Tag: CBC News

Jurisdiction and other ramblings.

In the 14 years that I’ve been dealing with the Canadian Forces, one thing that I have become acutely aware of is that the National Defence Act isn’t written in stone. It’s written in jelly. Jelly with diced fruits that can be moulded and mushed to mean whatever the military wants.

When I sent my email to the Edmonton Police Service in March of 2011, I didn’t contact the EPS because I couldn’t figure out how to send an email to the military police.

I did this because when I tried reporting the babysitter back in 1984 and 1990 the military police on CFB Namao told me on both occasions that the babysitter was a military dependent, and therefore he was a civilian and he had to be dealt with by the civilian police.

This is why I was greatly surprised in 2011 when I was contacted by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service and told that the CFNIS would be running the investigation because the events happened on a military base.

It would later me confirmed that when the EPS contacted the CFNIS via ASIRT that the CFNIS had claimed that at the time of the offences back in 1980 my complaint would have been the jurisdiction of the Morinville RCMP but that the CFNIS would claim jurisdiction. The CFNIS also decided to check with the RCMP and other agencies to see if I had tried making complaints with anyone else.

My original complaint in 2011 was solely against the babysitter. In hindsight I know that the CFNIS knew about Captain McRae because of specific questions that I was asked by Mcpl Hancock during my original interview.

The involvement of Captain McRae was first brought to my attention by Mcpl Christian Cyr on May 3rd, 2011. Before this date I had never made a connection between the occasions when the babysitter took me to the chapel and the “sickly sweet grape juice” that I’d always be given.

As soon as the connection between my babysitter and captain McRae was made clear I started reaching out for lawyers with military experience. The few ex-JAGs that I was able to contact were all well out of my price range, but they were all adamant that if my complaint was against the babysitter that I needed to get this matter removed from the military system as the military system didn’t have jurisdiction to deal with this matter.

One of the ex-JAGs pointed me in the direction of the proper civilian police. The outside civilian police force having jurisdiction for civilian matters on CFB Namao / Edmonton Garrison was the RCMP in Morinville, not the Edmonton Police Service like I had originally believed.

I made contact with the RCMP Morinville detachment in June of 2011. I dealt with a constable from the detachment who took my information and said that he’d look into things for me. Nothing became of this until I filed a Freedom of Information Request with the RCMP.

The information that I received back was appalling. The RCMP constable had been told by the CFNIS that my complaint was likely to go nowhere due to a complete lack of evidence. The constable in turn sent out a detachment wide (and possible force wide) email alerting other members and RCMP brass of the futility of my complaint and that “I was just trying to further my agenda against the Canadian Forces”.

At this point in time the CFNIS hadn’t tried to locate any of the other victims, hadn’t spoken to my brother, and had made no attempts to talk to the babysitter or his father. None of this would occur until after the CFNIS had told the RCMP in June that the was a complete lack of evidence.

The National Defence Act over the years has been very clear as to the jurisdiction of the military police in regard to military dependents. Military dependents are only subject to arrest by the military police and prosecution by the military justice system when the dependents are outside of Canada and accompanying their serving parent while that parent is on active duty with the Canadian Forces.

When pressed on this the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal both claim that the CFNIS could investigate this matter, and then they’d simply hand the case over to the civilian police to effect the arrests. That’s not how this works.

Nor does the fact that the members of the military police and the CFNIS have the powers of peace officers when conducting their duties. The CN Police, the mayor of any city, and civilian aircraft pilots all have the powers of peace officers while discharging their duties. But their duties are very specific and have very defined boundaries. Military police and the CFNIS are charged with enforcing the Code of Service Discipline. They are not and never have been a secondary civilian police force. And military dependents are NOT subject to the Code of Service Discipline in Canada. They never have been and they never will be. There is a very obvious reason as to why we are not subjected to the Code of Service Discipline in Canada.

These jurisdictional boundaries were also made clear in a 1998 Directive from the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal titled CFMP 2120-4-0. Offences committed by civilians not subject to the Code of Service Discipline are to be handed off to the outside civilian authorities having jurisdiction.

This was reiterated by Lieutenant General Christine Whitecross. She had been asked during a hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence by Vice co-chair Randall Garrison in matters like mine, who has jurisdiction to investigate. Her response was that matters like mine are always handed off to the civilian authorities having jurisdiction.

The interesting this about this is that in the days prior to this hearing, Rachel Ward, an “investigative reporter” with the CBC news program “Go Public” whom had taken over my story from Jenn Blair had asked me to keep her posted and to let her know about what was said as this would have serious impact on the direction of my story.

Almost immediately after Lt.-Gen. Christine Whitecross said what she had said during the committee hearing, Randall’s assistant called me to let me know. Randall himself called me shortly after. Randall told me where I could find the video of the hearing on the parliamentary website. I called Rachel’s number. No answer. Just a message stating that the subscriber had not set up their voice mail. A call to CBC Calgary yielded “We have no record of a Rachel Ward working here”. I managed to get through to mgmt. within the “Go Public” program.

Talk about some very serious misandry. I get the feeling that the mgmt within “Go Public” subscribes to the notion that males cannot be sexually assaulted, that males can only be abusers, that males can never be abused.

Yes, this is actually true.
Male children cannot be victims of sexual assault.
Only girls can be.
Boys can only be the perpetrators.

Apparently between the time Rachel Ward deep sixed the interview between myself and Jenn Blair and today, Rachel has been involved with covering sexual assaults in the military and how the military justice system is defective and has failed women.

But, in all of her stories, has she ever looked at children that live or lived on the bases in Canada? Nope.

It’s like we never have existed. Especially not boys.

Also, I can see news reporters sitting around in the news room going “Hey, did you see this nutcase? He said that children were in the military and lived in military housing! What a clown! Children! In the military! And living on bases to boot! What a fucking lunatic!”

God damn it, how many times do I have to spell it out for you idiots?
CHILDREN were never in the military and therefore couldn’t be on military bases!!
This Bobbie guy is obviously a fucking lunatic!

So yeah, I don’t really have much in the way of respect for the media.

CBC Go Public

The investigative platform that doesn’t like to investigate.

There are other victims of military child sexual abuse out there.
And another former victim

So, if you’ve ever wondered why the CBC has never shown an interest in a news story about how the Canadian Armed Forces were inappropriately investigating the sexual abuse of military dependents on Canadian Forces Bases in Canada, let me shed some light on this.

The CBC isn’t immune to petty politics and retribution.

Back in 2016 I first made contact with Jenn Blair the of CBC’s Go Public news program.

Jenn seemed very interested in my story.

Even to the point that she had a cameraman over to my apartment to film an interview between herself and I.

I put Jenn in contact with other victims of military child sexual abuse.

In subsequent telephone calls, Jenn was very certain that from what the other victims had to say and from what I was saying that this would be a very damning story against the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence.

Then in early January 2017 I received disturbing information from Jenn Blair.

All the time that Jenn had been investigating my story, she was only a “temp” at CBC Go Public and she was bidding on a position with CBC Go Public that eventually went to Rachel Ward.

The story of how the Canadian Armed Forces hid and buried child sexual abuse on the bases after Rachel Ward became involved. The people running are other military dependents fleeing back to the safety of anonymity.

Pretty well on the same day that Jenn notified me that she didn’t get the position that she was bidding on, Rachel Ward contacted me.

Right off the bat Rachel informed me that she didn’t like the direction that Jenn had been moving in and the she was scraping the video interview. Rachel thought that the story, instead of being broadcast, would work better as an “interactive time line” that visitors to the CBC Go Public website could click on to see key events.

I told her that this story was how the Canadian Armed Forces through flaws in the National Defence Act had hidden and buried child sexual abuse on the bases in Canada. I told her that her target audience was in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s and that they weren’t going to be trolling the internet looking for interactive time lines to play with.

These people had literally been put through hell by the Canadian Armed Forces and their defective military justice system and more often than not blamed for their own misfortunes. These other victims were going to need to know that it was safe for them to come forward and that the Canadian Forces would not be able to hurt them any longer.

Nope. Rachel wasn’t budging on her “interactive timeline”. Besides, it was her opinion that the military had changed and that there was no need to keep dragging the military through the mud.

I had been contacted by Randall Garrison’s office just before the Defence Committee hearing in which Randall Garrison was going to ask Lt. Gen. Christine Whitecross who exactly had jurisdiction to investigate child sexual abuse that occurred on the bases in Canada. I contacted Rachel and let her know, she called me back and told me to call her as soon as I had heard any information from this committee.

After the hearing, I was contacted by Randall’s office and told that the hearing was over and that as this was an official hearing that it would be available on the Parliamentary archive. They emailed me the link.

I viewed the video and I almost fell out of my chair.

Lt.Gen. Christine Whitecross said to the National Defence committee that the Canadian Forces have ALWAYS handed off matters involving child sexual abuse to the outside civilians.

I called the number that Rachel had given me.

All I got was a message stating that this customer has not set up their voicemail and that when I see the customer next I should remind them to set up their voicemail.

I called the office number she gave me, but the extension number kept responding with a generic automated message that most systems will give when the user’s greeting message hasn’t been recorded.

I called the CBC Calgary office and by randomly trying different extension numbers I was able to get someone who had heard of Rachel, but they weren’t sure how to get hold of her as her name was in the employee directory, but it wasn’t associated with any office or any extension.

I sent Rachel some email requests that she contact me.

Rachel eventually did get back to me.

The thing that threw me for a loop was when Rachel announced that she was going to have to file FOI requests with DND to get some information. She also asked my what I thought that Lt. Gen. Christine Whitecross meant when she said that DND and the CF always hand matters of child sexual abuse off to the civilian authorities. Rachel suggested that maybe Randall and I misunderstood what Lt.Gen. Whitecross meant.

I told her what Randall Garrison had said about the Office of the Minister of National Defence interfering with his attempts to set up a meeting between himself and Rear Admiral Bennett. Rachel actually asked me what I thought that Randall might mean when he said that.

This was gong absolutely nowhere and fast.

My telephone calls with Mrs. Marchitelli left a LOT to be desired.

I found her to be a very unpleasant person to deal with. Not what I would call a “people person”. She was like one of those middle managers that didn’t like to hear bad things about their subordinates because they’re worried about their superiors finding out and then questioning their leadership abilities.

Rosa wasn’t too understanding at all as to why some of the other victims of military child sexual abuse weren’t willing to go on camera. “If they want to make claims, they have to be willing to stand up”. Nope. Sorry. There are a lot of former military dependents that are terrified of the Canadian Armed Forces and fear the retribution that they could face.

Do I fear retribution?

No, I’m the person who has wanted to die since he was 8 years old. I’m not afraid of DND or the CF solely for that reason. If death comes, it comes. No use being afraid of it.

Rosa was almost of the same opinion of Claude Adams from Global News. That if what I was alleging was such a problem, then we’d know about it my now because surely the “others” would have come forward by now.

So, here we are in 2021 going into 2022.

In 2020 the Military Police Complaints Commission confirmed in writing that the CFNIS knew all along about the connection between P.S. and Captain Father Angus McRae -and- the CFNIS in 2011 knew that P.S. had been investigated by the base military police for molesting children on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

Minister of National Defence Anita Anand has ordered ALL sexual abuse investigations, including my complaint against the Canadian Forces officer in the sauna at the base pool in 1980, be moved into the civilian justice system. This came as a result of the recent review of the military justice system and the subsequent recommendation that the CFNIS and military police be excluded from sexual assault investigations.

I was recently in contact with Ashley Burke of the CBC. I sent her a copy of an email that I had recently received from the Victim Services coordinator of the Canadian Armed Forces acknowledging that my sexual assault complaint against a different former officer of the Canadian Armed Forces was in the process of being handed over to the civilian authorities as per the order of Anita Anand, the new Minister of National Defence.

Ashley emailed me back pretty quick and wanted to know if I would consent to talking to her in a confidential telephone call. I passed her my telephone number and my contact information. Never have heard back from her. She won’t even return subsequent emails.

If I was a gambling man I’d be willing to wager that after my encounter with Rachel Ward and Rosa Marchitelli that my name is on some sort of black list at the CBC.

I can’t see the CBC willingly colluding with the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces to hide stories about child sexual abuse involving military personnel from the eyes of the Canadian public.

My story is pretty unique in the sense that I am a civilian with an active investigation before the CFNIS that is being handed to the civilian authorities.

Go Public seems to handle a lot of different stories from the Canadian Public involving institutions that are not subject to Access to Information or Freedom of Information Acts. So not getting the “other side” of the story doesn’t seem to stop Go Public and the CBC from running these stories.

If you check out Go Public’s web page, their stories run the gamut of closed Facebook accounts, patients with dementia buying service contracts, banks holding customers liable for cheque fraud, and other such public interest issues.

Civilians being denied justice because their parents and their abusers were in the Canadian Armed Forces? Nope, no interest.

Sure, the CBC receives massive support from the Government of Canada, but would the CBC really be willing to look the other way in order to ensure that their funding isn’t reviewed?

I can’t understand any other possibility.

David Pugliese has admitted that budget cuts and staffing cuts make a story like mine really hard for the commercial media to take an interest in.

But the CBC is the public broadcaster that is supposed to hold the Government of Canada to account when the commercial media can’t or won’t.

I can’t see grudges held by Rachel and Rosa as being enough on their own to repeatedly deep-six the story of how the Canadian Armed Forces have hidden and buried incidents of child sexual abuse on the bases, but you never know.

Maybe they know the right people. And when you know the right people, that’s all you need.

Maybe the CBC and its reporters don’t believe that male children can be sexually abused. That could be another possibility.

Or maybe the CBC believes that a 15 year old teenage male abusing his position as a babysitter and having forced anal intercourse with the 8 year old male that he is supposed to be babysitting is really nothing more than “Childhood curiosity and experimentation”.

Maybe the CBC and its reporters believe that even though the military police and the CFNIS have been found incompetent time and time again that somehow the CFNIS and the military police are fully capable of investigating child sexual abuse on the bases completely free from Chain of Command influence.

Why is the media so terrified of Suicide?

I was recently told by a distant relation of the family that one of the reasons that the media may be reluctant to touch my story is because of what I desire no matter the outcome.

There has to be a good reason why the media won’t touch it.

  • The Canadian Armed Forces have come out and admitted that there was a problem with sexual assaults in the military for ages.
  • The Canadian Armed Forces have admitted that victims of sexual assault in the military were often disbelieved, humiliated, ostracized, and blamed for their own misfortune.
  • The Canadian Armed Forces have agreed that the Military Police, the CFSIU, and the CFNIS were often ill equipped and ill prepared to deal with sexual assault.

As I’ve said before, I view suicide as the outcome of an irrational heat-of-the-moment decision.

Medical assistance in dying is something completely different. You have to pass psychological tests and you have to be approved by a panel before you are allowed to receive a prescription for the procedure. There is no body for a caretaker or random stranger to discover. There generally are no unanswered questions. The death is supervised. The body is removed and disposed of after death is confirmed.

You’d think that the Canadian press would be very interested to hear about a matter in which recently released documents verify that the Canadian Armed Forces knew in 1980 the true extent of Captain McRae’s crimes and that the Canadian Armed Forces knew that Captain McRae had been molesting children on the other bases that he had been stationed at but refused to at the time to investigate those matters or to even offer the victims of Captain McRae any type of counselling or help.

However it looks as if my planned death is scaring the media away.

Nora Loreto recently tweeted that she had information of a police officer that walked into a detachment and then shot themselves dead. There was no news coverage of this.

Someone on the thread mentioned that a CBSA officer at Pearson International Airport committed suicide, but the media would only say that the officer was found “dead” at the airport.

And as I’ve mentioned in another post, there are a significant number of suicides in British Columbia each and every year.

BC Coroner Report Total Deaths 2008 to 2018
This is a snapshot of the BC Coroner’s report on Suicide Deaths covering the period of 2008 until 2018.

That’s 6,002 people whom died between 2008 and 2018 that the media have decided don’t exist and never did exist.

What’s scary is that this number only reflects “successful” suicides. Suicide attempts are not included.

Even more interesting is the age group that most frequently commits suicide.

The media always tells us that they’re “saving the children” by not reporting on suicides. Except it’s the 40 to 59 year olds that are committing suicide at the highest rates, not the children.

Why does the media do this?

Is it because the media doesn’t want to encourage copy-cat suicides?

I don’t think that’s entirely true.

I think it’s because the news media would have to open its eyes and realize that the there are a lot of people out there that require help. And the way our society is currently set up, there is no help available for these people and that means that society has failed its most vulnerable.

Even though I’ve only tracked down a few people from CFB Namao that were involved with the CFB Child Sex Abuse Scandal I know of 2 successful suicides, one possible suicide, and 2 attempted suicides related to the Captain Father Angus McRae matter on Canadian Forces Base Namao. That’s five people out of an estimated 25 people that Captain McRae molested on Canadian Forces Base Namao. How many others from CFB Namao did manage to commit suicide that no one knows about? How many kids did Captain McRae molest on Canadian Forces Station Holberg, Canadian Forces Base Portage La Prairie, or Canadian Forces Base Kingston? How many of those kids would go on to commit suicide later in life.

It would be safe to say that I’m not the only one who had a bad reaction to the affairs from CFB Namao. It would also seem to be correct to say that the Canadian Armed Forces didn’t know how to properly deal with the child victims of military sexual assault and that the way in which the Canadian Armed Forces did deal with the child victims of military sexual assault may have actually made the problems far worse due to the military’s penchant for victim blaming.

Maybe the media considers it a waste of time to report on my matter if I’m only going to die in the end anyways.

No.

I think there is such a stigmatism against suicide in our society that there can be no meaningful discussion of any topic when suicide is involved.

See, if I were to have kept my desire to die to myself, then more than likely the media would have reported on my story as they could cleve my eventual death from the CFB Namao sexual abuse scandal.

I could see the eventual reporting of my death:

“Mr. Bees passed away suddenly. There has been no official cause of death released. Mr. Bees if you will remember was the person who brought down the veil of secrecy that had shielded the eyes of the Canadian public from the child sexual abuse scandal that occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao from 1978 to 1980.”

But as I’ve said, my death isn’t going to be so that I can make people feel guilty or ashamed. My death isn’t going to be so that I can get back at people. My death isn’t to cause the Canadian Armed Forces to suffer humiliation. My death will not be romantic nor will it be a cause célèbre.

My death will be because I am tired. I am burnt out. My death will be because of my desire to escape from the memories of P.S., Captain McRae, Captain Totzke, my father, a psychologically tormented childhood and adolescence, and a lifetime of confusion, self doubt, self hatred, and regret.

Ideally my death will be a private event with only the physician in attendance. Maybe a friend or two. Hopefully my death will be humane and it will be very quick.

It’s far too late to save me. That die was cast a long time ago. My life has been the consequence of chain of command decisions that were made in May to July of 1980 by officers in the Canadian Armed Forces. And I wasn’t even a member of the Canadian Armed Forces.

But it’s not too late to save those who have yet to be abused by trying to ensure that they don’t get abused. It’s also not too late to save those who will no doubt be abused by ensuring that they are believed and not blamed, and that they receive help and treatment in a timely manner instead of humiliation.

And not all of those who are or who will be abused will go on to seek death, but just because they don’t doesn’t mean that their abuse wasn’t painful nor does it mean that they don’t need help.