Unless you’ve had first hand experience with the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, or even the Canadian Armed Forces Military Police Group for that matter, you will never truly understand the ability of agencies such as the Canadian Armed Forces to define what the truth actually is.
Under the rules governing complaints about the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service a person wishing to make a complaint against the CFNIS must first submit the complaint to the provost marshal.
This would be the same provost marshal that oversaw the CFNIS investigation in the first place. Remember, no matter how the Canadian Forces, the provost marshal, or the CFNIS like to spin things, everyone within the Canadian Forces Military Police Group are subject to the Code of Service Discipline. Each and every member of the Canadian Forces Military Police Group must obey the “lawful” command of their superiors.
As a retired JAG practicing in Victoria BC told me to remember, members of the CFNIS are Soldiers First and police officers second.
So far as the provost marshal goes, the provost marshal has the sole discretion to control which documents the Military Police Complaints Commission receives and which documents are withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission.
And during a review the MPCC cannot subpoena documents from the CFPM, the CFMPG, or the CFNIS. The MPCC literally has to reach their conclusions based upon the documents that were skillfully selected and submitted to the MPCC.
As there are absolutely no oaths administered during an MPCC review, the provost marshal has absolute free reign to lie to and feed bullshit to the MPCC and there are no penalties or sanctions that can be applied for this deceptive behaviour.
What information did the provost marshal intentionally withhold from the MPCC?
- Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit investigation investigation paperwork DS 120-10-80 which indicated that it was the babysitter’s sexual abuse of children on the base that initiated the investigation of captain McRae
- The court martial transcripts from McRae’s court martial that described in detail one the penetrative assaults the babysitter committed on a trio of ten-year-old boys behind the rec centre.
- I’d also bet the the CFPM also wouldn’t explain to the MPCC that their investigation was stymied by the fact that while they could lay charges against the babysitter, they wouldn’t be able to lay charges against Angus McRae due to the summary-investigation-flaw and the three-year-time-bar flaw.
- The existence of the out-of-court settlement reached between the babysitter, the DOJ, the CAF, and the DND in November of 2008 which appears to have implications for any subsequent investigation of the babysitter.
- The fact that a senior officer within the CFNIS Western Region told a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the investigation of my complaint “was likely to go nowhere due to a complete lack of evidence”. This was weeks before the CFNIS contacted my father, my brother, the babysitter, and the babysitter’s family. One of the babysitter’s replies to the CFNIS in 2011 was that “anything he had been involved in as a youth has already been handled by the military” and that if charges were brought against him “a lawyer would handle that”.
- My social service records that indicated that I started having problems in school on CFB Namao. Behavioural problems are nothing unheard of with sexually abused children and dysfunctional households.
- My social service records which also indicated that my grandmother was living with us on base and raising my brother and I. This was important as my father’s statement to the CFNIS in 2011 made it sound as if grandma popped in for a visit one weekend.
- My social service records also indicated that my father was having anger issues and often had anger outbursts. My social service records also indicated that my father blamed my issues on my grandmother whom he viewed as “being cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was quite frequently”, he would also tell social services that “his mother refused to seek treatment for her alcoholism”
And it wasn’t just the MPCC that the CFPM and the CFNIS lied to. The CFPM and the CFNIS had also lied to the Alberta Attorney General and the Alberta Crown Prosecutor. When the CFNIS submitted their summary to the Crown, they left out all of the above bullet points. However, in their summary to the Crown the CFNIS also “forgot” to mention to the Crown that I had tried twice before to report the sexual abuse to the military police.
All of this resulted in Mr. Weribiki observing that it was very significant that I had never told anyone about the abuse and that I had never tried to report the abuse in the previous 30 years. Who was I going to tell? My father who was frequently absent either on training exercises or living off base with his girlfriends? My “frequently cruel and intoxicated” grandmother who had an insane attachment to the catholic church? And I did try to report the abuse in 1984 and 1991.
My father’s statement was so detached from reality that when the CFNIS received a copy of my social service paperwork you would think that they would have gone back to my father and asked him to explain the horrific and glaring differences between his statement and the contents of my paperwork.
Nope, the CFNIS never approached him to explain the differences. Which leads me to believe that my father had been told what to say. Why would my father go along with what the CFNIS wanted? More than likely he had received some favour back in 1980 for agreeing to not make a fuss about his two sons being sexually abused. After all, if Mr. Gill had been at home on base with his kids instead of bringing his alcoholic mother on base to raise his kids in his absence, then his sons never would have been abused. So, I can see my father parroting whatever the CFNIS wanted him to say. Just like colonel Munro, captain McRae, and the various other men of ill intent, I don’t see why my father wouldn’t be willing to lie to save his own ass.
I know that at least one investigator with the CFNIS lied through his teeth when interviewed by the MPCC in 2012. This one investigator claimed that he had flown out to Victoria, BC to meet with me in person. The MPCC cited this as showing how the MPCC went above and beyond standard practice. The only problem is that I never net this investigator, nor have I ever met anyone from the CFNIS in person other than when I was interviewed in late March of 2011 by two investigators who had come to see me at the Vancouver Police Department Headquarters.
The sad thing is the members of the Canadian Forces Military Police group couldn’t tell the truth if they wanted to. They can only tell what the chain of command allows them to say. And the chain of command is full of sad sacks who believe that their primary function is to protect and shield the Canadian Armed Forces from outside scrutiny and criticism.
In 2006 the Canadian Forces Chaplaincy Branch issued a directive related to the release of baptismal records for military dependents that had been baptized by Canadian Forces chaplains on defence establishments. This memo indicated that the reason the rules for access to the baptism records was being restricted was due to the increasing number of child sexual abuse cases being brought against chaplains of the catholic church.




















































