Tag: Hedy Fry

The Federal election.

Well, the 2025 Federal Election is underway.

I live in Vancouver Centre.

I’m stuck between voting for the lame duck NDP or the useless federal Liberals.

The Liberal party has been kinda my default party, although I would dearly love to see Dr. Hedy Fry tossed to the curb.

I’ve lived in the West End of Vancouver since 1993.

Dr. Hedy Fry has been my federal MP since the ’90s

I needed her help back in 2012 dealing with the whole mess from Canadian Forces Base Namao. No help at all. Seriously. Her assistant was about as useless as a concrete parachute.

Then in 2020, when the Canadian Forces finally released to me the transcripts from the 1980 CFSIU investigation and the July 1980 Courts Martial which showed that the military police in 1980 and 2011 knew the full extent of the babysitter’s action, she refused to assist with my matter citing the fact that there are no military bases in Vancouver Centre.

I’ve asked to talk to her various time since the federal Liberals first flubbed on their promise to implement Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness in 2023.

Yet, I have no choice but to vote for her.

In all honesty, I’d be voting for the NDP as my politics are pro-union and pro-social issue and the federal Liberals are a corporate type party. But the federal NDP has tried to drift to the right-of-centre to capture Liberal voters.

The current candidate for the NDP in Vancouver Centre, Avi Lewis, ignored the questions that I posed to him. I asked “what are your opinions on Medical Assistance in Dying for reasons of Mental Health”, and “what do you intend to do about the flaw in the pre-1998 National Defence Act that deny justice to anyone who was ever sexually abused on a military base by a person subjected to the code of service discipline prior to 1998”.

Avi Lewis never responded.

Two canvassers that were in my apartment building glad-handing for Avi refused to respond to either question and instead segued into affordable housing and other fluff of no use to me.

I’m not planning on living long enough to worry about “affording a house”.

In Vancouver Centre we’ve always had to watch out for the Conservative Party of America. Ever since the Conservatives merged with the Reform Party and the Alliance Party, marching in lockstep with American policy has always been their desire.

I used to live in Alberta, and I have relatives in Alberta, so I’m very familiar with the very weird politics in that province.

The C.R.A.Party has always posed a threat to Canada, and it will continue to do so so long as Canada refuses to crack down on American dark money in any meaningful manner.

Over the last 20 years there’s been an explosion of new condos popping up like rancid mushrooms in Vancouver Centre. A lot of these condos are investments either rented out as apartments or AirBNBs and as such the owners tend to want to vote for those who will cut taxes to the absolute minimum while allowing for the removal of zoning regulations and “red tape”. The owners of the condos tend to always vote for the CONs because they really don’t care about social issues, they just care about buying up more condos and raking in more money through rentals or through AirBNBs.

So, yet again I trundle off to the voting booth to plug my nose and fill in the circle beside Fry’s name.

Hopefully this is the last time I ever have to vote in a federal election as the next one is due in 2029 and hopefully I’m gone by 2027.

Happy Pride Month?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queer kids just learnt to stay in the closet.

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

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

Kids on base learnt that compassion was a liability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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