Tag: Donald Trump

When the Word “Homosexuality” Silenced Victims

Cold War policies, Criminal Code language, and the institutional blind spots behind the McRae scandal

If a boy was sexually abused on a Canadian military base in 1980, there was a very real possibility that the system investigating the crime did not primarily see him as a victim.

Instead, he might be seen as evidence of a “homosexual problem.”

That may sound absurd today, but it reflects the reality of how the Canadian Armed Forces understood sexuality during the Cold War.

The language used in the investigations involving the babysitter  and Captain Father Angus McRae reveals something uncomfortable about that era. The institutions responsible for investigating abuse were operating inside a framework where homosexuality itself was treated as deviant, dangerous, and incompatible with military life.

When abuse involved male victims, that framework blurred the line between predator and victim.

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The Cold War Purge and CFAO 19-20

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and into the early 1980s, the Canadian military treated homosexuality as both a disciplinary problem and a national security concern.

This belief was written directly into policy.

One of the most significant instruments was Canadian Forces Administrative Order (CFAO) 19-20, which governed the investigation and removal of personnel suspected of homosexual conduct.

CFAO 19-20 existed within a broader Cold War purge that targeted homosexuals across Canadian government institutions, including:

• the Canadian Armed Forces

• the RCMP

• the federal civil service

The logic behind the policy was rooted in Cold War paranoia. Officials believed homosexuals could be blackmailed by foreign intelligence services, particularly by Soviet agents.

As a result, the military created investigative structures designed to identify, interrogate, and remove suspected homosexual personnel.

The policy environment produced several consequences:

• homosexuality was framed as a threat to institutional integrity

• investigators were trained to detect homosexual behaviour

• once the label appeared in an investigation, it influenced how everything else was interpreted

That mindset shaped how the military reacted when allegations of abuse surfaced on a Canadian base.

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The “Fruit Machine”: The Era’s Most Bizarre Investigation Tool

The Cold War purge of homosexuals produced one of the strangest devices in Canadian intelligence history.

It was known as the “Fruit Machine.”

Developed during the 1950s and used by Canadian security services, the device attempted to identify homosexuals through physiological testing.

Subjects were shown images of men and women while sensors measured:

• pupil dilation

• perspiration

• heart rate

Investigators believed these physical reactions could reveal sexual orientation.

The concept was deeply flawed and scientifically dubious. But for years it was treated seriously by Canadian security officials.

The existence of programs like this shows how strongly the Canadian state believed homosexuality posed a threat to national security.

Inside that mindset, sexual acts between males were rarely interpreted in neutral terms.

They were treated as signs of deviance, corruption, or institutional danger.

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The Criminal Code Language of the Era

The legal vocabulary used in the McRae investigation also reflected the Criminal Code provisions that existed in Canada during the late 1970s.

Several sections governed sexual activity between males.

Among them were:

Section 155 – Buggery

This provision criminalized anal intercourse except in narrow circumstances.

Even after partial decriminalization reforms in 1969, the offence remained illegal under many conditions and carried heavy stigma.

Section 157 – Gross Indecency

This section criminalized a broad range of sexual conduct between males that did not meet the definition of buggery.

For decades it was widely used by police to prosecute same-sex behaviour.

Section 149 – Indecent Assault on a Male

This offence criminalized sexual assault involving male victims.

Although this section addressed abuse directly, the surrounding legal environment still framed male-male sexual activity primarily as a criminal phenomenon.

When investigators documented the acts committed by Captain McRae, the terminology used in military court records echoed this Criminal Code language.

Terms appearing repeatedly in the documentary record include:

• buggery

• gross indecency

• homosexual acts

• immoral conduct

The problem was that this vocabulary did not clearly separate sexual orientation from sexual abuse.

Both were described using overlapping terminology.

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When Abuse Was Interpreted as a “Homosexual Problem”

Once the investigation entered that legal and institutional framework, the narrative could easily shift.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the exploitation of children, the investigation often framed the events as part of a broader issue involving homosexual behaviour on the base.

This pattern appears across multiple records connected to the scandal, including:

• CFSIU investigative files

• court martial transcripts

• ecclesiastical disciplinary proceedings

• administrative military documentation

Within these records, the abuse of boys by an adult priest was frequently described using the same legal language applied to consensual homosexual acts.

That distinction mattered enormously.

Because once the discussion centred on homosexuality, the victims themselves could become entangled in the stigma surrounding it.

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When Victims Inherited the Stigma

In a military culture that treated homosexuality as deviant or dangerous, the presence of sexual acts between males could cast suspicion on everyone involved.

That included the children.

Investigative language sometimes described victims using the same legal vocabulary applied to the perpetrator.

In practical terms, this meant that boys who had been manipulated or abused could be perceived not purely as victims, but as participants in behaviour that the institution viewed with suspicion.

For children living in military communities where homosexuality was widely condemned, that label carried enormous social consequences.

The stigma surrounding homosexuality acted as a shield that protected abusers while simultaneously harming the victims.

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The Interrogation Culture of the Era

Another piece of the historical puzzle that modern readers often miss is how suspected homosexual behaviour was investigated during the Cold War.

Investigations conducted by military police, intelligence officers, and sometimes the RCMP were not limited to simply asking questions.

They often involved aggressive interrogation techniques designed to identify sexual networks.

Individuals suspected of homosexual behaviour could be subjected to prolonged questioning about:

• their personal relationships

• sexual experiences

• private social circles

• other individuals who might also be homosexual

Investigators frequently attempted to build lists of names, treating suspected homosexuals as part of a hidden network that needed to be uncovered.

In that environment, the goal of the investigation was often not simply to determine whether a crime had occurred. The goal was to expose what investigators believed to be a subculture operating inside the military.

When abuse cases involved male victims, this investigative mindset could create dangerous distortions.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the conduct of the adult offender, investigators might treat the situation as evidence of a wider homosexual environment.

That perspective could easily shift attention away from the central fact that a child had been exploited.

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When Military Social Workers Misinterpreted Trauma

The same cultural attitudes sometimes appeared in child welfare systems connected to military communities.

During the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, military psychological and social work literature still contained deeply flawed assumptions about male victims of sexual abuse.

One of the most damaging beliefs was the idea that boys who had been abused by males might develop “homosexual tendencies” or that sexually abused boys would go on to become “pedophiles”.

In some cases, abused boys were not simply treated as victims of trauma. Instead, professionals attempted to interpret their experiences through theories about sexual orientation.

This could produce disturbing conclusions.

Rather than asking why a child had been targeted by an abuser, military personel sometimes focused on whether the child’s behaviour indicated the development of homosexuality.

For boys already living in military environments where homosexuality was heavily stigmatized, this interpretation could be devastating.

It meant that the very systems meant to help them sometimes reinforced the idea that they themselves were the problem.

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How These Attitudes Shaped the Narrative

When these investigative and psychological assumptions combined, they created a powerful institutional blind spot.

Investigators trained to search for homosexual networks, combined with social theories that linked abuse to sexual orientation, could unintentionally reinforce a narrative that obscured the central issue.

The question that should have been asked was simple:

Who harmed these children?

But in the cultural environment of the time, the question often drifted toward something very different:

What kind of sexual behaviour is happening here?

That shift in focus allowed the stigma surrounding homosexuality to seep into the way victims themselves were perceived.

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The Result: Victims Trapped in the Wrong Story

For boys caught inside that system, the consequences could last for decades.

Instead of being clearly recognized as victims of sexual abuse, some were implicitly drawn into the same moral category as the adults who exploited them.

The institutional narrative blurred the line between:

• victim

• witness

• participant

That distortion did not simply affect how cases were investigated.

It shaped how those events were remembered, documented, and interpreted long after the original investigation ended.

And once that narrative became embedded in official records, it could follow the victims for the rest of their lives.

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A System That Could Not See Clearly

Looking back at the records today, the most striking feature is how deeply institutional language shaped the investigation itself.

The system struggled to clearly distinguish between:

• homosexuality

• sexual misconduct

• sexual abuse of children

When those categories blurred together, the truth became harder to see.

The abuse did not occur because of these policies.

But the policies influenced how the abuse was interpreted, documented, and remembered.

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Why This Still Matters: The Echo in the 2011 CFNIS Investigation

The legacy of these attitudes did not disappear when the Cold War ended.

Decades later, when historical abuse allegations resurfaced and were investigated again by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service (CFNIS), the institutional framework surrounding the case was still shaped by the earlier narrative.

Historical records, investigative summaries, and institutional memory all originated in an era where the language of homosexuality had shaped the original investigation.

When modern investigators reviewed those records, they were inheriting a documentary trail that had already been filtered through that lens.

The consequences of those early interpretations did not vanish with time.

They became embedded in the archival record.

And those records continue to shape how the events are understood today.

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The Lesson Hidden in the Documents

The documents surrounding the McRae scandal reveal more than the actions of individual offenders.

They expose the institutional mindset of an era.

Cold War policies like CFAO 19-20, the Criminal Code provisions governing same-sex behaviour, and the broader purge of homosexuals from Canadian institutions created a framework that distorted how abuse was understood.

Within that framework, the most important fact could become obscured:

Children had been exploited.

Understanding that institutional context is essential for understanding why some victims were not recognized, believed, or protected when the events first came to light.

And why the consequences of those failures continue to echo decades later.

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Why Institutions Still Struggle With These Cases

Understanding the cultural and legal environment of the 1970s and early 1980s raises an uncomfortable question.

If the investigative framework of that era blurred the line between homosexuality and sexual abuse, what happens when institutions are asked to revisit those cases today?

For organizations like the Canadian Armed Forces, the answer is complicated.

Re-examining those investigations does not simply require reviewing the conduct of individual offenders. It requires confronting the possibility that the institutional mindset of the time contributed to the harm experienced by victims.

That is a much more difficult admission.

Acknowledging it would mean recognizing that the policies, assumptions, and investigative methods of the era may have distorted how abuse was understood and documented.

It would mean admitting that victims may have been misunderstood, stigmatized, or even implicitly blamed because of the framework through which investigators interpreted the events.

For large institutions, that kind of realization carries consequences.

It raises questions about:

• the fairness of past investigations

• the accuracy of official records

• the treatment of victims

• and the institutional culture that shaped those outcomes

These are not merely historical questions.

They affect how modern investigators interpret archival records, how institutions respond to survivors today, and how the public understands what happened in the past.

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The Weight of the Archival Record

Another difficulty lies in the nature of the records themselves.

Investigations create documents.

Those documents become files.

Those files eventually become the historical record.

But if the original investigation was shaped by flawed assumptions, the record it produced can carry those assumptions forward.

Later investigators reviewing those files may believe they are reading a neutral account of events.

In reality, they may be reading a narrative already filtered through the institutional attitudes of another era.

That means the past can quietly shape the present.

Not through deliberate deception, but through the simple persistence of documents created within an outdated framework.

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A Story That Was Never Fully Told

When the scandal involving the babysitter  and Captain Father Angus McRae surfaced at CFB Edmonton, it exposed a serious problem.

Children had been exploited.

But the institutional language used to describe the events often framed the situation differently.

Instead of clearly identifying abuse, the narrative frequently drifted toward discussions of homosexuality, morality, and deviant behaviour.

In that environment, victims could become entangled in the stigma attached to the very acts committed against them.

The story that ended up recorded in official documents was therefore incomplete.

It described acts.

It described investigations.

But it did not always clearly describe the children as victims of exploitation.

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Why This History Needs to Be Understood

Revisiting these events today is not about rewriting history.

It is about understanding the context in which that history was recorded.

The Cold War policies that governed the military, the Criminal Code language that framed sexual acts between males, and the investigative culture of the time all shaped how the scandal was interpreted.

Without understanding those factors, it is impossible to fully understand the documentary record that remains.

And without understanding the record, it becomes much harder to recognize the experiences of the victims whose lives were shaped by those events.

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The Real Lesson

The story surrounding the McRae scandal ultimately reveals something larger than the actions of any single individual.

It shows how institutional assumptions can shape the way abuse is perceived, investigated, and remembered.

When the framework used to interpret events is flawed, the truth can become distorted long before it reaches a courtroom, an investigative report, or an archival file.

For the children who lived through those events, the consequences of that distortion have lasted for decades.

Understanding the mindset of the era does not change what happened.

But it helps explain why the full story took so long to emerge.

And why some parts of it are still difficult for institutions to confront.

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A Personal Note About Why This Matters

For me, this history is not abstract.

I was one of the children living on the base when these events unfolded. Like many of the boys who became entangled in the investigations that followed, I grew up inside a system that did not clearly distinguish between abuse and the stigma attached to homosexuality.

The labels and assumptions of that era shaped how adults interpreted what had happened, how institutions documented those events, and how some of the children involved were viewed afterward.

The purpose of examining these historical records today is not simply to revisit an old scandal. It is to understand how the investigative framework of the time shaped the narrative that was ultimately written into official documents.

Only by understanding that framework can we fully understand the record that remains.

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The Power of Secrecy.

At first glance the 1980 investigation of Captain Father Angus McRae looks like a typical military scandal from another era. But the real story is not about one officer or one investigation. It is about the system that surrounded them. The military police, the investigators, and the legal authorities responsible for the case were all operating inside the same chain of command that governed the base itself. That was not an accident. It was how the National Defence Act was designed to function at the time.

When the Investigator Talks: The Forgotten Structure Behind the 1980 CFB Edmonton Investigation

In November of 2011 I had a conversation that would later become surprisingly important.

The man I spoke with was Warrant Officer Frederick R. Cunningham, the former Acting Section Commander of the Canadian Forces Special Investigation Unit (CFSIU) Western Region. Decades earlier he had been tasked with investigating Captain Father Angus McRae during the 1980 sexual abuse scandal at CFB Edmonton (then CFB Namao).

Cunningham did not speak to me as a stranger repeating rumours.

He spoke as the investigator who had been assigned to the case.

Within weeks of that conversation I raised what he had told me with the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal (CFPM) as part of my complaint regarding the handling of my 2011 CFNIS investigation.

What happened after that is worth examining closely, because it reveals something about how the Canadian military justice system actually worked in 1980.

The Base Security Officer: The Hidden Gatekeeper

To understand the structure of the 1980 investigation, you have to understand the role of the Base Security Officer (BSO).

At CFB Edmonton that position was held by Captain David Pilling.

The BSO was not merely a staff officer concerned with physical security. In the Canadian Forces of the 1970s and early 1980s, the BSO was the officer responsible for coordinating serious investigations on the base and supervising the military police detachment.

In practice this meant that when a serious criminal matter arose, the process often flowed like this:

Incident occurs
↓
Base military police become aware
↓
Base Security Officer assesses the situation
↓
Special Investigation Unit assistance is requested

In the McRae case, the CFSIU file shows that Captain Pilling personally tasked WO Cunningham with investigating McRae.

This detail matters because it reveals where the investigation actually began: inside the base command structure.

Command Authority and the Investigation

The base commander at the time was Colonel Daniel Edward Munro.

Colonel Munro was not just the commander of the base.

He was also Captain McRae’s direct superior officer.

This created a structural reality that is easy to overlook today.

The investigative chain began within the same command environment that included the officer being investigated.

The sequence looked something like this:

Colonel Munro – Base Commander
↓
Captain David Pilling – Base Security Officer
↓
Base Military Police
↓
CFSIU investigators (including WO Cunningham)

Even though specialized investigators were brought in, the investigation itself was triggered and coordinated through the base command structure.

This was not unusual for the era.

It was how the system was designed to function.

A System Built Around Command Authority

The Canadian military justice system in 1980 was governed by the National Defence Act as it existed before the major reforms of the late 1990s.

Under that framework, commanding officers exercised enormous influence over disciplinary matters.

They could:

• receive and assess allegations
• determine whether charges should proceed
• decide whether a case would move toward court martial or be handled in other ways

Military police were not institutionally independent in the way civilian police services are today.

They were embedded within the military chain of command.

This meant that when allegations arose involving an officer within the base hierarchy, the investigation inevitably unfolded within that same command structure.

The Conversation in 2011

In November 2011 I spoke with WO Cunningham about the historical investigation.

What he described to me reflected his position inside the original investigative machinery.

He spoke about:

  • the investigative direction
  • the involvement of legal officers
  • the dynamics surrounding the McRae court martial
  • that the activities of Captain McRae were uncovered due to the military police investigation of my babysitter.
  • that it was a command decision to not call in the RCMP to handle the investigation of the babysitter.
  • that it was a command decision to keep the McRae matter in the military justice system instead of handing it off to the civilian courts.
  • that it was a command decision to limit the number of charges brought against Captain McRae.

These were not abstract opinions. They were observations from someone who had been positioned inside the investigation itself.

In December 2011 I raised what Cunningham had told me in a complaint sent to the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal.

The Institutional Response

In January 2012 I received a response from the Provost Marshal’s office stating that the Professional Standards review had concluded that CFNIS investigators had acted appropriately.

The letter also included a strikingly narrow statement:

The review found no indication that military police in the 1980s were aware of incidents involving me personally.

This wording is significant.

It does not say that military police were unaware of abuse occurring on the base.

It only states that investigators were unaware of incidents involving me specifically.

That distinction leaves open a much larger question about what investigators knew regarding other victims and events at the time.

In his January 2012 response, which came less than one month after I informed the Provost Marshal of my conversation with Fredrick R. Cunningham, Deputy Commander Lt.-Col. Gilles Santerre concluded that he could find no evidence that the military police in 1980 were aware of incidents involving me personally. 

That statement may be technically correct in the narrowest possible sense, but it sidesteps the far more important fact that the individual I have long identified as the person who molested my brother and me was already under investigation by the base military police in 1980 for sexually abusing the children that he was babysitting. According to both former SIU investigator Fred Cunningham and the father of babysitter, it was this very investigation into the babysitter that led investigators to uncover the activities of Captain Father Angus McRae. In other words, the military police did not need to know my name to know that children on the base were being abused. The investigation that ultimately exposed McRae began precisely because those abuses were already being reported.

Also, Bobbie Garnet Bees became my legal name in the mid ’00s. The CFNIS were aware of my legal change of name and what my name was during the time of the abuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Provost Marshal and the CFNIS only searched the 1980 files for my current legal name and not my birth name. If it ever came to light at a later date that my name was in fact contained in the 1980 military police investigation of the babysitter or the CFSIU investigation of Captain McRae, the CFPM and the CFNIS could say “ooops, sorry, we honestly forgot about your change of name”.

The Curious Silence in 2016

Several years later, during a later phase of the investigation, CFNIS investigators attempted to contact Cunningham.

His response was notable.

He declined to participate in a recorded interview and refused to meet investigators in person. Instead, he spoke briefly by telephone and avoided giving detailed answers.

This was a stark contrast to the way he had spoken with me in 2011.

Why Cunningham became so cautious remains unclear.

But the timeline raises an obvious possibility.

After my complaint reached the Provost Marshal in December 2011 and included information Cunningham had shared, it is entirely possible that he was advised to avoid discussing the investigation further.

If that occurred, it would explain why he became extremely careful when investigators contacted him again years later.

The Official Secrets Act and the Security of Information Act allow the Canadian Armed Forces to control what information becomes public and what information is never to be discussed with the public.

A Structural Problem, Not a Conspiracy

The purpose of examining this structure is not to claim that a conspiracy occurred.

The issue is structural.

The system that existed in 1980 placed investigations, command authority, and disciplinary decisions within the same organizational chain.

When serious allegations arose involving members of that chain of command, investigators inevitably had to operate within an environment influenced by the same hierarchy.

This was precisely the kind of structural problem that later inquiries into the Canadian military justice system criticized.

Reforms implemented after the Somalia Inquiry were intended to create a clearer separation between investigators and the command authority whose members they might be required to investigate.

The Larger Question

Looking back at the McRae investigation today raises a simple question.

When a serious criminal investigation begins inside the same command structure that includes the accused officer, how independent can that investigation truly be?

The answer to that question is not found in speculation.

It is found in the structure of the system itself.

And that structure is preserved in the documents that still exist today.

Below is a closing section you can append to the blog post. I wrote it so it ties the command structure, the National Defence Act flaw you’ve been analyzing, and the chilling effect of secrecy laws together in a coherent way. You can trim or sharpen the tone to match your usual style.

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The Structural Flaw Behind It All

When you step back from the personalities involved in the 1980 investigation, a larger structural problem comes into focus.

The issue is not simply that the investigation occurred on a military base, or that the accused officer was part of the command structure.

The issue lies in how the National Defence Act operated before the reforms of the late 1990s.

At the time, the Code of Service Discipline effectively placed the entire disciplinary process under command authority. Commanding officers were not merely supervisors. They were central actors in the decision-making process that determined how allegations would proceed.

They could influence whether:

• allegations were pursued as service offences

• charges were referred for court martial

• matters remained within the military system

• civilian police were notified

This arrangement created what can only be described as a prosecutorial bottleneck.

Every major decision flowed upward through the chain of command.

In the McRae investigation, the chain of command ran directly through Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, who was both the base commander and the direct superior officer of the accused.

Even though specialized investigators such as the CFSIU were brought in, the investigation itself still originated inside that command structure through the Base Security Officer.

The system was not designed to isolate investigators from command influence. It was designed to operate within the command structure itself.

That distinction matters.

Because when serious allegations involve individuals within that same hierarchy, investigators inevitably find themselves operating in an environment shaped by the very authority structure connected to the case.

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Silence Through Secrecy

There is another layer to this story that is rarely discussed.

Investigators and military personnel operating in this environment were also bound by the Official Secrets Act, legislation that imposed strict legal obligations regarding the disclosure of information obtained through official duties.  

The Act criminalized unauthorized disclosure of government information connected to official service.

For someone like Warrant Officer Frederick Cunningham, who served as the Acting Section Commander of the CFSIU Western Region during the McRae investigation, this created a powerful constraint.

Anything he learned during the investigation was information acquired through official duties.

Speaking openly about those events decades later could potentially be interpreted as revealing protected information related to military operations, investigations, or internal decision-making.

Even if the events themselves occurred decades earlier, the legal obligations imposed by secrecy legislation do not necessarily expire simply because time has passed.

The result is a quiet but powerful chilling effect.

Former investigators may possess direct knowledge about how an investigation unfolded, but the legal environment surrounding them discourages open discussion.

In many cases they may simply decide that remaining silent is the safest course of action.

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The Problem With Silence

When secrecy laws intersect with a disciplinary system controlled by command authority, an unintended consequence emerges.

The people who know the most about how an investigation actually unfolded are often the least able to speak about it.

Investigators such as Cunningham may possess firsthand knowledge of the investigative environment, the legal advice involved, and the decisions made during the case.

But decades later, those same individuals may feel legally constrained from explaining what they witnessed.

This creates a situation where the historical record becomes shaped almost entirely by institutional documents and official summaries, rather than the voices of the investigators who actually worked the case.

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Why This Matters Today

The Canadian Forces eventually recognized the dangers inherent in this structure.

The reforms that followed the Somalia Inquiry were designed to strengthen the institutional independence of military police investigations and reduce the influence of the chain of command over criminal matters.

Those reforms did not appear out of nowhere.

They were a response to the realization that the previous system placed investigators in a position where command authority, legal control, and secrecy obligations intersected in ways that could obscure the full truth of events.

Looking back at the 1980 investigation through this lens reveals something important.

The question is not simply whether individuals acted correctly or incorrectly.

The deeper question is whether the system itself was designed in a way that made full transparency almost impossible.

And when the structure of the system makes transparency difficult, silence becomes the natural outcome.

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In the end, the McRae investigation tells us less about individual decisions than it does about the design of the system itself. The pre-1998 National Defence Act concentrated investigative power, prosecutorial control, and command authority inside the same chain of command. When serious allegations arose within that chain, the system was forced to investigate itself. That is not simply a historical curiosity. It is a design flaw. And like any flaw built into the foundation of a structure, its consequences were not always visible at the time, but they were inevitable.

Why the fuck am I not surprised?

The one thing that I’ve learnt in life is that money corrupts as does power.

Now it turns out that lots of modern day “people of power” and “people of money” were cavorting with Jeffery Epstein on Pedo Island.

I guess it’s true that when you’re rich you don’t move in the same circles as the lesser people.

But at least we know through an accidental dump of un-redacted records by the DOJ just how many time certain people contacted Epstein or Maxwell and went to the island.

Screenshot of a social media post listing mentions from the Epstein files, including names like Trump, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk with corresponding numbers.

Yep, no drag queens or trans people were heading off to Pedo-Island, but looks like South Africa’s favourite Apartheid twins were hanging out there.

You think that maybe Trump’s war against Trans and Gays was just a distraction to keep eyes averted from the Epstein matter.

Everything stunk about this. Alexander Acosta the DA with the Southern Florida District entering into a plea deal with Epstein in 2008 that dropped all federal charges and only proceeded with much weaker Florida state charges. And who the hell were the people that benefitted from “Guaranteed immunity to unnamed “potential co-conspirators”“

Unfortunately District Attorneys enjoy prosecutorial immunity, which means that Acosta doesn’t have to explain what he did, and will never face any consequences for what he did.

A provocative billboard featuring a satirical depiction of a man resembling Donald Trump sitting in a polluted landscape, holding a phone, wearing a crown and jewelry, surrounded by various objects including a car, a crocodile, and text referencing legislation.

Finally, even die hard MAGAs are starting to wake up to Trump and the whole Epstein matter.

Psychiatry, Silence, and the Cost of Survival

Let me be very clear about something.

Modern psychiatry is not primarily about repairing damaged minds. In practice, it is far more often about teaching damaged people how to function quietly—how to mask distress, suppress history, and remain acceptable to everyone else. Recovery is measured less by relief from suffering than by how little discomfort one causes others.

If you’ve followed my story, you’ll know that my first sustained contact with psychiatry and social services came in 1980 during the aftermath of the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

Three Systems, One Child

During that period, I was trapped between three systems, each with competing priorities:

  • the military social work system,
  • the civilian child welfare system, and
  • a deeply dysfunctional family, headed by a low-ranking CAF member struggling with untreated psychiatric issues, alcoholism, anger, and fear for his own career.

My civilian social workers recognized that my home environment was harmful and attempted to remove me from it. My military social worker, however, worked just as hard to prevent that outcome—not because civilian foster care was inherently worse, but because civilian intervention threatened military control of the situation.

This distinction matters.

Because my family lived in military housing on CFB Griesbach, Alberta Social Services could not simply enter the base and remove me. Civilian court orders had little practical force on base. Jurisdictional ambiguity worked entirely in the military’s favour.

Containing the McRae Scandal

At the same time, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence were doing everything possible to keep the McRae scandal minimized and out of public view. The decision to move McRae’s court martial in camera—despite the general rule that courts martial are public—was not incidental.

From an institutional perspective, it was far more convenient to present the case as involving a single fourteen-year-old boy, the then-legal age of consent in 1980, framed as “homosexual activity,” than to acknowledge the reality: more than twenty-five children, some as young as four.

Under military law, sentences were served concurrently. Whether McRae abused one child or twenty-five, the maximum punishment remained the same. The difference lay only in public perception.

Blame as a Containment Strategy

This context explains much of what followed.

Captain Totzke, the military psychiatrist assigned to me, appeared deeply invested in ensuring that I—not the system, not the institution—was framed as the source of dysfunction. Civilian social workers were treated as adversaries. The unspoken fear was that if I were removed from my father’s care and placed into foster or residential care, I might stabilize, improve, and begin speaking openly about what had happened on CFB Namao.

Instead of being treated for trauma-induced depression, I was told—explicitly—that I suffered from a mental illness called “homosexuality.” I was warned that I would end up in jail. I was told I was a pervert for having “allowed” my brother to be abused.

I was informed by Captain Totzke that he had the military police watching me, and that any expression of affection toward another boy would result in confinement at a psychiatric hospital. I was barred from change rooms, removed from team sports, and excluded from normal childhood activities under the justification that I could not be trusted to control myself even though I had been the victim of the abuse and not the abuser. In the military’s lens at the time, any sexual encounter between two males, no matter the age difference or the lack of consent, was treated as an indication of homosexuality. The victim was just as guilty as the perpetrator.

Age and Diagnosis

I was six years old when my family arrived on CFB Namao. I was eight when the abuse was discovered. Psychiatric intervention began about four months later just after my 9th birthday. By that point I was diagnosed with major depression, severe anxiety, haphephobia, and an intense fear of men. My father was so angry with me for having been found being abused that I was terrified that he was going to kill me.

None of these conditions were meaningfully treated.

What I did learn was how to perform wellness—how to mask distress just well enough to avoid punishment. That skill would define my later interactions with mental health professionals and the world in general. When I’d go for counselling with my civilian social workers, my father and Totzke would often warn me to watch what I said to the civilian social workers as they’d “twist my words” to make it sound as if I had said things that I didn’t say.

The Mask Never Comes Off

For decades afterward, my attempts at counselling followed a familiar pattern. My history was unwelcome. My symptoms were reframed as resistance. The stock phrases appeared reliably:

  • “Stop living in the past.”
  • “Move on.”
  • “You don’t want to change.”
  • “You’re playing the victim.”

It was not until 2011, when I finally received my own records, that I understood how early—and how thoroughly—my life had been derailed.

Group therapy or one-on-one it didn’t matter. Especially back in the days before I had obtained my social services paperwork. My inability to get out of bed on consistently was just because I’d stay up too late. My ability to sleep for days on end and miss work was just because I was a lazy asshole. My preference to be left alone was nothing more than my superiority complex. My debilitating fear of courses and exams wasn’t due to low self esteem, hell no, it was that I thought that I was too good.

Medical Assistance in Dying

For a while now I have been very open about my desire to access Medical Assistance in Dying.

What continues to astonish me is how many people believe this wish can be dissolved through optimism, pharmacology, or spiritual novelty. Ketamine infusions, microdosing, mantras—anything except acknowledging that some damage is permanent, and that survival itself can be a form of ongoing harm.

Don’t forget, in my case it wasn’t that the sexual abuse was unknown and no one ever knew about the issues I was facing. The CFB Namao child sexual abuse scandal was well known about in the military community. My diagnoses were known to my father and to Captain Totzke. But I wasn’t allowed to receive any help due to the desire to keep the proverbial “lid on things”.

Statistics and Comforting Fictions

This is why much of the anti-MAiD commentary rings hollow.

Recent opinion pieces lean heavily on selective statistics about suicide attempts and “recovery,” while ignoring the realities of under-reporting, stigma, misclassification of deaths, and survivorship bias.

Suicide statistics rely on narrow definitions: notes, explicit intent, immediate death. Overdoses are coded as accidental. Single-vehicle crashes are ambiguous. Deaths occurring months or years after catastrophic attempts are often excluded entirely.

The result is a comforting fiction.

A failed suicide attempt is not a victory. Often, it is survival driven by fear—not of death, but of catastrophic impairment. That fear should not be celebrated as evidence of restored hope or desire to live.

What Psychiatry Refuses to Admit

If psychiatry were being honest, it would admit what it does not know: the precise causes of depression, why some people do not recover, why treatment sometimes merely dulls experience rather than alleviating suffering.

It would also acknowledge the role of compliance and performance—the pressure to appear “better” so as not to be labeled the problem.

Instead, responsibility is quietly transferred back onto the patient.

And that, more than anything, is what I am unwilling to accept anymore.

Recently in the Toronto Star was an opinion piece

M.A.i.D. really isn’t an issue that requires “both sidesing”, but that’s what this opinion piece strives to do. It tries to mush a person’s right to self determination with personal opinions. And sadly the writer of the opinion piece concludes that if Canada could only fix its mental health system, then everyone would live happily ever after

Dr. Maher is dead set against M.A.i.D., to him any psychiatric illness can be easily treated, and if it can’t then the person should simply hold on and wait for a treatment that might possibly eventually work.

Dr. Maher was interviewed for an article published by the Canadian Mental Health Association.

https://cmhastarttalking.ca/from-pallbearer-to-psychiatrist-how-childhood-loss-propels-one-of-canadas-leading-medical-ethicists/

I have some questions for Dr. Maher.

23% of what? What is the number of Canadians that attempt suicide? 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, 100,000 people? How many people are we talking about?

Do we even know how many people attempt to commit suicide every year?

How many overdoses or single vehicle collisions are actually suicides?

How many people killed during risk taking activities are actually suicides?

How many work place “accidents” are actually suicides?

How many times does the coroner resist calling a death a suicide to spare the family the stigma of a suicide death?

How many times does the lack of a note cause the police and others to overlook a suicide?

How many people attempt suicide only to back away at the last moment, not out of the fear of dying, but out of the fear of fucking it up and ending up living for 20 years as a vegetable in a nursing home?

How many people that have attempted suicide never try to commit suicide again, not because they don’t want to take another attempt, but because their first attempt left them either physically or cognitively unable to make another attempt?

I guess we’ll never know.

And that’s sad.

This lack of understanding allows suicide to be pawned off as some random irrational behaviour that is driven by temporary bouts of sadness that some people just get too hysterical about instead of admitting that the human brain has an actual breaking point that once crossed can never be uncrossed.

The Class Action

Not too much to update on the class action.

Still going through the appeals process.

Although the Alberta judge ruled that this class action could proceed against the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces for their bungled handling of the affair on Canadian Forces Base Namao, the CAF and the DND have dug their heels in.

The underlying goal is to have me removed as the representative plaintiff, which would more or less be the death knell for this action.

What the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence have on their side is the frequent changes to the National Defence Act and the Criminal Code of Canada.

The DND and the CAF also seem to be leaning very heavily into the fact that the vast majority of Canadians have no recollection or knowledge of the various inquiries and hearings over the years that found the military justice system to be extremely inadequate and subject to manipulation by superior officers.

The DND and the CAF also seem to be conducting an experiment in law called “Schrodinger’s Base Brat”

Schrodinger’s Base Brat.
Subject at all times to the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations, and the Code of Service Discipline when outside of Canada with their serving parent, but cannot expect protection from pedophile members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Also DND and the CAF seem to be stonewalling in the search for other victims.

It’s not like the DND or the CFNIS have to take on a massive hunt for other victims.

DND and the CAF already have the names of the other ~25 victims of Captain McRae and his helpers that the base military police, the CFSIU, the modern day CFNIS, (ret) Brigadier General Daniel Edward Munro, and the various officers on the courts martial panel know.

It’s also worth wonder if the DND or the CAF have settled with previous victims of Captain McRae and his helpers.

To date the DND and the CAF have insisted that they were never responsible for the safety of children living in military housing located on military bases. The DND and the CAF have also indicated that they have no responsibility for the actions of their service members towards civilians.

Are DND and the CAF just going to run the clock out? This is a favourite tactic of the CAF and the DND. Dead plaintiffs can’t set precedents and can’t claim compensation.

I get to apply for Medical Assistance in Dying in 15 months and 21 days.

All the DND, the CAF, and the DOJ have to do is delay, delay, delay.

But Bobbie, you simply have to stay alive or you’re just going to let the DND, the CAF, and the DOJ win.

Who fucking cares?

Through the 14 years of lies, bullshit, and subterfuge since this matter began in 2011 my father has died. Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill will not have to explain what deals he made in 1980 with the chain of command.

When my father gave his statement to the CFNIS in 2011, he contradicted social service records and medical records that existed in three provinces that he was unaware of. When I examined him for federal court in 2013, he outright contradicted his statement to the CFNIS. I first gave my social service records to the CFNIS in 2011, then again in September of 2015 when the RCMP suggested to the CFNIS to take another go at the investigation. In 2015 I even gave a copy of the examination that I gave to my father in 2013. You would think that the CFNIS would want to hear the explanation from him as to why there was such a discrepancy between his statement to the CFNIS in 2011 and his statements to social services in 1980 through 1986. Nope, the CFNIS weren’t concerned in the slightest. They had the story they wanted. And that’s all they needed.

The goal of the CAF and the CFNIS in 2011 was to bury this matter. After all the babysitter insisted during a telephone call to Master Corporal Robert Jon Hancock that “Anything he had been involved in as a youth has already been handled by the military” and “if charges were to be brought against him, a lawyer would handle that”.

What deals did the CAF and the DND make with my father in 1980 and then again in 2011? We’ll never know.

My brother died in 2024. We’ll never know what drove him to start injecting ketamine, but apparently he was suffering from major depression and anxiety due to the events of CFB Namao and the dysfunctional household that we grew up in that the CAF shielded from public social services.

What deals did the CAF and the DND make with the babysitter? Again, we’ll never know. Any agreement reached between the babysitter and the DND and the CAF will no doubt be covered by a massive Non Disclosure Agreement.

And yes, NDAs are often applied in these matters. I’m already covered by an NDA. Yeah, I can mention the existence of an NDA. But I can’t mention a single detail about it.

Does the CAF, the DND, or the DOJ have any intention of justice or compensation for the children abused on CFB Namao by an officer of the regular force that were subsequently swept under the rug and posted off to various bases across Canada?

I don’t think so.

This case is so fucking toxic for the CAF and the DND.

Up to now the DND and the CAF have been able to claim that there was never a problem with child sexual abuse on the bases in Canada simply due to the lack of prosecutions.

Meanwhile the truth is we’ll never know how many instances of child sexual abuse were swept under the rug due to the 3-year-time-bar flaw, the summary investigation flaw, the fact that commanding officers had the authority of provincial crown prosecutors to approve or disapprove of criminal code charges against their subordinates, the fact that the CAF has sole jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute service offences, that service offences included all criminal code offences, and that the military retains sole jurisdiction for historical service offences.

The other thing that the DND and the CAF like to insist upon is that all of the questionable members of the Canadian Forces or its various predecessors prior to unification in 1968 were all one-offs, like each base was operated by an independent franchisee like 7-11 stores or McDonald’s.

Captain Angus McRae
Brigadier General Roger Bazin
Colonel Russell Williams
Base Commander of Canadian Forces Base Trenton
Most of the undergarments that he stole belonged to young girls
Agreed to plead guilty to the murders and the rapes so long as the crown didn’t charge him with possession of child pornography that was on a hard drive found in the basement of his home.
RCAF member Sgt. Alexander Kalichuk.
Was found to be driving around the backroads adjacent to RCAF Station Centralia offering free panties to girls aged 9 and 10. Was associated with the Lynn Harper family.
Corporal Donald Joseph Sullivan.
Enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces WHILE being investigated by the Ottawa Police Service for numerous sexual assaults on Boy Scouts in the 1970s.
Was kicked out of the military in 1985 after sexually assaulting children on Canadian Forces Base Gagetown.
These charges were not made known to the provincial crown or entered into CPIC.

All of these men were recruited by the Canadian Armed Forces or the various branches that existed prior to unification in 1968. All of these men were vetted as being suitable for service. All of these men had easy access to the children of service members living on the bases in Canada.

If any of these men molested children living on Canadian Armed Forces Bases prior to 1998, charges can never be brought due to the 3-year-time-bar that existed prior to 1998 as service offences included all criminal code offences that were committed by a service member while subject to the code of service discipline. Regular force members are subjected to the code of service discipline 24/7/365 from the day they enlist until the day they retire ( or are booted from the military). The National Defence Act states that any service offence committed by a person who is no longer subject to the code of service discipline but who would have been at the time of the offence remains the jurisdiction of the Canadian Armed Forces.

There are no exceptions to this.

A sexual pervert or deviant that was a member of the Canadian Armed Forces has the right to expect their service offence to be dealt with by the defective military justice system as it was prior to 1998. Which means that the 3-year-time-bar applies as does the requirement for a summary investigation.

This is why you don’t hear of charges against members of the Canadian Armed Forces for sexual crimes against military dependents that occurred prior to 1998.

Daily Prompt 2062

Daily writing prompt
Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.
View all responses

I really wish that I had learnt earlier in life that the Canadian Armed Forces were nothing to look up to.

As a child growing up in a military family living on military bases you get exposed to the military in a way that civilians aren’t exposed to.

I’ve flown in a Sea King.

I’ve flown in a Chinook more than a few times.

I’ve flown in a Hercules at least once.

These flights were typically on “family days” on base, but with the Chinooks it was when I was at the squadron I could go on test flights if I promised to keep my mouth shut and just sit there.

And when the Canadian Forces used to operate passenger planes for transferring personnel, I flew in one of these from Canadian Forces Base Shearwater to Canadian Forces Base Namao.

I don’t remember going to the squadron on CFB Shearwater or on CFB Summerside, but I was a frequent visitor to 447 Sqn on CFB Namao in the days prior to the Captain McRae fiasco. I knew how to turn on the DC breakers to get power to the cockpit radio and I knew how to select the AM band and tune in the local radio station and kill time in the cockpit while my father was busy doing who the hell knows what. Yeah, I knew how to tune into the base tower or the local civilian towers, but this wasn’t as much fun as the radio.

I followed a mechanic up on top of a Chinook once. The rotors were off the helicopter and he was doing something with the swash plate assemblies. This was prior to us moving off CFB Namao in September of 1980 so I would have been around 8. I was out of my father’s hair so he didn’t give a shit so long as I didn’t fall off and create paperwork.

This was the best I could get Chat to do. The first time I asked Chat to make an image like this it created a Chinook that looked like a giant R/C model with the mechanic standing beside it and the boy sitting on top. The next image chat created from my prompts had the mechanic and the boy looking at the forward gearbox like it was an engine under the “hood” at the nose.
So, this is as good as it gets.

Sure, my father was a drunk and an asshole, but so were a lot of the other guys. And they all seemed to love hanging out together at the mess. Yeah, my father could get angry and issue beatings, but that was my fault. He wouldn’t hit me or beat me if I didn’t deserve it, right?

And after what I had done on CFB Namao with the babysitter and Captain McRae I really deserved his anger and his fury, right?

For the majority of my life I held the Canadian Armed Forces in high regard.

And of course that didn’t change until May of 2011 when Master Corporal Christian Cyr let the beans out about the whole Captain Father Angus McRae fiasco.

To this day I can’t believe that I was so fucking stupid to believe that the Canadian Armed Forces had any honour.

The more I dug into the whens and whys of the Captain McRae fiasco the more it became crystal clear that the Canadian Armed Forces is an organization that places more concern in its public image and its ability to “wash the laundry in house”.

It cares not about the children living on base.

It cares not about the families living on base.

And it really doesn’t care about the individual members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

It’s a soulless entity that will destroy lives in order to protect its image.

Men like my father?

Just fucking mindless robots that go along with what they’re told because they’re not allowed to think on their own. They’re part of the hive-mind or the Borg. Completely fucking useless automatons that can’t do fuck all unless the chain of command tells them to.

The Canadian Armed Forces will never reward individuality. The Canadian Armed Forces is all about conformity and following orders.

If the Chain of Command tells you that you 8 year old son is a homosexual because he was found being buggered by his 14 year old babysitter, well who the hell are you to question the wisdom of the chain of command?

If a Colonel doesn’t want the public to know that over 25 children were sexually abused for a two-year period on his base, then the public isn’t going to find out. Fuck the victims. Just charge McRae with enough crimes to get him the boot from the military, but don’t charge McRae with the full extent as this will only call your command ability into question and your plan of retiring from the Canadian Armed Forces as a Brigadier General will be at risk.

And don’t forget, in 2011 the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service knew the whole sordid affair from CFB Namao as they had the CFSIU DS 120-10-80 investigation paperwork as well as the Courts Martial transcripts for CM62 in their possession. They knew the full fucking truth. But they still insisted on running a dog’n’pony show investigation because there was no way that the Canadian Armed Forces was ever going to willingly suffer the public humiliation of having the Canadian public discover that the military had historically hidden child sexual abuse that occurred on the bases in Canada and that the problem was quite extensive.

And that’s the lesson that I wished I had learnt earlier in life.

Maybe not too young, but at least by my early 20s.

Yet another day yet another spin around the axis.

What do I do for fun?

Nothing really. I slept most of yesterday day and today.

Why don’t you volunteer and get out and meet people?

Not my thing. It’s not that I don’t care. I just don’t have the energy or the desire. Besides, I really like to be left alone. No matter what I do or what I try I find that out of a crowd of ten people there will always be one or two that are never happy with me and will plunge their daggers into my back just for kicks.

Why don’t you hang out with people from work?

I don’t do the “hanging out” thing. Single and solitary is the way that I like it. Less anxiety, less chance of disappointment.

Why don’t you get into music?

Never really listened to music until I was in my 20’s. Living under my father’s roof as a kid taught me that music was something that degenerate people wasted their time on.

Surely you have a favourite TV show or movie that you like?

Nope. Didn’t spend much time in the house as a kid so I didn’t spend much time in front of the boob-tube.

Surely you like activities?

As my social service records from the early ’80s state, “There doesn’t seem to be a single activity these people do as a family”.

GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE!

GET THE FUCK OUTSIDE NOW!

SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU’RE MAKING TOO MUCH FUCKING NOISE!

Our stepmother didn’t want us in the house. I guess that she bought Richard’s lies and his fanciful stories lock – stock & barrel.

Richard didn’t want us in the house. Due to his untreated PTSD, his alcoholism, and the dysfunctional household that he was raised in he had absolutely no parenting skills or coping skills. And besides, we reminded him of our mother. And as he told one of his airforce buddies, he only kept us so that he could control the costs.

So no, we weren’t sent outside to play for exercise.

We were sent outside so that they could pretend that we didn’t exist.

To me, life is just one meaningless day after another.

Iceland

Daily writing prompt
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
View all responses

Before going to Iceland in June of 2023 I had never been outside of North America. When I moved to Vancouver in 1992 I had started going down to Seattle every now and again.

Prior to that, and including all of the years that I lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, I had never gone down to New York or even the American side of Niagara Falls.

Actually, I was over the American border once, but that was when I was on a job in the spring of 1990 and I had a stop over in the town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick. I had gone over the bridge into Calais, Maine a couple of times just to see what things were like.

I landed in Iceland a few days before the summer solstice in 2023.

I was in Iceland for just over a week.

Why did I go?

I had been expecting to be able to apply for medical assistance in dying back on March 17th, 2023 and going to Iceland was on my bucket list of things that I wanted to do before I kicked off this mortal coil.

Well, of course the Government of Canada chickened out at the last minute, so I’m still trapped here.

Why was Iceland on my bucket list?

Well, I talked about this before, but I’ll touch on it here again.

In 1976 my father had been posted from Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Nova Scotia to Canadian Forces Base Summerside on Prince Edward Island. His drinking and his physical abuse of my mother started to get out of hand.

In the winter of 1977 my father had my mother booted out of the military housing. My father then had his mother come in from Edmonton, Alberta to live in the PMQ and raise my brother and I as he was frequently away from home on exercises.

By the late spring of 1978 my grandmother had returned back to Edmonton.

In July of 1978 I had been found unconscious in the middle of the road due to an incident involving my bicycle. Someone had picked me up and driven me to the Prince County Hospital. The only next-of-kin listed was my father. My grandmother’s name wasn’t on the admission papers.

What was on that papers was this little curiosity:

Apparently it’s somewhat of a straight shot from CFB Summerside the to US Base in Iceland

So, being the curious type, I had to go see what was so great about Iceland.

It was an 8 hour flight from YVR to KEF.

It was an interesting week and a bit in Iceland.

Never did figure out why Richard went, must have just been a routine flight.

I mainly stayed in Reykjavik.

I couldn’t really see anyone that resembled me, so doesn’t look like my father made any pleasure stops while he was there.

I might go back in the winter of 2026 for the Winter Solstice.

Why do I blog?

Daily writing prompt
Why do you blog?
View all responses

I started blogging back around August of 2011 just after I received my social service paperwork from the Alberta government.

I quickly realized that I had no one to talk to about the events that I had lived through on Canadian Forces Base Namao, Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, and Canadian Forces Base Downsview.

And talk I wanted to.

To go from someone who had been reviled by his own family for causing the events on Canadian Forces Base Namao and for having fucked with his father’s military career to now being one of at least 25 children that got chucked under the fucking bus by the Canadian Armed Forces due to chain of command decisions made by grown adults in May to June of 1980.

I had begun counselling sessions in May of 2011 with a counsellor from the EFAP program at work, I could tell that he wasn’t able to comprehend any of what I was telling him. Sure, the counselling went on for a few years. It was nice having someone to talk to even if he had nothing to offer in the slightest.

I thought that these blogs would get me more answers and more details about what had happened on CFB Namao. But this hasn’t worked out. Yes, I have been contacted by other brats who were abused on the base at the time. But much like I had been prior to my crash course in the damaged military justice system, most people who had grown up on military bases as children had no idea of just how fucked up things were on the bases back then.

There are generally two types of base brat. The ones that came from somewhat functional families and who undoubtedly participated in the shunning of kids from dysfunctional families that would occur on base. And those that came from dysfunctional families like mine that are unaware that their own serving parent sacrificed the wellbeing of their children to appease the chain of command.

The members of the former group will not under any circumstance admit that there were dysfunctional families on base as that means that they would have to admit to the fact that they often participated in the shunning and harassment of the children of these families.

And you had better fucking believe me when I say that a military community is not very tolerant of non-conformity. The military is built around 100% conformity.

The members of the latter group will not admit that their family was dysfunctional as they subconsciously know what happened, but they don’t want to have their suspicions confirmed.

I quickly came to realize that the general public has no idea of what happened on the bases in Canada, and the general public just doesn’t seem to care.

The media that once existed in Canada no longer exists. It’s all downsized, consolidated, and owned by the Americans. And timing is everything. The last 25 years have been extremely unstable in the geo political sphere, so the story of how the National Defence Act allowed matters like Captain Father Angus McRae to be buried often becomes sidelined due to current events.

So, I type away on my blog in the vain hope that something will come of this all the while knowing that this blog will only really appeal to a very small minority of people.

**************…….

So, on a lark I prompted ChatGPT with:
“hey chat, can you write a song about the benefits of medical assistance in dying, but do it in the style of ****************?”

This is what ChatGPT responded with:

Sure, here’s a ************–inspired track about Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) — blending dark humor, hyper-pop shock, and existential beats into a lyrical exploration of autonomy and peace. Think of it as something ***** would scream while ****** whispers the end of life like it’s a rave invitation to the afterlife.

I’ve removed the name of the band and artists……

🎵 TRACK: “EXIT STRATEGY ” 🎵
(Style: *********** — aggressive electro-rap beat, horrorcore undertones.

[Intro: ******* whispering, childlike]
Shhh…
I got a secret plan…
A silver key in a doctor’s hand…
Lights go low, the pain goes bye,
Pop-pop — sleep now, **** don’t cry.

[Beat drops – ******* snarling]
Yo!
I’m not scared of the end — nah,
I’m scared of draggin’ it out, bruh!
When the light’s all gone from my eyes
Let me peace out, clean, dignified!

Tick-tick BOOM! I choose the time,
I’m not trapped in a slow decline.
You pray for a miracle, I plan my ride —
Clinical calm with that phenobarb glide.

[Chorus: *******& choir of ghostly kids]
✨
MAiD, MAiD — I ain’t afraid
Sick of the pain, now I press “play”
Body’s a cage, mind’s in a rage
Gimme my key to unlock the stage
✨
MAiD, MAiD — not suicide
Doctor by side, no need to hide
Last breath soft, no twitch, no fight
Exit with ****, into the night

[Verse 2: *******]
****-lord of the hospice suite,
Got my paperwork done, that VIP beat
Pill game strong, no wires, no drip
Just one final ride then a permanent trip

Yo, why we fear what’s natural, hey?
When the mind’s still here but the flesh decay
Don’t tell me “wait” with your holy book,
I’ve read that too — now gimme the hook!

Sick ain’t sin, and pain ain’t noble,
I’m not your martyr or your moral fable
I’m **** ’til the end, so play my jam,
Drop the propofol beat, let me scram!

[Bridge: ******* — autotuned, eerie]
Floatin’ in a dream now, clean like snow
No tubes, no screams, just let it go
White light strobe on a slow mo beat
I ride the bassline into relief

[Final Chorus – both screaming + whispering combo]
✨
MAiD, MAiD — let me fly
Life was wild, now I say goodbye
MAiD, MAiD — no regrets
Signed that form, now place your bets
✨
MAiD, MAiD — ****don’t stall
Exit fast through a sterile hall
No more fightin’, no more lies
Just peace in a beat and a doctor’s eyes

[Outro – ******* laughing softly]
Yoh…
Don’t mourn me, bru.
I ghosted out… like a ninja do.
Poof.