switching into overdrive, then I was a target for the real boys who didn’t want a faggot in their midsts. I could never figure out what it was. Was it the way I walked? Was it the way I talked? Was it the fact I never acted like horndog around girls and that I never showed any interest in girls?

When I worked for Ed, Bruce, and Dirk at Classic Billiards, Ed was always quick with the gay humour. I got sent to do a service call at the Hotel Isabella by myself with Ed asking me if I got any “action” when I came back to the shop. Ed even sent me off to see a rather interesting promoter in the city. Ed kept asking me if he made any advances to me and if I did anything with him.

In my teen years I would periodically find myself being groped by random men. I never could figure out why I was being groped and no one else was. Like I’d be riding the subway and some dude would make a bee line for me on an empty car, sit down beside me, make some small talk, and then his hand would be massaging my crotch. One time I was downtown at Funland Arcade, I was playing pinball, and the guy wasn’t even being coy about it, he just came up from behind, stuck his hand between my legs, and he wasn’t even coy about it. And as he’s doing that he asks me if I want to go back to his place as he finds me really cute.

I got mugged back in 1995 down at Burrard and West Georgia in downtown Vancouver. The first thing that the investigating officer wanted to know is was this actually a fight between me and my boyfriend or perhaps I tried to pick up a straight guy in a bar.

I had a manger in the early ’00s who would frequently refer to me as “Freddie” as in Freddie Mercury. He would often urge me to use protection when I had sex as he didn’t want me to catch AIDs.

While I was working for this same manager, one of the contractors that did construction projects for the company used to wait until no one was around, then he’d call me a faggot, or a fucking queer. I’d go talk to the manager and he’d laugh it off and tell me that I had to grow a thicker skin if I wanted to survive in the world.

When I first started working at the hospital my department was managed by an outside management firm. I had two mangers that worked for this outside contractor. One of these managers refused to acknowledge me. The other manager, who was the first manager’s manager said that I was far too flamboyant and that if I toned it down maybe the other manager would begin to tolerate me.

But through all of this, never once did I feel “gay”.

I just never really was attracted to women.

And actually, I was never really attracted to men either.

Since I was a kid I was certain that I was going to have nice breasts. Not big ones, nothing like Dolly Parton or Jane Mansfield. Just nice ones.

All the other stuff I wasn’t too concerned about because I really wasn’t aware of the other stuff yet.

Around age 5 on CFB Shearwater, me and three of my female friends were playing in the garage attached to one of their PMQs. I can’t honestly remember how it came to this, but the three of them were tying to help me push my penis back inside because the consensus was that I must have peed too hard one time and that’s why everything popped out and why I didn’t look like them.

But the differences down below never really caused me any issues until later.

In the years that I lived on CFB Griesbach in the aftermath of CFB Namao I really despised what I had between my legs. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it.

Even though I had been sexually abused for 1-1/2 years, I’m certain that the disdain that I felt towards my junk wasn’t because of the abuse.

About that time I had started going through the early parts of puberty.

And I really didn’t like what was going on.

The feelings of phantom breasts were becoming more intense. It’s like I felt like these should be developing, but they never did.

And at the same time it felt like my hips were supposed to be widening, but they never did. It’s an odd sensation that still persists to this day.

I used to cry myself to sleep every night hoping that I’d wake up as a girl the next day, but childhood hopes can’t overcome physical realities.

It was just after we moved to CFB Downsview in Toronto that my nipples started to secrete a milky white liquid. Finally! I thought that I was finally going to get my breasts. Nope.

Apparently some boys experience this leakage and it’s quite normal.

Transitioning isn’t something that I just decided to do on a whim.

I legally changed my name back in 2008 as a first step in the process.

Bobbie was supposed to eventually become Bobbi.

I even wrote my father a detailed letter explaining what I wanted to do and why I was doing it. He never wrote back or called after that.

And it’s not like he didn’t know what was coming down the pike. In August of 2006 we had an in depth conversation about the events on CFB Namao in which he blamed his mother for hiring the babysitter and that I just had to understand that none of it was his fault.

I told him that I wanted to go after the babysitter and Richard cautioned me against doing that as I might not like the way the shits smells.

After we had that initial telephone call he called me on a daily basis for almost 2 months, but then the calls just suddenly stopped.

I think maybe I had mentioned the verboten topic in casual passing in one phone call.

When I got my name change in 2008 I was so geared up towards taking the necessary steps, but then in 2009 I got an offer of employment that would steer me off course.

The new job disappeared due to a dispute between two factions of shareholders that owned the company. One faction wanted to keep the business operating, the other faction just wanted to sell the property and get the money and get out of there.

I ended up taking some of the shareholders to the Supreme Court of BC. Took a few months of legal back and forth but we ended up settling out of court.

Armed with this, I decided to take on the babysitter.

That was a fucking mistake.

I could have transitioned years ago, but instead I got ensnared in the shit my father warned me about. For 13 years I got derailed on my gender adventure by a military hellbent on keeping their dirty laundry out of sight of the public.

They lied, and they lied, even though they knew the truth.

They called me a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military.

The Minister of National Defence accused me of being a scammer looking for a quick buck.

So, here I am waiting for two weeks.

Two weeks for me to get my first dose of anti-androgen meds and my first dose of estrogen.

I won’t truly be a woman, and I’m fine with that.

Just so long as I can no longer be considered a male, I’m happy with that.

If this works and there are no adverse effects, then I do plan to have all traces of my male genitalia removed. No penis, no testicles, no scrotum. Just nothing.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like if humans were born genderless and then had to choose a gender on the 16th birthday, what gender would I have chosen.

The sad thing about being a human being is having to endure other human beings that “know more”.

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” blah, blah, blah.

There’s only two genders……. blah, blah, blah.

Boys are supposed to have sex with girls, not with other boys (Totzke said this)…… blah, blah, blah.

You can’t have a penis and testicles and long for your phantom breasts and phantom hips….. blah, blah, blah.

I’m not a brainologist, or a genderologist, or a sexual attractionologist, I’m just a XY that’s never felt like an XY or identified as an XY.

The Justice System in this country is in shambles and is horrifically broken if you’re the victim

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.