Tag: depression

It’s been a little while since I wrote my last post.

Just haven’t had anything to post about.

When my depression really creeps in, it really creeps in.

This existence just gets so tired and boring.

Get up late for work.

Sleep during coffee and lunch breaks.

Go home and sleep weird sleep schedules.

Dontcha have any hobbies?

Nope, absolutely no interest.

Favourite TV show?

Nope.

Favourite movie?

Nope.

Favourite band?

Nope.

Anyways, I had a brief email exchange with Adam, the lawyer representing my class action, to see if he’s heard anything back from the Government of Canada.

Nothing yet. But that’s absolutely nothing unheard of. The Government of Canada is able to abuse the law to the fullest extent possible, after all the Government of Canada is able to afford the finest lawyers that tax payer money can afford. The Government of Canada managed to drag out the babysitter’s settlement claim for 8 years, and the babysitter was the only kid anointed by the chain of command to be a victim of Captain McRae.

On top of this it looks as if I’m going to have to battle the Government of Canada again just so that I can have the right to request my death on my own terms. Sadly it looks as if the Senate of Canada fell under the sway of the tinfoil hat brigade.

The tin foilers had the Senate of Canada believing that if Medical Assistance in Dying was legalized for mental illnesses such as depression that the Government of Canada was just going to shut down homeless shelters and hospitals and just give everyone who had a brief go with sadness M.A.i.D..

I think that’s what’s driving my latest depression is knowing that the possibility of a peaceful death by M.A.i.D. is being taken away from me by a bunch of do gooders who think that all I have to do is smile and think happy thoughts.

One thing that I really hate about my life is the high functioning depression that I endure.

People only accept a person as having depression if they’re acting like a depressed person is portrayed in the media.

But if you appear “normal”, then there’s no way that you could be depressed and you’re just claiming to be depressed for attention.

It now looks like I’m going to have to fight the government again, but this time for the right to die.

But Bobbie, what about the settlement, won’t the settlement make everything all right?

Not really.

It’s the only way that I can get the Government of Canada to admit that something went horrifically wrong on Canadian Forces Base Namao that literally destroyed the lives of 25 children.

It does nothing to counter 46 years of not being qualified, or having to live with lowered expectations in life because the voices of Captain Terry Totzke and Master Corporal Richard Gill keep echoing in my head.

The Senate’s role is supposed to be sober second thought. It is supposed to examine legislation carefully, objectively, and without allowing itself to be swept up by political panic, moral fear, or emotionally charged lobbying.

But on MAID, the Senate failed that role.

Instead of maintaining objectivity, the Senate allowed itself to be captured by hysterical anti-MAID rhetoric. It listened far too readily to the voices insisting that every form of suffering can be medicated away, managed away, prayed away, therapized away, or postponed indefinitely so that other people can feel morally comfortable.

That is not sober second thought. That is institutional avoidance.

There is nothing wrong with senators asking difficult questions about MAID. In fact, that is exactly what they should do. MAID involves autonomy, disability, mental illness, medical ethics, poverty, state power, and the limits of personal liberty. Any law touching those subjects deserves careful scrutiny.

But scrutiny is not the same thing as hysteria.

A senator can ask whether safeguards are strong enough. A senator can ask whether people have meaningful access to treatment, housing, income supports, and medical care. A senator can ask whether clinicians are properly trained, whether the law is clear, and whether vulnerable people are being protected from coercion.

Those are legitimate questions.

What is not legitimate is allowing the debate to be captured by rhetoric that treats every request for MAID as evidence of manipulation, every applicant as incapable, every physician as suspect, and every expansion of eligibility as a descent into social collapse.

That kind of rhetoric does not clarify the issue. It poisons it.

The Senate did not simply disagree with MAID for mental illness. It allowed the entire discussion to be framed by fear. Once fear became the framework, evidence stopped being the centre of the debate. Autonomy became suspicious. Suffering became something to be managed for the comfort of others. And the people most affected by the law were reduced to objects in someone else’s moral performance.

People such as myself were effectively ignored. Not because we do not exist, and not because our suffering is imaginary, but because listening to us would have forced the Senate to confront something deeply uncomfortable: some people are not asking for death because they are confused, impulsive, uninformed, or unaware of their options. Some people are asking because they have lived with suffering that other people only discuss in theory.

That does not mean the law should be careless. It does not mean safeguards do not matter. It does not mean poverty, disability, trauma, or lack of care should ever be ignored.

It means the Senate had a duty to remain objective.

Instead, the Senate acted as though refusing to listen to people who want a dignified death would somehow make us disappear. It treated avoidance as compassion. It treated delay as protection. It treated paternalism as wisdom.

That is the failure.

I do not need senators to agree with me. I do not need them to like what I have to say. I do not need them to find my life, my history, or my conclusions comforting.

But I do expect them to do their job.

The job of the Senate is not to amplify the loudest moral panic in the room. The job of the Senate is not to give anti-MAID advocates a veto over the autonomy of people they do not understand. The job of the Senate is not to decide that suffering is acceptable so long as it happens quietly and out of sight.

The job of the Senate is to examine the law with seriousness, discipline, evidence, and objectivity.

On that standard, the Senate failed.

This failure matters even more for people whose suffering is connected to institutions that have already failed them.

As I have said before in other blog posts, I suffered immensely as a child. Growing up in a dysfunctional military family does lasting damage. Living on a military base in a household shaped by violence, neglect, secrecy, and untreated trauma does lasting damage. Being surrounded by adults who know something is wrong but choose not to intervene does lasting damage.

Military dependents can be harmed by the military environment without ever wearing a uniform. Yet their suffering is rarely counted, rarely studied, and rarely acknowledged.

Everyone talks about the mental health of serving members and veterans. Far fewer people talk about the mental health of military dependents. Far fewer still talk about what happens to those dependents decades later, after the postings are over, after the records are gone, after the institution has moved on, and after the child has become an adult carrying damage that no one wanted to name.

That silence matters.

It matters because when lawmakers talk about suffering in the abstract, they often erase the people who actually live with it. They talk about hope, treatment, resilience, safeguards, and vulnerability, but they do not always listen to the people who have spent decades surviving the consequences of institutional failure.

That is what happened here.

The Senate allowed anti-MAID rhetoric to frame people like me as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be heard. It allowed the language of protection to become a tool of control. It allowed discomfort with death to override respect for autonomy.

And then it called that compassion.

But compassion that refuses to listen is not compassion. Compassion that strips people of agency is not compassion. Compassion that demands endless endurance from people who are suffering, while offering them little more than slogans, is not compassion.

It is paternalism.

The Senate did not fail because it was cautious. Caution is defensible. Skepticism is defensible. Demanding strong safeguards is defensible. Wanting clear evidence is defensible.

What is not defensible is allowing hysteria to replace objectivity.

That is what happened with MAID. The Senate stopped behaving like an objective reviewing chamber and started behaving like an institution afraid of the political consequences of taking suffering seriously.

A sober Senate would have listened carefully to people on all sides. It would have separated evidence from panic. It would have distinguished real safeguards from moral obstruction. It would have recognized that protecting vulnerable people does not require erasing the autonomy of suffering people.

Instead, the Senate allowed the debate to be captured by people who speak about dignity while denying it to others.

That is not sober second thought.

That is political cowardice dressed up as compassion.

And when an institution as powerful as the Senate abandons objectivity on an issue as serious as MAID, it does not protect the vulnerable. It protects itself from having to think clearly.

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Civil claims against the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence may become impossible for many former military children, not because the abuse did not happen, and not because the Crown has a strong defence, but because the records needed to prove those claims are controlled by the very institution accused of hiding the truth and the very same institution that is liable for damages and compensation.

That is not a small procedural problem. It is the entire battlefield.

The Canadian Forces spent decades keeping records about Captain Angus McRae, a military chaplain and convicted child abuser, away from the public. When the court martial transcript was finally released, it showed that McRae had multiple child victims at CFB Namao. That mattered because the official story had long been narrower, quieter, and easier for the military to contain. The Ottawa Citizen reported in 2020 that the Canadian Forces had fought to keep those details secret for forty years, including by claiming that the original charges against McRae could not be revealed to the public.  

That history should terrify anyone who believes civil justice is available to former military dependants.

A civil action is not magic. A plaintiff still needs evidence. A plaintiff still needs records. A plaintiff still needs names, dates, postings, complaints, investigation files, court martial material, police notes, social-work records, command correspondence, and proof that the institution knew or should have known what was happening.

But what happens when those records were sealed, withheld, misclassified, destroyed, scattered, never transferred, or simply declared impossible to locate?

That is the danger now sitting underneath future civil claims against DND and the CAF.

Access to records is not separate from access to justice

Canada’s Access to Information Act is supposed to provide a right of access to federal government records. The Act’s stated purpose is to enhance government accountability and transparency by providing access to records under the control of government institutions.  

That sounds good on paper.

But in cases involving historic abuse on military bases, the paper is the problem.

Former military children are not trying to obtain abstract policy memos. They are often trying to reconstruct childhood events from decades ago, inside a closed federal institution that controlled the housing, the schools, the police, the chaplains, the social-work referrals, the postings, the investigations, and the disciplinary process.

If DND cannot locate the records, the survivor loses.

If DND says the records were destroyed, the survivor loses.

If DND releases records so heavily redacted that the names, context, and institutional knowledge are removed, the survivor loses.

If DND delays release until witnesses are dead, memories are gone, or litigation deadlines become harder to fight, the survivor loses.

And if DND can call its own records transitory, administrative, operationally sensitive, personal, irrelevant, or no longer useful, then the survivor may never even know what existed.

That is not a fair fight. That is an evidence monopoly.

The McRae records show the problem clearly

The McRae case is a warning sign.

McRae was not an unknown outsider. He was a Canadian Forces chaplain. He operated inside the military community. His victims were children connected to that community. The institution had military police, command structures, chaplaincy structures, court martial authority, and internal records.

Yet the public only learned key details decades later.

The attached reporting shows two separate but connected issues.

First, the military fought the release of records showing that McRae had multiple child victims.

Second, even after release, DND still resisted disclosing records and explanations about who protected him, who delayed disclosure, and why the institution handled the matter the way it did.

That matters because future plaintiffs cannot build cases on rumours. They need the hidden machinery. They need the records that show who knew, when they knew, what they did, what they failed to do, and why certain people were protected while children were left exposed.

In historic abuse cases, the cover-up records can matter as much as the abuse records.

DND’s ATIP problems are not theoretical

This is not merely about one old chaplain file.

The Office of the Information Commissioner has repeatedly found serious problems with National Defence responses to access requests. In several 2024 decisions, the Commissioner found DND had failed to respond within the statutory timelines and was therefore deemed to have refused access. In one case, the Commissioner called the delay by Canadian Forces Intelligence Command in retrieving relevant records “unacceptable.”  

In another 2024 DND case, the Commissioner found that delays by RCAF and Canadian Forces Intelligence Command affected DND’s ability to comply with the Act, and recommended that DND develop proper processes and performance indicators to hold senior officials accountable for delays in providing records to access officials.  

That is important. The problem is not always the ATIP office itself. The problem is often that the internal military or departmental office holding the records does not provide them properly, quickly, or at all.

For survivors, that distinction does not matter much. Whether the failure happens at ATIP, inside a command office, inside an intelligence unit, inside military police, inside personnel records, or inside archives, the result is the same: the person asking for records does not get what they need.

And without records, a civil claim may die before it starts.

“No records” can become the perfect defence

One of the most dangerous phrases in any historic abuse case is: no responsive records found.

That phrase does not necessarily mean nothing happened.

It may mean the records were destroyed under retention rules.

It may mean the records were transferred somewhere else.

It may mean the request was worded in a way that missed the internal filing language.

It may mean the records exist under a different name, unit, file number, archive code, investigation number, or command structure.

It may mean the records were never properly captured in the first place.

It may mean the records are sitting in a box, a restricted archive, an old investigation file, a military police system, a legal file, or a personnel file that nobody tasked properly.

But in civil litigation, “no records” can still operate like a wall. The defendant does not need to prove the survivor wrong if the survivor cannot get the records needed to prove the defendant knew.

That is the quiet violence of institutional record control.

Record retention rules can erase the trail before anyone knows to ask

The issue becomes even more serious when government moves toward shorter retention periods for digital communications.

Treasury Board material confirms that departments are responsible for establishing and implementing retention and deletion practices based on operational needs and legal obligations. It also states that departments must preserve records with business value and must not delete information relevant to access-to-information, privacy, or litigation matters.  

On paper, that sounds protective.

But in practice, it depends on someone inside the institution correctly identifying what has “business value,” what may be relevant to future litigation, and what must be preserved.

That is a major problem in abuse cases.

At the time abuse occurs, the institution may not want to admit there is a problem. It may classify communications as informal, transitory, administrative, or not worth keeping. Years later, when a survivor finally comes forward, the institution can say the material no longer exists.

This creates a brutal circular trap:

The survivor needs records to prove the institution knew.

The institution controls whether those records survive.

If the records are gone, the survivor is told there is no proof.

That is not transparency. That is managed disappearance.

The military dependant problem is worse than ordinary ATIP delay

Former military dependants face a specific records problem.

They were children inside a federal military environment, but they were not serving members. Their own records may be fragmented across military police, base schools, social services, chaplaincy files, medical systems, provincial agencies, service-member family files, and Library and Archives Canada.

The parent’s service file may not preserve the child’s story. Military dependant material may be stripped, destroyed, or never retained in a way that allows the former child to reconstruct what happened.

That means a former military child may be caught between systems.

DND may say the records are not in the member’s file.

The CAF may say the records were local base records.

Military police may say records are gone, restricted, or not searchable.

Archives may say the material is closed, redacted, or subject to long waiting periods.

Provincial agencies may say they only have partial social-work records.

And the Crown may still demand proof.

That is how a legal right becomes hollow.

Future civil actions may become impossible

The real issue is not whether survivors technically have the right to sue.

The issue is whether that right can be exercised after DND and CAF record systems have done decades of damage.

A civil action against the Crown requires evidence of institutional knowledge, negligence, failure to warn, failure to supervise, failure to investigate, or failure to protect. In cases involving historic child abuse on military bases, much of that evidence is likely to be held by DND, CAF, military police, chaplaincy structures, command offices, or federal archives.

If those records are withheld, delayed, destroyed, misfiled, or redacted beyond usefulness, then future civil actions become almost impossible.

Not because the claims lack merit.

Not because the victims are unreliable.

Not because the abuse did not happen.

But because the evidentiary trail has been controlled by the defendant.

That should concern Parliament, the courts, journalists, veterans, former dependants, and every Canadian who believes government institutions should not be able to bury liability through poor recordkeeping.

The law needs to treat missing records differently

Courts and lawmakers need to confront the obvious problem: when an institution had exclusive control over abuse-related records, and those records later vanish, the missing records should not automatically benefit the institution.

There should be consequences when DND or CAF cannot produce files that should have existed.

There should be adverse inferences where records were destroyed, sealed, withheld, or not properly searched.

There should be independent preservation orders for records involving child abuse, sexual misconduct, military police investigations, chaplaincy abuse, dependent children, and internal disciplinary proceedings.

There should be a statutory duty to preserve records once abuse allegations are known or reasonably foreseeable.

There should be meaningful penalties when records are destroyed after the institution knew, or should have known, that they could be relevant to access rights, litigation, or public accountability.

Without that, DND and CAF do not need to win civil cases on the facts.

They only need to outlast the records.

Corporal Donald Joseph Sullivan

The Donald Joseph Sullivan matter shows that military secrecy can damage civilian justice. Sullivan’s court martial records showed that he had been convicted in the 1980s for five counts of gross indecency committed at CFB Gagetown, yet those convictions did not appear on the criminal record filed as evidence in either his 2005 conviction or his later historical sex-abuse proceedings. The records existed, but they were functionally invisible. That is the danger for former military children seeking civil accountability: if even criminal courts and Crown prosecutors can miss prior military convictions involving children, then survivors attempting to reconstruct institutional knowledge decades later face an almost impossible burden unless DND and CAF are forced to disclose what they know.

The chilling effects of the Official Secrets Act

The Official Secrets Act, now continued in modern form through the Security of Information Act and its successor title, the Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act, matters because it places military information inside a criminal-law secrecy framework. The legislation does not need to expressly say that DND may hide embarrassing abuse records. Its practical effect is subtler. People who obtained documents or information while subject to the Code of Service Discipline, or through Crown employment, may reasonably fear that speaking outside authorized channels could be treated as unauthorized communication of official information. That leaves former military children dependent on DND-controlled access systems to obtain records that may prove DND’s own knowledge, negligence, or concealment. In that structure, secrecy law does not merely protect national security. It can also protect institutional silence.

Conclusion

The McRae records show what happens when the military controls the truth for decades.

The problem is no longer just what happened at CFB Namao. The problem is whether former military children will ever be able to prove what happened to them when the records are hidden inside the same institution they are trying to sue.

Access to information is not a side issue. It is not paperwork. It is not administrative housekeeping.

For survivors, access to records can be the difference between a viable civil claim and a dead one.

If Canada allows DND and CAF to become more restrictive with records, more aggressive with retention limits, more comfortable with delay, and more willing to say that records cannot be found, then future civil actions may be impossible before they are ever filed.

And that may be the point.

Because when the records disappear, accountability disappears with them.

If you were sexually abused on CFB Namao between August of 1978 and May of 1980 by either Captain Father Angus McRae, one of his altar boys, or a combination of the two, you can email me at info@cafclassaction.ca and I will forward your contact information to the lawyer handling this class action.

In 2011, the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service investigated my historical complaint about being sexually abused as a child on CFB Namao.

The investigation has since been described, by both CFNIS and the Military Police Complaints Commission, as thorough. They contacted schools. They looked for old yearbooks. They searched for fire records. They interviewed my father, my brother, the sister of the accused, and attempted to interview the accused himself.

On paper, that sounds impressive.

But there is a difference between doing investigative activity and doing a meaningful investigation.

A meaningful investigation does not simply collect statements. It tests them. It compares what a witness says against the available record. It looks for contradictions. It asks whether a witness has reason to minimize, deny, forget, blame, or protect themselves.

That is where the 2011 CFNIS investigation falls apart.

One of the most important witnesses interviewed by CFNIS was my father, Richard Wayne Gill. His statement became a convenient explanation for large parts of the story. According to the CFNIS summary, Richard said he did not remember hiring a babysitter. He said his mother looked after my brother and me for a time. He said a female neighbour across the street would simply keep an eye on us. He said he was unaware of the sexual abuse allegations until I told him years later. He also framed me as a child with discipline problems, school disruption, and behavioural issues that apparently nobody could explain.

That version of events was useful.

It made the babysitter issue foggy. It made the abuse disclosure sound late and unsupported. It made my childhood distress sound like a personal defect. It gave CFNIS a parent’s statement they could place into the file without doing the harder work of asking whether that parent’s version of events survived contact with the documents.

The problem is that Richard’s version did not survive contact with the documents.

It also did not survive contact with Richard’s own history.

Richard and Captain Terry Totzke both knew about the babysitter. This was not some unknown person who drifted into the story decades later. The babysitter was known inside the family context and inside the military social work context. What happened with the babysitter was not treated as abuse of a child. It was treated as evidence that there was something wrong with me.

That distinction matters.

According to my recollection and the family history around these events, what the adults wrongly framed as my “having sex” with the babysitter became the basis for Captain Totzke treating me as though I had a mental illness called “homosexuality.” In other words, the adult system did not begin with the question, “What happened to this child?” It began with the conclusion that the child was defective.

Captain Terry Totzke’s role matters because he did not appear to treat me as a child whose behaviour might be evidence of abuse, trauma, or family dysfunction. That was the problem. In the military social-work frame, I was treated as a behavioural and sexual-management problem. My supposed “homosexuality,” my access to sports, my bedroom door, and my privacy became the focus. The question was not “who hurt this child?” The question became “how do we control this child?”

That poisonous conclusion shaped what happened next.

It explains why I was not allowed to play sports where there might be naked boys in a change room. It explains why the door was to be removed from my bedroom. It explains why my behaviour, my privacy, and my body were treated as the problem instead of asking why a child had been placed in the care of an older boy who was harming him.

That is not a small contextual detail. That is the interpretive framework the adults used.

They did not say, “This child may have been abused.”

They said, in effect, “This child is becoming homosexual.”

Once the adults chose that explanation, everything else flowed from it. The babysitter was no longer treated as the danger. I was treated as the danger. I was treated as contaminated, suspect, and in need of control.

Years later, the blame still followed the same path.

In 1987, when my brother Scott stole Sue’s Pontiac Chevette, Richard blamed me. The logic was grotesque: Scott was turning out this way because I had supposedly allowed the babysitter to touch him. That is not the thinking of a father who knew nothing about the babysitter. That is the thinking of a father who knew exactly which history he wanted to weaponize.

Then, in 2006, Richard and I discussed the babysitter again. During that conversation, Richard said I was wrong to blame him for the babysitter because he had warned his mother not to hire him. He said he did not like the babysitter. He also said that, on occasion, he had to pay the babysitter when his mother did not have the money.

That matters.

Because in 2011, Richard told CFNIS he did not remember hiring a babysitter.

Those are not the same thing.

Saying “I warned my mother not to hire him” is not the statement of a man who knows nothing about the babysitter. Saying “I sometimes had to pay him” is not the statement of a man with no connection to the babysitter. It is a statement that places Richard directly inside the childcare arrangement.

So when CFNIS took Richard’s 2011 statement, they were not dealing with a neutral witness who had no knowledge. They were dealing with a father whose own prior statements, family conduct, and documented child-welfare history created obvious reasons to test his account carefully.

The problem with relying on Richard did not begin in 2011.

The Alberta records had already flagged him as an unreliable source. At the January 26, 1983 case conference, professionals recorded that Richard denied knowledge of my difficulties, current or past, despite documentation to the contrary. They also noted that family contact had been sporadic and only achieved after repeated notes and phone calls. Most importantly, they wrote that Richard often contradicted previous statements from one contact to the next.

So when CFNIS took Richard’s statement in 2011, they were not interviewing a blank-slate parent with no documented credibility issues. They were interviewing a father whose inconsistency, denial, and lack of follow-through had already been recorded by child-welfare and treatment professionals almost thirty years earlier.

By August 2011, CFNIS had been warned that my Alberta Child Intervention file existed. MCpl Robert Hancock recorded that I had left him a message saying I had obtained my 1981 Child Intervention file from the Alberta Government. The file was described as 195 documents. I told CFNIS that the records showed my father did not have much involvement with his children. I also told them that, after the move to Ontario in 1983, I was supposed to receive further care, but my father never followed up on the recommendation.

That should have changed the direction of the investigation.

It should have caused CFNIS to go back to Richard’s statement and ask: does this father’s version fit the independent records?

The answer is no.

The Alberta and Ontario records do not describe a mysterious child whose behaviour was simply inexplicable. They describe a child in distress, in a family system that professionals identified as dysfunctional. They describe poor family follow-through. They describe sporadic attendance at family counselling. They describe professionals trying to arrange continued monitoring and support after the move to Ontario. They describe concern that what was supposed to happen after the transfer did not happen.

The Toronto Children’s Aid Society records are especially important. They record that Alberta Social Services referred the case to Toronto after the family moved. They also record that I was supposed to continue receiving treatment after the move, but that I was instead registered at Sheppard Public School. That is not a minor detail. That is the failed handoff. That is the gap between what adults said would happen and what actually happened.

The paper trail shows that this was not a vague complaint made years later. In August and September 2011, before CFNIS concluded its investigation, I was already telling CFNIS that Alberta and Ontario child-service records existed, that my father had not followed through after the move to Ontario, and that his version of events could not be treated as reliable. Those emails were not lost in the mail. They were forwarded internally and marked to be scanned into the CFNIS/Professional Standards file. The issue is therefore not whether CFNIS was warned. The issue is what CFNIS did with the warning.

Richard’s CFNIS statement should have been treated cautiously because the records already showed a pattern: the adults around me knew there were serious problems, but the practical result was drift, denial, and transfer.

Instead, CFNIS seems to have treated Richard’s statement as if it were stable ground.

It was not.

Take the babysitter issue.

Richard told CFNIS he did not remember hiring a babysitter. But that is not the same as saying there was no babysitter. Later, when I examined him in writing, his answer shifted. He indicated that if a babysitter had been hired, his mother would have been the adult who hired that person.

That is important because the childcare arrangement in the Gill household was not simple. Richard’s mother had been looking after us. But her husband, Andy Anderson, had suffered a serious injury and required care. She had to travel into Edmonton to visit him. That created the practical need for someone else to watch my brother and me.

Richard’s CFNIS statement blurred this by saying his mother stopped looking after the children after his “father” died. But that timeline does not work. If Richard meant Andy Anderson, Andy did not die until October 1983, after we had already moved to Ontario. That cannot explain the childcare gap during the CFB Namao period. The relevant issue was not Andy’s death; it was Andy’s injury, hospitalization, and long-term care, which required my grandmother to travel into Edmonton and created the practical need for a babysitter.

That is exactly the kind of contradiction investigators are supposed to notice.

They did not need to accept my memory alone. They had records. They had dates. They had a father’s statement that could be tested. They had enough to see that Richard’s explanation was at best incomplete and at worst misleading.

The same problem appears with Richard’s description of my childhood behaviour.

In his CFNIS statement, Richard described me as having discipline problems since I was little. He said teachers called because I was disruptive. He said I was taken to a child psychologist and that nobody knew what was wrong with me, except that medication was supposedly suggested.

That version is convenient because it turns documented distress into “Bobbie was always a problem.”

The records also show that the problem was being documented long before I was old enough to be blamed for it.

In March 1973, when I was only about eighteen months old, I was admitted to the Izaak Walton Killam Hospital for Children. The medical note described a mild upper respiratory infection, but the summary line is the important part: I was an “18 mo. old boarder, admitted because of parental social problems.”

That matters because it shows the family context was already being noticed when I was a toddler. Years later, Richard would describe me to CFNIS as a child with discipline problems, school problems, and unexplained behaviour. But the paper trail starts somewhere else. It starts with adults documenting parental and social instability around me before I was even two years old.

By the time Alberta Social Services and later Toronto CAS became involved, the pattern was no longer new. The language had changed, but the theme had not: family dysfunction, poor follow-through, disrupted care, and adults trying to manage the consequences while Richard minimized or contradicted the record.

The Alberta records describe family dysfunction. They describe counselling recommendations. They describe poor commitment by my father to family counselling. They describe a child who was bright but emotionally distressed. They do not support the simple idea that professionals had no idea what was wrong and merely wanted to medicate me into compliance.

That was Richard’s version. It was not the record’s version.

And CFNIS had been warned about the record.

This matters because historical abuse investigations depend heavily on credibility. In a case that is more than thirty years old, there may be no physical evidence. Witnesses may be dead, unavailable, unwilling, impaired by memory, or invested in denial. That makes contemporaneous records even more important, not less.

A child welfare file from the early 1980s may not say, in plain words, “this child was sexually abused by this named person.” But that does not make it irrelevant. It can still show behavioural change, family dysfunction, parental non-cooperation, professional concern, failed treatment planning, institutional handoff, and contradictions in later witness statements.

That is what my records did.

They did not prove everything. They did something narrower and more important: they challenged the story Richard gave CFNIS.

Yet the CFNIS investigation and the later MPCC review seem to have treated the social service records as peripheral because they did not directly name the accused as the cause of my distress. That is a serious mistake.

Those records were not being offered as a magic confession. They were being offered as context, corroboration, and contradiction.

They showed that my father’s account was not neutral. They showed that his description of himself as an uninformed parent did not sit comfortably beside records of professional involvement, counselling failures, and child welfare concern. They showed that the Ontario transfer was not just a family move; it was a child welfare handoff that appears to have failed. They showed that the military social work system, through Captain Terry Totzke, was not some distant background feature. It was directly involved.

The CFNIS investigation did many visible things. That is true.

But visible effort is not the same as analytical rigor.

If an investigator interviews a father and accepts his minimizing explanation without testing it against records the complainant specifically identified, that is not thorough. If an investigator records that the complainant has obtained a 195-document child intervention file, but the investigation does not appear to integrate that file into the assessment of the father’s credibility, that is not thorough. If the file contains a parent’s claim about childcare that collapses when compared to basic dates, that is not thorough.

That is box-checking.

The strangest part is that the CFNIS did send the matter to the Crown. The covering letter stated that the investigation supported the elements of an offence under the Criminal Code provision for indecent assault on a male. So this was not a case where CFNIS found nothing at all. They found enough to send the matter for legal review.

But the weakness remained: the investigation treated my father’s statement as if it carried more weight than it deserved.

Richard was not an independent witness. He was the parent who had failed to protect two children. He was the parent whose own conduct and lack of follow-through were criticized in social service records. He was the parent who had a direct emotional interest in minimizing what happened in his household, on his watch, during his military posting.

That does not mean every word he said was false.

It means his words required testing.

CFNIS had the warning. CFNIS had the opportunity. CFNIS had enough information to know that the Alberta and Ontario records mattered. CFNIS also had enough reason to know that Richard’s statement was not the statement of a detached, uninvolved parent.

Yet Richard’s statement was allowed to sit in the investigation as though it were a reliable foundation.

It was not a foundation.

It was one more piece of evidence that needed to be examined.

And when it is examined against the records, the timeline, and Richard’s own prior admissions, the statement looks less like clarity and more like a convenient fog.

The records also show that the problem was being documented long before I was old enough to be blamed for it.

By the time Alberta Social Services and later Toronto CAS became involved, the pattern was no longer new. The language had changed, but the theme had not: family dysfunction, poor follow-through, disrupted care, and adults trying to manage the consequences while Richard minimized or contradicted the record.

In September 2015, I was re-interviewed by RCMP Inspector Akrum Ghadban, Sgt. Damon Tenaschuk, and MCpl Mercier. That interview did not simply repeat the 2011 complaint. It generated follow-up issues, including a former CFB Namao neighbour I identified as a possible witness, Fred R. Cunningham, the earlier McRae/CFSIU connection, and confusion around whether it was the babysitter’s sister or younger brother who may have entered the room. I also introduced my father’s written examination answers. Those answers materially complicated Richard’s 2011 statement. Yet CFNIS does not appear to have gone back and re-interviewed Richard. Once a key witness’s earlier statement is contradicted or complicated by later written answers, a serious investigation should test the contradiction, not quietly carry the original statement forward.

Years later, Alberta’s victim-benefits appeal process reached a different conclusion than the original denial. The Director had denied my claim because police information was treated as insufficient to support that a Criminal Code offence occurred. But on review, after considering the Director’s file, Canadian Forces Military Police information, and my Children’s Services records, the Appeals Reviewer found me eligible. The decision stated that the CFNIS investigation report identified and acknowledged me as the victim of an eligible Criminal Code offence, and that the Children’s Services records confirmed psychological injury incurred as a direct result of the incident.

The problem was not that CFNIS had no warning. The problem was that the warning did not appear to change the analysis. Richard’s statement was treated as useful fog, when it should have been treated as evidence requiring scrutiny. The child-welfare records, the timeline, the later written answers, the 2015 re-interview, and the eventual Victims Appeals decision all point in the same direction: the issue was never simply whether CFNIS made phone calls or opened old files. The issue was whether CFNIS was willing to let the documents disturb the story it had already accepted.

One of the most difficult parts of the CFB Namao matter to accept is the conclusion reached years later by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service: that there was supposedly not enough evidence to arrest, charge, or even further question the former babysitter whose abuse of children in 1980 led directly to the discovery of Captain Father Angus McRae.

That conclusion is not just disappointing. It is almost impossible to square with the known history of the file.

The McRae scandal did not appear out of thin air. It was not discovered because the military randomly decided to inspect the chapel. It was not uncovered through some broad institutional child-protection initiative. It came to light because various parents complained about a teenage babysitter abusing children on the base. Military police investigated those complaints. That investigation led from the babysitter, my babysitter, to McRae.

In plain language: the babysitter was not a side issue. He was the doorway into the entire McRae matter.

Even in 2020 the MPCC remarked that the actions of the babysitter were well documented in the CFSIU paperwork and the Courts Martial transcripts. The MPCC noted that in 1980 McRae’s defending officer tried to discredit the babysitter’s testimony against McRae by insinuating that the babysitter was testifying against McRae to shift the eyes away from what he had done.

That is what makes the later CFNIS position so difficult to understand. If the babysitter’s conduct was serious enough in 1980 to trigger the investigation that exposed a military chaplain abusing children, how could CFNIS later conclude that there was not enough evidence even to arrest him or bring him in for further questioning?

That is not a small contradiction. That is the central contradiction.

The original military police investigation did not begin with McRae. It began with complaints about the babysitter. Multiple parents were concerned enough to come forward. Children were involved. The babysitter was allegedly connected to more than one victim. His conduct appears to have been the investigative thread that led military police to the chaplain’s residence, the chapel, and ultimately to the in-camera court martial of McRae.

So the question is simple: what exactly did CFNIS think happened in 1980?

Did the military police invent the babysitter issue? Obviously not.

Did the complaints from parents mean nothing? That seems absurd.

Did the discovery of McRae happen independently of the babysitter? That does not match the known narrative.

Did the babysitter somehow provide the investigative bridge to McRae while also leaving behind no usable evidence of his own conduct? That is theoretically possible, but it strains belief.

The more reasonable concern is that CFNIS treated the babysitter file as too old, too uncomfortable, too procedurally messy, or too institutionally inconvenient to reopen in any meaningful way. But that is different from saying there was no evidence.

There is a major difference between “we cannot prove this beyond a reasonable doubt in a modern criminal prosecution” and “there is not enough evidence to arrest or question the person further.” Those are not the same thing. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. An arrest, an interview, a renewed investigation, or a serious evidentiary review does not require the same final standard.

That distinction matters.

By the time CFNIS reviewed the matter, decades had passed. Records may have been missing. Witnesses may have died. Memories may have faded. The military may have lost, sealed, withheld, or failed to preserve critical material. All of that may make a prosecution harder. But none of that changes the basic historical fact that the babysitter was central to how the McRae matter was discovered in the first place.

If the military’s own 1980 process identified the babysitter as part of the chain of events that exposed McRae, then CFNIS had a duty to take that seriously. Not dismissively. Not mechanically. Not as though the file began in 2011 or 2018 with whatever fragments happened to remain available.

The proper question was not merely: “Can we lay charges today?”

The proper questions should also have included:

Why was this not properly prosecuted in 1980?

What did the original military police know?

What did the Base Commander know?

What did CFSIU know?

What did the Judge Advocate General’s branch know?

What happened to the evidence?

Why were the charges against McRae narrowed?

Why were the children other than the babysitter apparently left out of the court martial process?

Why was the babysitter not treated as an accused person in his own right?

And why did the later CFNIS review appear to accept the institutional wreckage of the original process as though that wreckage were proof that nothing more could be done?

That last point is important. A failed investigation should not become the reason the institution avoids accountability. Missing records should not become a shield. A flawed court martial should not become a historical blindfold. The fact that the military controlled the investigation, the accused chaplain, the witnesses, the documents, the court martial process, and the institutional narrative makes the later “not enough evidence” conclusion even more troubling, not less.

The babysitter’s alleged abuse was not peripheral to this story. It was the spark. It was the thing that brought McRae into view. Without that part of the story, the McRae fiasco may never have been exposed at all.

That is why the CFNIS conclusion feels so disconnected from reality.

It asks us to believe that the same conduct which was serious enough to uncover a predatory military chaplain was somehow not serious enough, decades later, to justify arresting or even further questioning the babysitter himself.

That is a very hard conclusion to accept.

It may be dressed up in investigative language. It may be softened with references to evidentiary thresholds, faded memories, or prosecutorial discretion. But underneath all of that is a basic common-sense problem: CFNIS appears to have looked at the person whose conduct opened the door to the McRae scandal and concluded there was not enough there to seriously proceed.

For the children involved, that conclusion is not merely unsatisfying.

It looks like another institutional failure layered on top of the first one.

This conclusion becomes even harder to understand when considering what the babysitter reportedly told CFNIS in 2011. He did not simply say, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” He reportedly took the position that anything he had been involved in as a youth had already been handled by the military, and that if charges were brought, a lawyer would deal with it. That is a remarkable response. It does not read like a categorical denial that anything occurred. It reads more like reliance on the fact that the military had already dealt with the matter internally. If that was his position, then CFNIS had even more reason to ask a very obvious question: handled by whom, handled how, under what authority, and where are the records?

In other words, the babysitter’s reported response to CFNIS was not “nothing happened.” It was closer to “whatever happened was already handled by the military.” That should have set off every alarm bell in the building. Because if the military had already “handled” allegations involving child abuse by a teenage babysitter on a defence establishment, then CFNIS should have been asking who handled it, what was done, what records existed, whether charges were ever considered, and whether the military process improperly buried the matter. Instead, the later conclusion appears to treat the absence of a clean modern prosecution file as though it were the same thing as absence of evidence.

The contradiction becomes even sharper when looking at CFNIS’s own conduct in 2011. On May 3, 2011, Master Corporal Christian Cyr asked me whether I remembered anything about the base chaplain being arrested for molesting children during the same general time frame in which I had accused the babysitter of abusing my brother and me. That question mattered. It showed that CFNIS already saw, or at least suspected, a connection between the babysitter allegations and the McRae matter.

During the 2012 MPCC investigation, Cyr claimed that I was the person who brought up McRae. But the MPCC found, after reviewing Cyr’s own paperwork, that the question originated with Cyr, not with me. That is not a minor detail. It means the McRae connection was not something I injected into the investigation after the fact. It was something CFNIS raised with me.

That point became even more important during the MPCC’s later review of the 2015 to 2018 CFNIS investigation into the babysitter. In that review, the MPCC discovered that CFNIS had the 1980 CFSIU investigation file, DS 120-10-80, relating to Captain Father Angus McRae. That file included the investigation of the babysitter. In other words, CFNIS was not dealing with a vague rumour, a distant childhood memory, or an unsupported historical complaint. CFNIS had access to the original military investigation material connecting the babysitter matter to the McRae scandal.

That makes the later conclusion even harder to accept. CFNIS knew enough in 2011 for Cyr to ask me about McRae. The MPCC later found that the McRae question originated with CFNIS. And the MPCC later confirmed that CFNIS possessed the 1980 CFSIU paperwork that included both McRae and the babysitter investigation. Against that background, the claim that there was not enough evidence to arrest, charge, or even seriously re-question the babysitter does not look like a neutral investigative conclusion. It looks like an institution stepping around the very evidence that tied the whole story together.

The problem was not that CFNIS had no trail to follow. The problem was that the trail led straight back into the military’s own handling of the 1980 investigation.

One thing that became very apparent to me is how completely the Senate ignored people such as myself and Claire Elyse Brosseau.

The Senate seemed far more comfortable listening to people who believe suffering can always be managed, reframed, treated, or talked away than listening to people who have lived for decades with damage that did not heal.

They may have thought that by putting their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen to people asking for a dignified death, they could make us disappear.

But ignoring us does not make us disappear.

It only ensures that our suffering remains private, unmanaged, and invisible until it becomes someone else’s problem.

This is not a problem that can be solved by sending me back to another professional to talk about what happened. I have done that. The issue is not that I never tried. The issue is that the damage was created, ignored, and then left for me to carry.

What Military Family Trauma Actually Looked Like

As I’ve said before in other blog posts, I suffered immensely as a kid.

Growing up in a dysfunctional military family destroys a kid.

When you’re living in a dysfunctional military household, the other serving parents are well aware of the issues in your PMQ, and they don’t want their kids playing with you.

When you grow up in a dysfunctional military household, your parent’s untreated illness does not stay inside them. It becomes the weather system of the entire home.

Everyone talks about the suicides of members of the Canadian Armed Forces; no one ever talks about the suicides of military dependents. And just as the suicides of military dependents are of no concern to anyone, especially not the Canadian Armed Forces, the mental trauma endured by military dependents living on base in dysfunctional households is also of no interest to the Canadian Armed Forces.

I was a frequent flyer at the IWK children’s hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia while my father was stationed at CFB Shearwater. My medical records indicated that my father had been returned to port early due to “emotional issues.”

I was kept in the IWK for close to a month as a boarder due to issues with my parents.

Just before my father was posted to CFB Summerside, there were notes in my medical records in which the doctors were wondering if my frequent visits to the hospital were due to social issues in my home and whether they should get social services involved.

Even at CFB Namao, home life was anything but peaceful.

My grandmother was living with us on base in our PMQ, raising my brother and me, as our mother had left in 1977 and my father was frequently absent from the home due to training exercises.

My grandmother had her own demons. She had been through Holy Angels Indian Residential School. She was authoritarian, often angry, and severely alcoholic. None of that made her evil. It simply meant the damage in our home had already been passed down before it reached my brother and me. Her issues were no doubt the reason behind my father having piss-poor parenting skills himself.

In fact, it was my grandmother’s alcoholism that led to my brother and me requiring the babysitter in the first place.

What Happened After CFB Namao

Growing up on base as a sexually abused male child was not an easy task. The isolation was strict. On CFB Namao it was the beatings and the teasing from the other kids that was the driving factor behind my family being moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach in October of 1980.

CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach both comprised CFB Edmonton, and they were only about 10 kilometres apart from each other.

After 1-1/2 years of sexual abuse at the hands of Captain Father Angus McRae’s altar boy, as well as the various visits to the chapel to visit with the Father where alcohol was given to me, the behaviours of my brother and me were of great concern to our teachers at Major General Griesbach School.

Major General Griesbach School was the school operated by the Department of National Defence for the children of military families. It was our teachers at that school who called in a man named Terry.

From reading my social service records, it became apparent that my mental health at that point in my life was failing.

It was so bad that by the spring of 1982 I was supposed to have been institutionalized in a psychiatric facility for children. Unfortunately, it would appear from reading my social service reports that other things were afoot, and that my mental health and well-being were down the list of priorities for the “brass” on CFB Edmonton.

In October of 1980, I was diagnosed as having major depression, severe anxiety, an intense fear of men, a fear that my father wanted to kill me, and a fear of being touched. In fact, the depression was so bad that the psychologist had noted that she wondered if I had gone past depression and was well into despair.

I wouldn’t discover until the summer of 2011 who Terry was, but suffice to say I wasn’t surprised when I read my social service paperwork and discovered that Terry was Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke.

This explains why my father, Master Corporal Richard Gill, would follow Totzke’s instructions to a “t” and why he wouldn’t question Totzke.

The Help I Never Received

The sad thing is that I never received meaningful help for the trauma caused by the abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

Nor did I receive meaningful help for what was happening inside my father’s household.

Some people may ask why the Canadian Armed Forces would have had any responsibility for either issue.

The answer is simple.

Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, and Master Corporal Richard Gill were all members of the Regular Force. I lived in housing provided by the Canadian Armed Forces, on Defence Establishment property, inside a military community where the institution controlled the housing, the schools, the police, the social relationships, and much of the information flow.

This was not some private family matter that happened far away from the military.

It happened inside the world the military built and controlled.

Instead, the explanation placed on me was that I was suffering from a supposed mental illness called “homosexuality.”

That was supposedly why “I had sex” with the babysitter for 1-1/2 years, as if I seduced the babysitter and initiated the sex. That was supposedly why I didn’t report the abuse. That was supposedly why I stood by and allowed the babysitter to molest my younger brother.

Totzke’s helpful hints for my father were to pull my bedroom door off its hinges so that I couldn’t sneak boys into my bedroom, and that I shouldn’t be allowed to play hockey or go swimming as there might be other naked boys in the change room.

And yes, my father used that on me once when he declined to allow me to go on a swimming trip.

Totzke’s advice to me was that he had the military police watching me, and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy, the MPs would tell him and then I’d be sent off to the Alberta Hospital.

Alberta Social Services became involved with my family in November of 1981 when our teachers called them in to deal with me and my brother, as Captain Totzke wasn’t having much success.

Whenever my brother, my father, and I would go to counselling sessions, Terry would always remind me to watch what I said to Pat and Wayne, as they’d twist my words and make it sound as if I had said something that I didn’t mean to say.

There were also the warnings from my father to keep my mouth shut.

Without wasting too much time, I never did get help with the trauma I was carrying from the 1-1/2 years of abuse on CFB Namao.

Even when my father was posted from CFB Griesbach to CFB Downsview in Ontario, both he and Captain Totzke promised Alberta Social Services that I would be placed in a psychiatric program at the SickKids hospital in Toronto.

When I filed an ATI with SickKids in Toronto, they hadn’t heard of me or my father.

In fact, my paperwork from the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto showed that the Canadian Armed Forces were less than helpful with trying to connect with my father. When asked about the problems with my brother and me, my father told CAST that our involvement with Alberta Social Services was both unwarranted and unhelpful.

It would be another couple of months before our teachers and principal at Sheppard Public School started raising concerns about my brother and me.

But by then it was too late.

Another couple of years and I would be out of the house and living on my own just after my sixteenth birthday, trying to make my way in a world with my untreated mental illnesses.

My younger years were spent jumping from job to job and collecting welfare in three different provinces before I was 25.

I’d go to the doctor periodically with complaints about constant tiredness, no desire to live, overwhelming feelings of failure, and panic attacks. Most of these walk-in doctors would diagnose me as just not getting enough sleep and prescribe melatonin.

The Canadian Armed Forces Knew More Than They Wanted To Admit

And then throw on top of this the pleasure of dealing with the Canadian Armed Forces in 2011, and then again from 2015 to 2018.

It wasn’t so much that charges weren’t brought against the babysitter.

It was the fact that the CFNIS in 2011, and again from 2015 through 2018, knew the full fucking truth about how big the child sexual abuse scandal was on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and yet they seemed hellbent and determined to portray me as the “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military.”

And it’s not like I haven’t tried therapy.

I had therapy from 2011 onwards. Mostly just talk. I had to be very careful about what I said, because shit like that can end employment opportunities.

I even went to counselling for male victims of sexual assault, but a lot of my mental health issues aren’t from the sexual abuse itself.

I’ve always said that what I considered more damaging was the abuse that I endured at the hands of my father and Terry in the aftermath of CFB Namao.

The Senate Did Not Listen

So here I am at 55.

The Senate of Canada appears to believe that all I have to do is think happy thoughts and everything will be better.

I am so fucking tired and burnt out.

I have the babysitter, my father, Captain Totzke, my grandmother, and a host of others living inside of my skull, reminding me of just exactly how much of a failure I am.

There is no happy ending.

Right now my lawyer has made a settlement offer to Canada’s lawyer.

I want to stay long enough to see myself, and the other children from CFB Namao who were swept up in the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal, receive some measure of recognition for what was done to us and what was ignored afterward.

I do not know what comes after that.

I only know that I am tired of carrying damage that other people created, other people minimized, and other people walked away from.

There will be no happy ending here.

But there should at least be an honest record.