Department of National Defence – Page 3

Happy Pride Month?

As I’ve said, I’ve never really taken part in pride, and I really don’t identify with it.

I guess part of it has to do with the environment that I grew up in.

Military communities were isolated. And by isolated I mean that the Canadian Armed Forces had control over the types of people that were allowed to live in the military communities on base.

By way of filtering recruits, the Canadian Armed Forces could control the political leanings of those living on the bases. And it should be of no surprise that these military communities were very conservative and right leaning.

The thing is, when you’re living within these communities, especially if your exposure to the outside world is very limited, you come to see the political leanings of these communities as being “normal”.

Yes, Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 did no apply to children living on base, it only applied to members of the Canadian Armed Forces. But as has been indicated through various studies, members of the Canadian Armed Forces often had a problems with separating their military careers from their home lives.

As the civilian social worker that dealt with my family noted during various home visits to our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, Mr. Gill orders his children with simple commands and answers their questions with yes or no replies and the children don’t question these decisions.

Being in the Canadian Armed Forces, Richard was nothing more than a cog in a machine that demanded his servile obedience. His was not a position to question. His was a position to do as he was told. And like many men who are stripped of the authority in their lives, he made up for this lack of authority by exerting his authority on those he could.

When it came to me and my issues from Canadian Forces Base Namao he was not going to question the authority of Captain Terry Totzke. If Captain Totzke said that I was a homosexual, that I was exhibiting signs of homosexuality, who was master corporal Gill to question this?

When I’ve talked to other base brats about how things were on base I get this Pollyannish rose coloured view of what things were like on base. This usually comes from former brats that didn’t have “issues” and therefore weren’t exposed to the underbelly of life in the “company town”.

I have encountered a few former brats that don’t participate in any of the social media groups for base brats. They want nothing to do with acknowledging their past. And I have an inkling that the brats who don’t want anything to do with remembering their pasts as base brats vastly outnumber the number of brats that celebrate their past as base brats.

The number of broken and dysfunctional families that lived on the bases was probably a high percentage, especially when you look at how the recruiting process would naturally filter out more liberal minded recruits. The military communities were rife with homophobia, racism, misogyny, victim blaming, victim shaming.

Another matter that played into the sterility of the military community was the fact that military housing could only be rented to members of the Canadian Armed Forces, and that these members had the ability to decide who could live in these houses and who couldn’t. If a service member wanted his spouse out of “his” PMQ, she was booted off the base by the military police. Same thing for his kids. As long as provincial law allowed for it, the serving member could give his kid the boot. The age that a child can live on their own varies from province to province. In Ontario a 16 year old can move out on their own.

I’m not sure what the rules are any more, but in my day living on the bases, 18 was the absolute oldest a base brat could be. Once you hit 19 you were expected to get off the base. There were exceptions to this rule, care givers could live in military housing so long as it was to look after military dependents, persons with disabilities could live on base past their 19th birthday, and students obtaining a higher education could continue to live on base until their 24th birthday.

As you can imaging, there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Everything was sterile. Everything was the military mindset.

Queer kids just learnt to stay in the closet.

Queer kids learnt that they were defective and a national security threat.

Kids on base learnt that there were no victims, that it always took two to tango.

Kids on base learnt that compassion was a liability.

Living on base there were no “others” like us.

Living on base we only had exposure to adults that passed the requirements of the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting agents.

Our view of the world was shaped by the monochromatic views of the world espoused by these serving soldiers that passed the conformity tests.

You know all of those soldier that have been implicated in hazing rituals over the years? Yeah we grew up amongst those people.

I lived on the base that was the home of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. We grew up amongst the mindset and the racism that lead to the death of Shidane Arone in Somalia.

All those sexual assaults that occurred in the Canadian Armed Forces? Those were committed by men of the Canadian Forces, many of whom were our fathers.

The misogyny and homophobia that were rampant in the Canadian Armed Forces back in the day? The men espousing these views were often our fathers.

I grew up in a community that allowed everyone up the chain of command to escape responsibility for the murder of Shidane Arone and allowed a lowly private, private Kyle Brown, to be made the scape goat for the whole sordid affair.

I grew up in a community that allowed sexually abused children to be blamed for the abuse they suffered at the hand of members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

I grew up in a community where the chain of command could determine who was a victim and who wasn’t a victim.

I grew up in a community that had the legal power to investigate itself and its members for sexual assaults against children.

I grew up in a community in which officers with no legal training and no legal background could summarily dismiss service offence charges that had been brought against their subordinates.

I grew up in a community in which a 3-year-time-bar applied to all service offences, including service offences of a purely civilian nature.

I grew up in a community which claimed criminal code offences related to children as service offences to be dealt with solely through the military justice system.

I grew up in a community served by such a compromised justice system that it was dismantled and restructured due to horrific miscarriages of justice.

So no, in the end I have nothing to be proud of.

Finally, at long last.

Well, it looks as if the Minister of National Defence has finally grown a pair and is stripping the Canadian Armed Forces of its ability to investigate and prosecute sexual offences.

This is great news.

But it should go much further. The CFNIS and the base military police MUST be prohibited from investigating any crime on base in which civilians are the victims. This would officially remove both domestic child abuse and domestic spousal abuse from the purview of the Canadian Forces military police group.

Sadly it’s too late for the kids of CFB Namao to receive justice.

The settlement from the class action will be the only acknowledgement that we will ever receive.

There will be no admissions of guilt.

There will be no prosecution.

There will be no admission that the military justice system outright failed us.

There will be no investigations to see how extensive child sexual abuse was on the bases in Canada and how often these matters were mishandled by the military justice system.

In my matter the police force investigating this matter was guided by all sorts of wishy-washy policies enacted by the various National Defence Acts.

And none of these policies dealt directly with child sexual abuse.

For example in 1998 the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal put order CFPM 2120-4-0 into effect that stated that in the matters of sexual assault that occur on base when both the victim and the abuser are civilians, the matter is to be handed over to the outside civilian authorities having jurisdiction.

One military dependent sexually abusing other military dependents would be a perfect trigger for this order.

That policy was outright ignored by the CFNIS in March of 2011, and it was ignored by the Federal Court of Canada in 2013.

Yes, CFPM 2120-4-0 instructed the military police and the CFNIS that matters involving civilian on civilian crimes and sexual assaults involving civilians be handed off to the outside civilian authorities, but as the CFPM 2120-4-0 wasn’t hard written into the National Defence Act according to the Federal Court, the Provost Marshal in 2011 was free to ignore this directive at will.

The Provost Marshal and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service can whine and cry and protest all they want.

They fucked up.

Yes, they may have had no choice in the matter, but they fucked up nonetheless.

In 1980 the military police were not allowed by the chain of command to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

Why didn’t the base commander allowed the RCMP to be called in? Remember, the Canadian Forces moved heaven and earth to keep this investigation and prosecution within the military justice system and out of the prying eyes of the Canadian public, even going so far as to move the court martial “in-camera” and sealing the transcripts. The military would have lost all of this power had the babysitter been investigated, arrested, and then prosecuted in the Juvenile Delinquents Court. One peculiarity of the Juvenile Delinquents Act was the fact that the juvie court could find an adult responsible for the delinquency of a minor and issue summary fines and sentences. All of the work that the Canadian Forces undertook in 1980 to keep Captain McRae a secret would have been all for naught if the babysitter went to juvie court.

In 2011 the CFNIS had the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the court martial transcripts, both of which heavily implicated the babysitter with the abuse of numerous children on the base. In fact as Fred Cunningham stated in 2011, and as the babysitter’s own father stated to me in 2015, it was the babysitter’s abuse of children that triggered the investigation of Captain Father Angus McRae.

Yes, the existence of the paperwork wouldn’t have proved the babysitter’s guilt, but the fact that he had been investigated by the military police and was found to have been sexually abusing children during the exact same time period that I accused the babysitter of molesting me and my brother would have probably encouraged the crown to request a more in depth investigation.

Remember, it wasn’t that the babysitter had been cleared during the military police investigation, or that the charges had been dismissed against the babysitter , the chain of command on Canadian Forces Base Namao prevented both the base military police and the CFSIU from calling in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

And yes, when I requested in 2017 that the CFNIS question the former base commander of CFB Namao, retired brigadier general Daniel Edward Munro, as to why he dismissed the majority of charges against Captain McRae and why he wouldn’t allow the RCMP to be brought in to deal with the babysitter, the CFNIS obtained a legal opinion from a legal officer in Ottawa that stated that due to the 3-year-time-bar that existed prior to 1998 no charges could be brought against Daniel Edward Munro so therefore no investigation was to occur.

However the CFNIS failed to pass any of this information on the Albert Crown prosecutor’s office. In fact the CFNIS seemed to have withheld numerous bits of information from the Crown.

This was a tactic that the military police employed in the ’90s during the CFB Gagetown Rape Controversy in which a military spouse was gang raped by numerous soldiers in a barracks on the base. The general consensus was that the military police would give a case to the crown that the military police knew the crown would not prosecute. The military police would then blame the crown for the failure to bring charges.

During the 2012 MPCC investigation of my complaint against the CFNIS, the Provost Marshall willingly withheld the existence of the CFSIU paperwork and the court martial transcripts from the MPCC. In fact the Provost Marshal withheld numerous documents from the MPCC.

Federal Court rules state that an applicant for judicial review cannot enter into evidence any documents that were not before the tribunal in question.

This means that I was unable to enter into evidence anything that the Provost Marshal hadn’t given to the MPCC. Which was a lot. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Provost Marshal withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission over 80% of the documents from the 2011 investigation.

Even though the 2nd CFNIS investigation was conducted much better as an inspector with the RCMP had set down some ground rules and directions for the CFNIS to follow, in the end the CFNIS basically resubmitted the same brief word for word to the Alberta crown that the CFNIS submitted in 2011. The second time around that CFNIS again failed to notify the crown of the existence of the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork or the 1980 court martial transcripts that indicated that the babysitter was known to have molested numerous children on the base during the same frame of time that I had made my allegations against him.

And I know that the exact same brief was filed because when I filed for judicial review in 2013 I was given a certified copy of the documents before the MPCC. In 2019 when I appealed the findings of the Alberta Victims of Crime decision that no crime had occurred based upon the CFNIS investigation, I was given a certified copy of the documents before the Alberta Victims of Crime. This included the 2018 submission to the Alberta Crown. It was identical to the 2011 submission.

See, the problem with the military police is that they are soldiers first and police officers second.

The investigators with the CFNIS must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. Their superiors must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. And so on, and so on.

This means that investigations conducted by the CFNIS can be exposed to political interference.

Children who were sexually abused on military bases in Canada were of absolutely no concern to the brass at NDHQ. And the brass at NDHQ was certainly not going to allow a bunch of base brats sully the public image of the Canadian Armed Forces.

What would the public think if they discovered that children were not entirely safe while living on allegedly secure defence establishments?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that children who lived on bases in Canada prior to 1998 and who were sexually abused by members of the Canadian Forces could not obtain justice due to the existence of the 3-year-time-bar?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that due to the principles of “double jeopardy” military service personnel who sexually abused children on base prior to 1998, and who had their charges dismissed by their commanding officer, could never be tried again on the same charges by either a civilian or military tribunal. I would like to think that the Canadian public would blow a collective gasket if they were to discover that these commanding officers that had the power to dismiss and charge brought against their subordinate had no legal training, no legal background, and prior to 1997 didn’t even have to consult with a legal officer before dismissing charges.

And what would the public think if they discovered that the likelihood of charges being brought against an abuser in the pre-1998 days had a lot to do with the rank of the victim’s serving parent versus the rank of the abuser and ultimately the rank of the abuser’s commanding officer.

A corporal’s demand that charges be brought against a captain when the captain’s commanding officer is a colonel isn’t going to go too far. Especially not when that commanding officer is the base commander and had the ultimate authority over everyone on that particular defence establishment. This would include the corporal, the corporal’s commanding officer, the base military police, and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit detachment located on the colonel’s base.

Anyways, enough for now…….

Growing up Queer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

There’s nothing that starts up arguments better in the base brat groups on F-book than discussions about what it was like to grow up queer on a military base.

The strongest counter argument that most former base brats can come up with is that it wasn’t easy to be queer in the civilian world so why do I concentrate on the military world.

I didn’t grow up in the civilian world, I grew up in the military world.

I lived on military bases from the month I was born until just after my 16th birthday.

By the time I was 8 years old I knew the following terms:

Homo
Faggot
Queer
Cocksucker
Pansy

I was taught that women were inferior to men and that girls were inferior to boys.

It would be an understatement to say that the military was a very misogynistic and homophobic environment.

The Canadian Armed Forces had a very strict policy against homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” right up until 1994 when they were ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to ditch the homophobia.

This policy was CFAO 19-20.

And as I’ve said before, yes, the policy didn’t apply to military dependents. But each and every member of the Canadian Forces would have received basic information on this policy as they were expected to rat out fellow members if they suspected those fellow members of being gay, lesbian, or exhibiting any other sexual “abnormality”.

I think this is one of the reasons that Captain Terry Totzke was so hellbent on making me understand that I was a homosexual because I had sex with the babysitter. In Totzke’s mind I must have been a homosexual as there would be no other reason why I’d let a boy twice my age put his penis into my rectum on various occasions. Totzke’s training in the military must have fucked up his common sense beyond all belief.

And as study after study has indicated, military personnel were very prone to bringing their training into the homes on base.

This is one of the reasons why domestic abuse was always a problem in the military community. In the military you do not under any circumstance question or disobey the orders of your superiors. In the military home the male spouse would often view themselves as the commander of the house and everyone in the house was his subordinate bound to obey his each and every command. And there would be hell to pay if commands were not obeyed.

All I can say is that I am very thankful that Richard never caught me crossdressing in my early years on Shearwater or Griesbach. Actually, I’m very thankful that no one else caught me crossdressing.

I cannot imagine, even in today’s world, growing up trans on base, or even just gender non-conforming. Being gender non-conforming on base is dangerous.

For the longest time I had always assumed that my desire to not be male had something to do with the abuse from 1978 until 1980.

No, the abuse was not the source of my desire to not be male.

Yes, in the aftermath of the abuse I really wanted to be a girl. But I had always assumed again that that was due to the abuse as well as the teaching of Captain Totzke and nothing more.

I had always written off my desires to have my own breasts and my own hips like the girls at school was just me being fucked up due to the abuse.

All the abuse from CFB Namao did was set me up for further abuse on CFB Downsview.

It was the military’s attitude towards gender non-conforming people, and the military’s opinion that gender non-conformity was a mental illness that caused me to bury my desires.

Yes, I realize that switching hormones isn’t going to be easy, but at least today’s civilian world is far more accepting than the homophobic and misogynistic environment that I grew up in.

Yes, I do expect to encounter boneheads who think that what I am doing goes against “god’s will”.

Tough.

Yes, I do expect to encounter women that will accuse me of wearing “their” gender as a costume.

Tough.

For the most part my gender identity and my sexual orientation were formed in utero. The brain is literally hard wired for sex. If the human brain, or any other animal brain for that matter wasn’t hard wired for gender identity and sexual orientation, reproduction would have never worked.

Sex is a basic instinct.

There is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.

But how the brains are wired very much depends on what hormones the fetus is exposed to in utero as well as the levels of those hormones, and the timing of the exposure.

Genes and chromosomes also play heavily into gender identity and sexual orientation.

Humans start developing as females even if they have XY chromosomes. However, once the fetus’s gonads develop into either testicles or ovaries and start secreting either androgen or estrogen the the fetus will either keep developing as a female or the development as a female will halt and the fetus will start developing as a male.

Persons that are born intersex prove that gender is not a simple binary male / female choice. We’ll never know the true prevalence of intersex persons throughout the entirety of human existence, but it would be safe to say that ever since mammals started determining sex via the presence of a second X or Y chromosome that intersex persons have been with us.

One type of intersex are persons with XY chromosomes that are born presenting as female. XY is supposed to be male, right? Well unlike what the bible thumpers would love for you to believe, due to Androgen Insensitivity intersex persons are often born with testicles in their abdomen, a vagina, but no uterus, all external genitalia presenting as female. These people are usually not detected to be intersex until they become teens and fail to go through puberty.

Their testicles are in their abdomen because due to the androgen insensitivity they failed to descend towards the scrotum. Basically the gonads stayed where they would have been had they developed into ovaries.

They have a vagina and external female genitals as both male and female fetuses have these until the gonads become testicles and the female tissues are repurposed for their male counterpart.

Males have mammary glands and nipples because they form before the gonads develop into ovaries or testicles.

How and when the brain starts adapting its wiring is anyone’s guess. Researchers know what the various areas of the brain do, but the exact wiring patterns that form and how they determine the characteristics of the fetus are still quite a few years away from truly being understood.

Trans people and queer people and gender non-conforming people have existed all throughout human history no matter how hard the Abrahamic religions have tried to erase them. To say that human beings are either genetically male or female, identify as male or female, and are only attracted to the opposite sex is quite laughable.

Class action update

There was some exchange of information between my lawyer and I this last week.

The DOJ seems to be willing to allow this matter to proceed as a class action.

There was some disagreement on the definition of what constituted a “class member” so hopefully my lawyer is able to have this definition properly defined.

Once my lawyer and the DOJ reach agreement on what constitutes a class member, then the court still has to accept. This shouldn’t be a problem though.

Beyond that I can’t give much more information as it’s all in the hands of the lawyers.

Saturday April 6th, 2024

On Monday I’m back to work.

It’s been a fun 15 days away from work.

Still have 20 days left of vacation time.

I think the first 7 days I barely got out of bed.

Dreamland is such a pleasant place to visit, so much nicer than reality.

The rest of the time I was getting out of bed super, super late.

Tuesday I’ve got an appointment with my nurse practitioner. I’ll have a pretty interesting decision to make.

He’s kinda apprehensive. He wants to know if I’ve ever had any involvement in the trans community before. I told him that I had been involved with some groups in the mid ’00s, but the fact that I’m a socially isolated loner meant that I didn’t stick around them for too long.

Beside, I don’t want to transition into a woman. I want to transition into neither. Not male. Not female.

Sex has been an unmitigated disaster for me.

To officially be neither, but to have bits of both intrigues me.

My NP has warned me that I’m pretty old and my masculine features are pretty hard set. I told him that I’m fine with that, that I’m not looking to be female. I just don’t want anything associated with male.

He cautioned me that people might not be too accepting.

I’m covered in tattoos from head to toe.

I have a lot of facial piercings.

I wear dresses and heels.

I work with trades that are normally dominated by “Real Manly Men….. Grrrrrr(tm)(c)”

At work I put up with people who won’t give me the time of day due to the way I am.

Having breasts and less muscle mass isn’t going to be much of a game changer for me.

And really, I’ve seen guys with bigger breasts than I intend to have. They usually call those “Molson Man Tiddies”…… but I digress.

The NP says that there is a risk of blood clot and stroke with taking oral or intramuscular Estrogen at my stage in life. Fine, dermal patch it will be.

The lawyers are still working away on the class action, nothing to report on that front.

I am beginning to accept that the DOJ and the DND will succeed in their endeavour to hide this mess from the public.

Sometimes I wonder if things would have been better off and if I listened to Richard’s warning to me about sticking my nose into this shit. Sure, knowing the truth about Canadian Forces Base Namao is one thing. But knowing the truth really hasn’t changed anything. Pedophiles and child molesters who had successful careers in the Canadian Armed Forces prior to 1998 and who got away with their crimes due to the 3-year-time-bar flaw and the summary investigation flaw get to enjoy their retirement knowing that they can’t ever be touched by military or civilian tribunals. And the victims of these perverts get laughed at by the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence because neither of these agencies can be compelled by any civilian authority to admit that these flaws impacted children living on the bases.

Until next time……..

DNA

So, I bit the bullet last week and I ordered an Ancestry DNA test.

I’ve always been kinda curious about my lineage.

According to my father, I’m my Uncle Al’s son.

But then again, according to Richard I’m Bill Parker’s son.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes back.

There are pictures of my brother and I as kids.

He has the same skin tone and brown eyes like my grandmother.

Me?

I look like my mother, and so does my brother.

But he also looks like he has First Nations blood.

Me, not so much.

My father was a horndog that would literally fuck anything that moved.

I’ll be interested to see if I get any hits for half-brothers and half-sisters that I didn’t know about.

He was with the Royal Canadian Navy for 6 years before he remustered into the airforce after the unification of the Canadian Forces in 1968.

But even when he was with the airforce he was often away on training exercises.

So there’s no telling how many panties he dropped.

And the thing with being in the Canadian Forces back then is when he said that he was going away on training exercises, did he really go away on training exercises?

Or were his “weekend training exercises” just panty raids.

But other than discovering how far and wide my old man distributed his tadpoles, I’m really curious about the maternal side of my family.

As I’ve said previously, I more or less know about the paternal side of my family. My paternal grandmother raised my brother and I for about 6 years of our lives as kids.

I did meet my paternal grandfather, albeit only for a few weeks over the 1982 xmas holidays.

I met both of my paternal uncles, uncle Doug and uncle Norman.

I met two of my paternal grandmother’s brothers, Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Johnny.

I even met my paternal grandmother’s sister, Aunt Karen.

So far as the maternal side of my family, I only vaguely remember uncle Al. I never would see uncle Al again after my father was posted from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside.

It will be interesting to see what comes up.

Resting Bitch Face………

I’ve come to the realization that I suffer from a bad case of “Resting Bitch Face”.

Here’s an album of my “Resting Bitch Face” in Canada, America, and Iceland…..

What causes Resting Bitch Face?

Probably a life time of being dead on the inside.

It’s hard at work because I gotta fake a smile all the time otherwise people seem to think that I’m going to snap.

It’s not that I hate or despise perky people. I just don’t feel the need to run around all day with an insane grin on my face.

In my house there was no need to smile.

The best thing around grandma, Richard, or Sue was to just adopt a blank face.

And growing up keeping a blank face also work at school as it kept the other kids and the teachers from knowing that anything was wrong at home.

When I went to the Westfield program in Edmonton from June 1982 to March 1983 we had to talk about our “feelings”. We also had to do “temperature check” every morning before classes so that we could express our feelings and emotions.

This did not go over well with me. I hated it. I hated talking about feelings.

Richard, Grandma, and the events of CFB Namao had killed off just about every emotion that I ever had.

Even to this day the worst thing that you could do is ask me to express emotions, or talk about my feelings, of talk about personal things.

“You don’t like to talk about personal things?”

Get the fuck outta here!

What the fuck is this blog then?

This blog is therapy and a testament.

Besides, I talk about what I want to talk about when I want to talk about it.

But Bobbie, you gotta talk about your feelings if you want to get better……..

Nope.

That’s not how this works.

You don’t get to ignore the past and then wash your hands of my dysfunction by further blaming me for being me.

Don’t forget, a lot of my dysfunction didn’t come from bad personal choice. Almost all of my dysfunction can be traced back directly to bad decisions made by members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

You didn’t honestly think that what I endured wasn’t going to have an effect on me, did you?

And blaming me for the dysfunction wasn’t going to cure me.

I think that this may be one of the reasons that I embraced an eccentric manner of dressing, what I lack on the inside I cover up with nice colours, patterns, and designs on the outside.

Too little, too late

If you haven’t paid attention to the media over the last few days you missed out on some major changes coming to the Canadian Armed Forces.

The Minister of National Defence is calling for the removal of sexual assault from the purview of the Canadian Forces Military Police Group, including the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service.

The Minister is requesting that all sexual assaults that occur on Defence Establishments in Canada be investigated and prosecuted by the civilian police and the civilian justice system.

I will be very curious to see how this affects military dependents that were sexually abused on military bases in Canada, especially in the days prior to 1998.

I also wonder how this will affect pre-1998 child sexual assault investigations that rely on access to the service files of retired service personnel.

This of course is 13 years and three weeks too late to be of any benefit to me.

In my case the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, and the Canadian Forces will always be able to say that the Military Police Complaints Commission and Federal Court justice Yves De Montigny found no issues with the 2012 MPCC investigation which in turn found no issues with the 2011 CFNIS investigation and therefore the 2011 CFNIS investigation was an example of superb police work.

That of course only works so long as the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, and the Canadian Forces forget to tell the Canadian public that they willingly withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission and ultimately Federal Court Justice Yves De Montigny the fact that the CFNIS in 2011 had in their possession the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork, and the 1980 Court Martial transcripts that show that it was the babysitter’s abuse of young children that brought him to the attention of the base military police and that this subsequently brought Captain Father Angus McRae to the attention of the CFSIU which found that McRae had been molesting well over 25 children on the base and that McRae had been obfuscating this abuse by administering alcohol to the children that he was abusing in the rectory of the chapel.

I also like the fact that the Minister of National Defence is willing to expand those who can make interference complaints to the Military Police Complaints Commission. Up to now the only persons who can make complaints are the investigators with the military police or the CFNIS. But if your superior gives you a “lawful command” is that really interference?

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/2024/03/introduction-of-the-military-justice-system-modernization-act.html

Interests.

In this video I talk interests.

I’ve had interests in life. But they were always the wrong interests and I had these interests for all of the wrong reasons.

I wish that things in life had been different when I was a kid.

But they weren’t, so I can only live in the shadows of the aftermath and the destruction.

A touchy subject.

Because I wish to obtain Medical Assistance in Dying and because I post about it on social media, the algorithms keep filling my feed with posts that deal with M.A.i.D.

There are those who are convinced that the government’s intention with M.A.i.D. is to save money on mental health treatment by forcing people with mental illness to undergo M.A.i.D. instead of living on social assistance.

Others are convinced that the government is going to send white vans around in the cities of Canada to euthanize the homeless and the elderly.

One of the major problems that mental health care faces in Canada is that our general population is overwhelmed by American media. American media is dangerous in the fact that it pushes an imaginary economic reality that does not exist. Americans believe in low, low, low taxes. Which is why they have massive infrastructure problems, crappy schools, non-existent social safety nets, and almost non-existent health care. That, and America’s defence spending is completely out of control.

Fellow Canadians see the low taxes that Americans pay, and so they demand from our governments that we pay the same stupidly low taxes up here as they do down there.

Which is why our health care is crumbling. Which is why mental health care is almost non-existent. And which is why mental illness is vilified as being due to laziness and poor personal choices.

America has had homeless mentally ill people wandering the streets and living in tents on the street for years, like since back in the ’70s and ’80s. And this problem is coming up to Canada.

American style austerity is a cancer.

But Canadians love their low, low taxes and their cheap imported goods, so don’t look for any kind of funding increases any time soon.

A lot of disabled rights groups and mental health rights groups want mental illness yanked as one of the criteria for being able to access Medical Assistance in Dying.

But the problem with doing so is that you deny people such as me the right to end our lives as we see fit. You also ensure that I suffer mental pain for 10, 20, or even 30 more years.

Better mental health funding wouldn’t have done anything for me. As I’ve said before, I was a “dirty little secret” and my lack of mental health treatment was due to the desire for secrets to be kept from the Canadian public. No amount of public mental health funding was going to change that.

And having the government of Canada rescind the right of Canadians such as myself to avail ourselves to a humane and painless death at the time of our choosing isn’t going to increase the funding for mental health treatment and housing for persons with mental illness.

To get Canada on track again, Canadians would have to eschew American style disaster capitalism and embrace full democratic socialism. Canadians would have to learn to understand that higher taxes do lead to overall better outcomes as any of the Nordic or Scandinavian countries can attest.

But changes like that would take years, especially when you consider how much money American right wing think tanks pump into Canada on a yearly basis to try to convert us into a mini-USA.

I don’t know what the solution is for the time being.

As I’ve said, I make my application in March of this year. Hopefully I get my two assessments by no later than July. So hopefully I can undergo my procedure and cease living sometime in December of 2024 or early 2025.

I don’t want to be forced to suffer as a casualty in someone else’s war.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to cause 500k new low income houses to be built.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to cause 500k new assisted living homes to be built.

Banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness isn’t going to give those living with disabilities or mental illness $100k in yearly income assistance.

But banning M.A.i.D. for mental illness will prolong the suffering that persons like me have to endure, and I would envision that it would increase the number of suicide attempts and suicides as persons try to escape their pain and torment.

I don’t envy the struggle the mental health and disability advocates face, but please don’t fuck with my ability to die peacefully and painlessly.