Tag: depression

People tell me to move on as if this story ended decades ago. It didn’t. It is still active, still administrative, still written into records that continue to shape my life.

And that sounds great and magic and all, but that’s not how it works.

What happened in 1980 didn’t stay in 1980. It malingered from 1980 until it was revived in 2011, reinforced in 2018, and made permanent.

In 2011 the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service called me a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military”.

I wasn’t someone who endured a year and a half of sexual abuse, from age seven to age eight, at the hands of a fourteen-year-old babysitter.

That was obviously just a story that I made up.

A lie that was told so that I could juice some easy money from the Canadian Armed Forces.

My father was interviewed by the CFNIS and claimed that he “never” hired a babysitter to look after my brother and me. And he was right. He never hired the babysitter, except for on one occasion. It was my grandmother that hired the babysitter every second weekend or so.

During our involvement with Alberta Social Service my father was noted as telling people that he perceived to be in a position of authority what they wanted to hear. My father was also found to tell conflicting stories from one interview to the next. And my father also claimed to be the victim, that everyone was attacking him, and that people were intentionally keeping information from him.

When I gave a copy of my Alberta Social Service paperwork to the CFNIS in September of 2011, did the CFNIS contact my father again to ask about the discrepancies between my Alberta Social Services records and his August 2011 statement?

Nope.

What he told the CFNIS in August of 2011 was more than enough to help the CFNIS shape the narrative of the story they wanted to ship to the Alberta Crown in October of 2011.

Growing up in Richard’s house on CFB Shearwater, CFB Summerside, CFB Namao, CFB Griesbach, and CFB Downsview was anything but pleasant.

On CFB Shearwater my mother made use of the “battered wives club” frequently. I was often “boarded” at the IWK Children’s Hospital due to instability and conflict in the household. My father was noted as being returned to port early due to “emotional issues” while at sea. And the doctors were beginning to put plans in place to put Child Protective Services in contact with my family just before we were posted to CFB Summerside.

When my father was posted to CFB Namao he asked his mother to come and raise my brother and I. Richard really didn’t like his mother. There was no closeness between the two. But without grandma there was no way that he’d be able to go on training exercises while leaving his 7 year old and 4 year old home alone for two or three weeks.

When my family became involved with Alberta Social Services in November of 1981, my father blamed the issues my brother and I were having on his mother. He described her to Alberta Social Services as being extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was drinking, which was frequent due to her alcoholism. He also said that she refused to seek treatment for her alcoholism. Now, this is rich coming from Richard and both he and grandma were alcoholics, and the two of them would often get stumble down drunk when they drank together. Sometimes they’d even trade blows if they got hammered enough.

When my father was asked by his buddy Jacques Choquette sometime around 1985, why Richard didn’t give us back to our mother to raise if he was getting sick and tired of us, Richard told Jacques that as long as we lived under his roof, he controlled the costs, and that if he sent us to live with that “bitch” that he would have to sign his whole fucking paycheque over to her and that wasn’t going to happen.

Around the spring of 1982, Richard called my brother and I into the living room of the PMQ on CFB Griesbach. Richard told us that he and Sue might be splitting up. Both Scott and I cheered as Sue was quite the asshole. She had gone from promising to get Richard’s drinking and temper under control to being just as angry as abusive as he was. It was almost like she had Stockholm syndrome and thought that if she punished us enough that Richard would be happy and approve of her. Richard told us to both shut up. He explained that if Sue left him, Scott and I were going into a duffel bag, buried where nobody would ever find us, and he would simply move back into the barracks.

This wasn’t a picturesque childhood.

This was a fucking horror show.

After the abuse on CFB Namao, I would frequently wet my bed.

Grandma would get angry and accuse me of attention-seeking.

My father was fine with me sleeping in the piss as he wasn’t going to waste his time on changing sheets.

Sue had decided that the best way to stop me from pissing the bed was to rub my face in it like a dog.

I actually stopped wetting the bed the day I moved out of the house just after my 16th birthday.

After Captain Terry Totzke declared me a homosexual because the abuse had gone on for so long, my father’s attitude toward me soured completely. He wanted sweet bugger fuck all to do with me.

The worst was when Captain Totzke said I shouldn’t be allowed to play sports because if I saw another boy naked in the change room, I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

No matter how clean I kept my nose, or how well I tried to do in school with absolutely no support from home, this wasn’t good enough.

My brother Scott was in and out of group homes and juvie while we lived on CFB Downsview, and Scott could do absolutely no wrong.

The difference?

Scott was a victim of the babysitter and me.

See, in 1980 Captain Totzke declared me to have a mental illness called homosexuality. My brother didn’t have that same illness apparently.

According to the Canadian Armed Forces, there were only two victims of child sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao. One person was the babysitter. The other person was my younger brother.

The funny thing is the babysitter went on to have a prolific career of molesting children. I ended up disgusted with sex believing that sex was only something that somebdy else made you do to them to make them feel good.

Because I allowed the babysitter to abuse Scott, Scott was no longer to blame for anything that he did. Me? Well, that’s a different story. Anything that Scott did was my fault because I let the babysitter touch him.

It was sometime around the summer of 1987 when my brother stole Sue’s Pontiac Acadian and took it for a joyride off the base and into the city. I was 15 he was 13. When Richard and Sue came home from shopping in Oshawa and Richard found the Acadian missing, he laid one fuck of a beating on me. As he’s wailing away demanding to know why I can’t look after my brother, why I’m not raising my brother, he blurts out that Scott wouldn’t be doing these things if I hadn’t let the fucking babysitter touch him.

By the time the fall of 1987 rolled around things were getting pretty tense in Richard’s houshold on CFB Downsview. Richard was his same old angry self. His drinking was picking up again. Sue had sent me over to the Sgt. & W.O. mess a few times to pick him up and bring him home. His insomnia was going off the rails. My bedroom had been moved into the basement a few months after Sue’s son William was born in August of 1985. Richard had his work area set up in the basement with his desk, his computers, and his television. He would frequenly come downstairs after midnight, turn his computers on, turn his TV on, spark up some smokes, and maybe have a night cap, or two, or three.

As I was young at the time, my hearing was top notch. I didn’t listen to loud music. Fuck, I didn’t even have a radio in my room, let alone a stereo that I could hook up headphones to. So when he turned his TV or computers on, the whine of the horizontal deflection circuitry would wake me up. Kids these days have it lucky with LCD and OLED monitors, but back in the day when I was kid TVs and monchrome computer monitors had a scan frequency of 15.734 kHz. And this was audible and annoying to any kid with decent ears.

When Richard discovered that his insomnia was waking me up every night and making it hard for me to sleep, especially considering that my room didn’t have a door, his solution was that I could get the fuck out of his house anytime that I wanted to.

I moved out in late 1987, just after I turned 16.

I had stopped going to school a few months earlier.

I was already paying Richard $150.00 a month in rent for my bedroom.

So when the company that I was working for found out the trouble that I was having at home, they set me up with a room to rent. It was only $50.00 more than what my father was charging.

Richard didn’t care. In facte he borrowed a pickup truck from one of his buddies and helped me to move.

I wish that I knew that my family had been under the supervison of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. I could hve applied for emergency aid which would have gotten me shelter and the ability to continue going to school.

But such was not the case.

Without school, I never had the opportunity to enter the trades. But then again, my father was adamant that he joined the RCN with grade 9 and that’s all anyone really needed to get a job.

So there was no trade school.

There was no college.

There was no university.

There was nothing.

And even if by some fluke I had been able to scrape the money to go to school, there was the untreated depression and severe anxiety that I had to deal with.

Remember, I wouldn’t find out that I had been diagnosed with major depression and severe anxiety until August of 2011 when I received my Alberta Social Services paperwork.

From literally October of 1980 when Captain Totzke sent me to see a psychiatrist until I received my paperwork in 2011, I had no fucking idea whatsoever that I had been diagnosed with major depression, severe anxiety, and haphephobia.

Growing up under Richard’s roof on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, and Canadian Forces Base Downsview, both Richard and Sue treated my depression as me just be a lazy fucking asshole that didn’t want to do anything and who just whined about everything like a little bitch.

My anxiety was often treated by my father with a good backhand and an order to calm the fuck down.

My haphephobia wasn’t my fear of being touched. No, that was apparently me being to good to play with other kids.

So no, even if I had the money, the depression, the anxiety, and the haphephobia would have ruined everything.

Why didn’t you seek treatment?

Treatment for what?

Grinding my teeth all night long?

Sleeping in all the time?

Not wanting to get out of bed?

Not getting pleasure or joy out of anything?

Constantly wishing that I’d be dead?

No desire for sex as sex was a deviancy that only perverts and the mentally ill engaged in?

Trying to figure out whether it was worth continuing to exist at all?

No, see, my father had told me, I was just a lazy fucking crybaby.

I wasn’t depressed.

There was no depression in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Base brats had no fucking reason to be depressed.

So no, there was never going to be anything meaningful in my life.

Sure, I can do things.

But because I don’t have the qualifications on paper, I’m told I can’t officially do these things, even though I do them anyway.

I often find myself being attacked by people with certificates and Red Seals because I’m not supposed to know those things or work on those things. Doesn’t matter what my back ground is, or why I was prevented in life from getting the qualifications that they have.

I get yelled at by people with more qualification than I have because apparently I’m not teaching them what to do because I want to make them look bad. Yet they don’t seem to understand that they’re the ones getting paid a higher pay grade than I am because they’re supposed to be more qualified than me.

As I said, if I had gotten into the trades back in the late ’80s, and my depression and anxiety didn’t fuck things up, the absolute lack of support from home would have.

University? I don’t know of a single fucking university student that doesn’t receive assiatnce from home.

So no, there is no moving on.

There is no “getting over it”.

Every day of my existence is a reminder of what was taken away from me, because I live through it every day.

Every day is a reminder of how much of a joke my life actually is and how meaningless my life actually is considering how easily the Canadian Armed Forces decided that I was expendable not only in 1980, but again in 2011, and 2018.

No, there is no moving on from this.

This whole fucking mess is nothing but a fucking albatross around my neck slowly pulling me under the waves. And I am still expected to pretend it isn’t there.

For all of the bitching and complaining that the Military Police Complaints Commission does about the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, you’d think that the MPCC would show a little interest in talking to the CFPM and the CFNIS about just how exactly the Provost Marshal and the Military Police avoid the pitfalls presented by the pre-1998 summary investigation flaw and the 3-year-time-bar-flaw.

When Bill C-25 ” An Act to Make Amendments to the National Defence Act” was passed in 1998, it removed the 3-year-time-bar from the National Defence Act and it removed the requirement for Commanding Officers to conduct Summary Investigation of the charges brought against their subordinates.

When the 3-year-time-bar was removed from the NDA in 1998, Bill C-25 said that current Criminal Code limitations, if any, would apply to service offence charges comprised of Criminal Code offences.

Bill C-25 also said that there was no longer a need for the review of charges by the commanding officer of the accused via a Summary Investigation. Going forward all charges would be referred to a Military Director of Prosecutions.

But what Bill C-25 didn’t concern itself with is what happened to service offences that occurred prior to the bill coming into effect.

Bill C-25 only applied to Service Offences after the date the Bill became law. Bill C-25 did not apply retroactively to service offences committed prior to 1998.

In the past, when I’ve asked the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal how they can bring forth charges for service offences when the 3-year-time-bar has obviously expired, all I get is a “trust me” response. I’m never directed to any Act of Parliament that allows for the retroactive removal of the 3-year-time-bar prior to 1998.

I for one can’t understand how any suspect charged in the modern day for any service offence that occurred prior to 1998 would give up the protection of the 3-year-time-bar.

The 3-year-time-bar is the case killer for any service offence that occurred prior to 1998.

Now, I know that there will be those that say that “Service Offence” are only military related.

That’s not true.

A service offence is not only related to charges of a military nature, but to all criminal code offences that are committed in relation to a defence establishment or defence material by a person subject to the Code of Service Discipline at the time of the offence.

And if the 3-year-time-bar didn’t kill off the prospect of charges, the requirement for a summary investigation after the laying of charges would.

In the post Bill C-25 era, how do the Canadian Armed Forces and the Judge Advocate General reconcile with the fact that the accused could enjoy the protections presented by his commanding officer in a Summary Investigation that was required by the National Defence Act after the laying of charges?

It was the commanding officer’s discretion as to whether the charges would be dismissed, or moved to a civilian court or a military court.

How can the Canadian Forces Military Police or the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service in the modern day go against the protections that a member of the Canadian Armed Forces enjoyed prior to 1998 under the law.

You can’t simply pass legislation and strip rights retroactively. There’s a reason for this. In 1984 when “Rape” was removed from the Criminal Code of Canada, the charge of Rape wasn’t retroactively removed as this would have exposed generations of husbands to potential charges of rape as under the definition of rape in the Criminal Code, a husband could never be charged with rape for having forced sexual intercourse with his wife against her wishes.

When Stephen Harper raised the Age of Consent from 14 to 16 in 2008, there’s a reason why this law didn’t apply retroactively.

If the law was made retroactively can you imagine the chaos in the courts if suddenly 18 year old boy friends were going to prison for having sexual intercourse with their 15 year old girl friend, or vice versa?

If the Government of Canada were to remove the retroactive protections afforded by the pre-1998 National Defence Act you can bet that this would create quite the constitutional crisis in this country as now the government could pass laws at will that retroactively criminalized behaviours or retroactively removed protections.

I sent a letter to the Military Police Complaints Commission asking them to look into how the modern day CFNIS was able to successfully lay charges for service offences that occurred prior to 1998.

This is the response that I received from the MPCC:

I sent the following reply to their response.

And this was their final response:

The thing about the Military Police Complaints Commission that makes it very different from civilian police agencies is that you cannot make complaints against the CFNIS or any component of the Canadian Forces Military Police Group outside of conduct complaints related to the conduct of a specific person or persons during an investigation.

This is one of the ways that the Government of Canada compromised with the Canadian Armed Forces and got the Canadian Armed Forces to buy in to civilian oversight of their in-house police agency.

The military has its customs, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to allow some outside civilian agency to come in and tell the military police what they could or couldn’t do.

And Parliament, in draughting the rules for the MPCC, obviously never imagined the need for the MPCC to handle complaints from civilians about civilian related investigations undertaken by the CFNIS.

The rules of the MPCC favour members of the Canadian Armed Forces. If you’re a member of the public, you are shit out of luck, especially if you don’t have the funds available to hire an ex-JAG willing to go up against the Canadian Armed Forces.

And unlike members of the public, members of the Canadian Armed Forces can approach the Chief of Defence Staff with a grievance for redress that will override any finding of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal or the Military Police Complaints Commission.

If I had to say what the number one flaw with the Military Police Complaints Commission is, it’s that during a conduct review the MPCC will not share with the complainant what the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal shared with the MPCC.

As I’ve said in other posts, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal has the full authority under the National Defence Act to pull the wool over the eyes of the MPCC and there is nothing the MPCC can do.

The MPCC is full well aware that the CFPM more often than not hides paperwork from the MPCC and refuses to hand over documents.

In my matter, the CFNIS knew full well in March of 2011 of the connection between my babysitter and Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Father Angus McRae.

The CFNIS already had the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork. The CFNIS also had the 1980 Courts Martial transcripts for the Courts Martial of Captain McRae. The CFNIS knew in March of 2011 from CFSIU DS-120-10-80 and from Courts Martial transcripts CM-62 that it was the investigation of my babysitter by the base military police in May of 1980 for the molestation of numerous children on the base that led to the investigation of Canadian Armed Forces Officer Captain Father Angus McRae.

The CFNIS in March of 2011 were very much well aware that the investigation of Captain McRae uncovered the fact that McRae and the babysitter hadn’t just molested a child or two. According to Mr. Cunningham in November of 2011, and the babysitter’s father in July of 2015, the CFSIU knew that Captain McRae and the babysitter were involved in molesting well over 25 children on the base from the years of 1978 to 1980.

In 2011 the CFNIS did a CPIC check on the babysitter.
The CFNIS would have discovered:
1982 – Convicted for molesting a young boy that lived off the base at CFB Petawawa.
1984 – Convicted for child molestation involving a child that lived off the base at CFB Winnipeg in Manitoba.
1985 – convicted for molesting a 9 year old boy on Canadian Forces Base Namao when his father had been posted back there. Also convicted for molesting a 13 year old newspaper boy after the Canadian Armed Forces ordered the babysitter to move out of the military housing.

The CFNIS, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, the Chief of Defence Staff, and the Minister of National Defence were well aware of the babysitter’s $4.3 million dollar civil action against the Minister of National Defence that was settled in December of 2008.

And yet, on November 4th, 2011, Petty Officer Steve Morris contacted me by telephone and told me that the CFNIS just couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that the babysitter was capable of committing the crimes that I had accused him of, even though I would find out in 2020 that the Courts Martial transcripts showed that the military police and the CFSIU knew that the babysitter was having forced anal intercourse with children much younger than he was and that he was receiving psychiatric care for his attraction to children even before he had been investigated by the base military police in May of 1980.

But, this is information that the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal willingly withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission in 2012.

Doesn’t the CFPM worry that someone will discover what the CFPM did?

Nope. Why should they?

No agency has the authority to order the CFPM to hand over any documents. And to prove that the CFPM and the CFNIS don’t have “local copies” would be impossible.

But considering that the Captain McRae scandal has resulted in at least one successful lawsuit against the Minister of National Defence for the actions of Captain McRae, I wouldn’t put it past the military to have a folder or a CD-ROM / USB thumb drive / hidden network folder that contains instructions on how the CFNIS are to handle any complaints against Captain McRae or Captain McRae’s altar boys.

This way there’s no paper trail showing that the CFNIS signed out copies of the CFSIU DS-120-10-80 or the CM62 Courts Martial transcripts from the JAG library.

This is like when the Communications Officer for the Minister of National Defence asked for my correspondence to be given a non controversial name, encrypted, and hidden away in a “space saver file” ensuring that the contents were always beyond discovery and disclosure.

And when I filed my application for judicial review in 2013, when I discovered what the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal had done, it was too late.

This was the fatal flaw with my application for judicial review.

I relied extensively on “new evidence” which really wasn’t new evidence.

It was evidence that the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service had in their possession as it was information that I had shared with them, but it was evidence that the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal intentionally withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission.

And during my dealings with the MPCC, the MPCC never once sat down with me and shared with me what the CFNIS had shared with them so that I could counteract what the CFNIS had claimed.

Instead MPCC investigators Peter and Claude both lectured me as to why the CFNIS had done one helluva bang-on investigation. Maybe Claude and Peter refused to accept my email conversations with the CFNIS investigators because they knew if these weren’t in the documents supplied to the MPCC by the CFPM they wouldn’t be able to do anything with them.

So…….. that leads to the question, “What is the purpose of the MPCC”?

The existence of the MPCC is just to satisfy a checkbox in Bill C-25. And that was the establishment of an outside civilian agency to oversee the military police. And that’s it. That’s why the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal has absolutely no issue with thumbing its nose at the MPCC as the CFPM knows there’s nothing of any real consequence that the MPCC can do.

During a review the MPCC cannot:
Subpoena documents
Subpoena witnesses
Administer Oaths
Re-run the investigation to see if the CFNIS should have come to a different conclusion.

All the MPCC can do is to look at what the CFNIS did.

Did the CFNIS take my complaint ?
Did the CFNIS investigate my complaint?
Did the CFNIS talk to witnesses?
Did the CFNIS submit a brief to the Crown?

So when an investigator claims that he flew out to Victoria to personally meet with me, it’s not the MPCC’s job to ascertain if this is true or not.

And even though the CFNIS investigator lied, he would have faced absolutely no consequences for lying.

When the CFNIS excludes all of my social service records that indicate that my father had brought his mother into the PMQ on base to raise my brother and I because our mother “abandoned us” and that he subsequently blamed his own mother for being cruel and abusive towards his children due to her alcoholism, the CFNIS never call him to explain his statement that his mother never lived with us and that he never hired a babysitter.

The fact he never hired a babysitter is correct, but that’s only because he was never at home.

Rent on the PMQ was cheap. Much cheaper than renting grandma a three bedroom apartment off base in the city. If it would have been cheaper for grandma to live off base, Richard would have sent us to live with her. And not only was it just cheaper for grandma, Scott, and I to live on base in the PMQs, but Richard could continue to claim us on his income taxes.

And more importantly, as we lived on base, Richard could use the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations to ensure that our mother wasn’t able to come to see us. It wasn’t that our mother “abandoned” the family on CFB Summerside, Richard had the military police eject her from the military housing as she wanted a divorce if he was unwilling to get his rage and his drinking under control.

And at the end of the day, there is nothing that the MPCC can do to discipline the CFPM or any member of the Canadian Forces Military Police Group. If the CFPM wants to ignore the findings of the MPCC, the CFPM can tell the MPCC to go piss up a rope. Any recommendations that the MPCC offer are not enforceable through any legal mechanism.

why can’t society just accept the fact that some people just don’t want to live?

Society seems to believe that everyone should enjoy life, and that if they don’t enjoy life then the person wishing to die is the problem and they had better smarten up.

It’s almost as if society is so hellbent on doing everything it can to hide the defects in everyday life. It’s almost as if society knows that life is fucked, but if they have to suffer then everyone else is going to have to suffer.

My desire to die via Medical Assistance in Dying is not something that I’ve just developed since M.A.i.D. was first legalized in Canada in 2016. My desires to die have existed since the day the babysitter first slipped his hands down my pants when I was 7. And the desire was only amplified with every depraved act he did to me or forced me to do to him over the next 1-1/2 years.

Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, the memories of what happened in the rectory after the “sickly sweet grape juice” are very, very vague. I do remember on time having rectal bleeding after one visit. And I do remember getting a beating from my grandmother after another visit when the babysitter had brought me back home a little too intoxicated and my grandmother first accused me of getting into her booze, and then when she checked her booze and saw that it was all there, she accused me of getting into my father’s booze. Even though my father was away on training exercises, she said that it appeared that his booze hadn’t been touched. So she dragged me around the PMQ patch while interrogating all of the teenage kids to see if one of them gave me the booze.

The actions of Captain Totzke and my father in the aftermath of the CFB Namao child sexual abuse scandal really intensified my desires. And the desires have never gone away.

As I’ve said in other posts, I’ve never followed through with my desires simply due to the fact that I am terrified of fucking up the act and ending up as a brain damaged vegetable in a hospital having to endure 20 years of a feeding tube and nursing students wiping my ass.

That’s not a reason to live.

I’ve seen too many people trapped inside broken bodies, nope, not for me.

It’s not my job to undo the damage that the babysitter, Captain McRae, Captain Totzke, or my father bestowed upon me via sexual abuse, mental abuse, psychological neglect, or neglect in general.

It’s not my responsibility to take drugs for the rest of my life so that I become a compliant zombie.

It’s not my responsibility to go for therapy where I can learn how to hide my issues and mask my inner turmoil so that the rest of you can feel comfortable.

It’s not my job to pretend what happened didn’t happen and that it was my fault for getting “stuck in a rut”.

To compare what I went through with someone who lost their goldfish when they were 12, or who didn’t get the bicycle they wanted when they were 10 is absolutely insane.