Tag: history

Your life is really not your own

It’s often said that Canadians have rights and freedoms that most of the world don’t enjoy.

The one right that I don’t have is the right to request that my life be terminated.

For some reason my desire to die is either taking rights away from people who don’t want to die, or if I am allowed to die then the man in the sky will be angry.

I didn’t ask for this life.

I didn’t ask for my grandmother to be a residential school survivor.

I didn’t ask for my father to be a pissed tank alcoholic like his mother.

I didn’t ask for military rules and regulations to allow dead beats like my father to have my mother discharged from military housing.

I didn’t ask for Captain Father Angus McRae to be a sexual pervert.

I didn’t ask for my babysitter, Captain McRae’s altar boy, to work as McRae’s agent.

I didn’t ask to be sexually abused by the babysitter when my grandmother would go into town to visit her husband in the nursing home.

I didn’t ask for the 1970 RSC National Defence Act to be written in such a way that unscrupulous members of the Canadian Forces could bend and obstruct a criminal investigation to hide and minimize the true extent of the crimes.

I didn’t ask for Captain Terry Totzke to interfere with my mental health and wellbeing so as to keep a lid on the events of CFB Namao.

I didn’t ask to be blamed for the abuse my brother endured at the hands of the babysitter.

I didn’t ask to be disowned by my father for “fucking” with his military career.

I’m suffering from a myriad of issues that I didn’t ask for and didn’t have any control over.

And then I get ambushed by disabled rights groups and mental health advocates because I can be fixed or cured so long as I am willing to hide, bury, and internalize the shit I went through.

I get ambushed by the members of the Invisible Sky Daddy crowd who seem to think that their invisible friend will be sad and upset if I end my own life.

And then I also get ambushed by the Canadian Armed Forces who will move mountains to prove that nothing whatsoever happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao and that I’m just a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military”.

I should be able to make a simple request, go through a simple verification process, a subsequent cooling down period, and then the procedure if I wish to go through with the procedure.

The fact that others may be upset about my death shouldn’t be a factor in this matter.

Society has absolutely no problem with my death if I get killed by an out-of-control car driver because speed and horsepower are more important than my life.

Society has absolutely no problem with my death due to pollution, because pollution means production, and production means owners get wealthy.

The right-to-die is a basic human right that should never be removed from a person.

Don’t want physically healthy person dying for mental health reasons?

Don’t let children get sexually abused, and if they do, take care of them.

Don’t let them get fucked over by the dysfunctional military sham justice system.

Don’t let unqualified persons fuck with children’s brains.

And don’t hide, minimize, and then victim blame the victim.

The complete lack of concern for the mental health of its members.

In late August of 1985 my brother and I flew back from Edmonton after having spent the entire summer staying with our grandmother in Edmonton.

Upon our return to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario our father had to alert the base military police to our arrival back home.

The military police came to talk to my brother and I about a rage-out that our father had in the PMQ that had contributed a significant amount of damage to the PMQ and required 3 military police officers to bring him under control.

Richard’s rage-outs were nothing new, but during this one he had completely lost control and smashed out all of the ground floor windows and damaged a lot of the furniture.

Richard used to self medicate by getting himself pickled drunk. But since Sue moved in with us in the summer of 1980, she tried to get Richard to sober up.

Richard also had a thing for prescription pain meds. Beyond that I can’t say if he was ever into hard drugs or not. But yes, he was an alcoholic.

And by not self medicating, Richard’s physical rage and temper would often peak at boiling over.

The military police implored my brother and I to NOT call 9-1-1 but to instead call the base military police as the Toronto cops couldn’t just come on to the base.

The two military police officers told us that we shouldn’t call for help unless we got out of the PMQ first, and that we should be prepared to jump from the second story of the PMQ if we had to get away from Richard.

Looking back I now realize that the base military police didn’t want us calling 9-1-1 as the civilian police were duty bound to report domestic violence to civilian social services where as the military police and the Canadian Armed Forcesliked to keep things in house an out from under the noses of those nosey civilians.

The MPs gave my brother and I business cards with the direct phone number for the MPs so that we didn’t have to go through base switchboard.

I was going to go show one of my friends the business card and tell him how the military police promised me that they would protect me from Richard and his anger outbursts as the MPs had heard things from the neighbours about the way Richard treated my brother and I.

Bill Parker intercepted me as I walked across the common lawn that the PMQs surrounded.

Bob! Bob, come here, I need to talk to you.

Bill promised me that if my father ever got angry again that I could come stay with his family, just like my mother and I had done on Canadian Forces Base Shearwater. I would find out about the CFB Sheawater “Battered wives club” in the 2010’s.

I showed Bill the business card and told Bill that if the fucker ever hit me again that I’d call the military police and they’d come take care of Richard. Bill told me that I had to take it easy on my father, that I simply didn’t understand what my father had been through and how the Canadian Forces had abandoned him.

Bill went on to explain something about my father having sailed to England with the Sea Kings in 1969 and that there had been an explosion in the engine room on one of the ships and that my father lost three of his drinking buddies from when he had been in the Navy.

“Bob, I wish you knew your father before that. He was a completely different man. He would have been nice.”

Bill implored me to never ask my father about this, that I was supposed to keep this a secret and just understand and accept my father’s anger and temper.

August of 1985 was long before the advent of Netscape Navigator and Google.

I was in Sea Cadets at the time, so I devised a way in which I’d ask my father about this “engine room explosion” without asking him directly about it.

I came home one night after cadets and told him that as part of studying naval history in the Canadian Navy that I was supposed to write a report on ship explosions that would have occurred in 1969.

The blood drained from his face, his cigarette hung from his lower lip, and his fists clenched up. All he said was that if I ever asked him a question like that again that I wouldn’t have to worry about ship explosions because of my broken neck.

It was the early 2000’s when I discovered the HMCS Kootenay incident that occurred in October of 1969 when the ships from CFB Halifax and the Sea Kings from CFB Shearwater were returning from exercises to the UK. It wasn’t an engine that exploded. It was oil vapour in a high-speed gear box that ignited due to an overheated main bearing. 11 members of the navy died. The explosion had been swift and hot. It was so hot that it melted all of the aluminum ladders that lead out of the engine room / gear box room.

My father had been on the Kootenay in his navy days before unification gave him the opportunity to get out of the Navy and into the Air Force. His name won’t show up on any of the ship’s registers as he was with the Sea Kings in the Air Force and not the Navy.

When I met my mother, Marie, in 2013 she confirmed Richard’s involvement with the Kootenay incident saying that Richard became a different man in the days and weeks after. His drinking had increased, his violence increased, he started to exhibit a hair trigger temper.

When Richard was posted to CFB Summerside his temper and his drinking became even worse, hence why she tried to take my bother and I back to Nova Scotia to stay with our uncle Al, but why she ended up being ejected from the PMQ by the base military police.

I met a gentleman by the name of Chris Legerre in the summer of 2014 when I went to Halifax to see the city that I had been born in 42 years previously. Chris had been on the HMCS Kootenay on the day of the gearbox explosion.

Yep, the Canadian Armed Forces literally and figuratively fucked everyone over that had been involved in the incident. A complete lack of compassion. No mental health treatment, nada, zip, zilch. Drug use became rampant amongst the survivors. Families of the deceased were booted out of the military housing with absolutely no compassion shown to the kids.

And you’d think that things would have changed in the last 55 years, but you’d be sadly fucking mistaken.

The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence don’t give one sliver of a flying fuck about the mental health of the members of the Canadian Forces . And from my personal experience the Canadian Armed Forces care even less about the family members of mentally ill service members that have to experience the untreated mental illness of the serving member.

See, in my day of living on the bases in Canada military dependents were of absolutely no concern to the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence. We were referred to as D.F.&E., Dependents, furniture, and effects. It took lobbying by the Ombudsman to get the Canadian Armed Forces to change this and to stop lumping dependents in as the personal belonging of the serving member.

But that really didn’t change things.

David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen posted a link to a story by Morgan Lowrie of National News Watch that was about two member of the Canadian Armed Forces that committed suicide. They were brothers. Both had served in Afghanistan. The article talks about how the Canadian Armed Forces are going to give the mother of the two soldiers a silver star. The article however mentions nothing about the spouses of the deceased members, nor the children of the deceased members.

https://nationalnewswatch.com/2024/11/01/new-brunswick-woman-who-lost-two-sons-to-ptsd-named-national-silver-cross-mother

Children of service members that die in action or die as a result of committing suicide due to mental stress endured during service should automatically receive guaranteed scholarships to college or university or support through trade school.

Spouses should receive compensation up until the retirement age of the service member.

The Canadian Armed Forces asks a lot from its service members, and by extension it asks a lot from the families of the service members.

It should then have to look after the families of service members, and stop treating military dependents like an afterthought.

The independence of the military police.

Just thought that I would make a post about the imaginary independence of the Canadian Forces Military Police and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service from the Chain of Command.

The base MPs and the CFNIS along with its predecessor, the CFSIU, have never been free of the chain of command. The investigators with these agencies are at all times soldiers first and police officers second. These soldiers, just as all other soldiers, are bound by the National Defence Act to obey the lawful commands of their superiors.

And yes, there is a difference between legal and lawful. Member of the Canadian Armed Forces generally don’t have the time and the ability to consult with a legal officer to determine if a lawful command is in fact a legal command.

And this poses a massive problem for persons such as myself who have actions against the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces for abuse and neglect that we endured at the hands of members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

In the spring of 1980 the military police commenced an investigation of my babysitter due to the numerous complaints of inappropriate sexual touching of other children living on the base. The investigation quickly exposed the fact that Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Father Angus McRae was running a child sexual abuse ring on the base.

There were three boys involved with escorting children over to the living quarters attached to the chapel. One of these boys was my babysitter.

You would think that the military police would have wanted to string Captain McRae up with as many charges possible. But that’s not the way that the military justice system worked then.

In May of 1980, after the base military police investigated the babysitter for molesting children, base security officer Captain David Pilling instructed CFSIU Acting Section Commander Warrant Officer Fredrick R. Cunningham to investigate Captain Father Angus McRae for having committed acts of “homosexuality” with young boys on the base. The use of the term “acts of homosexuality” indicated that the Canadian Armed Forces already viewed McRae’s victims not as victims, but as homosexuals participating in homosexual activities.

Now, this is where things become very bad for the victims of Captain McRae that were under the age of 14.

The Canadian Armed Forces could only prosecute for the crimes of Gross Indecency, Indecent Assault, and Buggery so long as consent was a possibility. This fact was raised in the Court Martial Appeal Court finding of Regina vs. Corporal Donald Joseph Sullivan which was held in 1985.

Captain McRae’s commanding officer was Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, the base commander of Canadian Forces Base Namao. In 2017 as a result of me asking a CFNIS investigator if they could talk with retired Brigadier General Daniel Edward Munro to find out what transpired of CFB Namao in 1980 the office of the JAG replied that due to the 3-year-time-bar that existed in 1980, no charges could ever be brought against Munro so the CFNIS declined to talk to him.

In 1980 it would have been the commanding officer of the accused that would have decided what type of investigation McRae would be subjected to and how in-depth the investigation would be.

Colonel Daniel Edward Munro along with his chain of command would have known that the Captain McRae couldn’t be subjected to a courts martial for any crime committed against a child under the age of 14. Munro and his superiors would have known that to prosecute McRae for abusing any child under the age of 14 the Morinville RCMP would have had to be called in. And this would mean that McRae would be prosecuted in the civilian justice system where the military would not have been able to place a “veil of secrecy” around the whole affair.

This is why it was either Colonel Daniel Edward Munro or his superiors that wouldn’t allow the Base MPs to contact the Morinville RCMP to deal with the babysitter. They weren’t trying to protect the babysitter. They were trying to keep this whole mess from getting out into the public eye. Once the RCMP started investigating the babysitter, and once the babysitter mentioned the other boys and that they were bringing children as young as 4 over to the chapel the military would have lost control of the whole matter

Once the CFSIU completed its investigation of Captain McRae for sexually abusing children, the charges weren’t referred to the Alberta Crown Prosecutor for review. McRae was being charged with sections of the Criminal Code of Canada that were enumerated into the National Defence Act as Service Offences. Service offences were not in the purview of the provincial crowns. The charges were instead reviewed by the commanding officer of the accused. Which again in this case was Colonel Daniel Edward Munro, the base commander of Canadian Forces Base Namao.

An interesting thing about Colonel Daniel Edward Munro is that EVERY member of the regular force and the reserves located on Canadian Forces Base Namao was Munro’s subordinate. There is no requirement for an officer with the Chain of Command to follow the command structure when issuing commands to subordinate.

At work, if a manager from a department makes an unrealistic request of me or my subordinates, I can ask that manager to address my department manager. And I have the union to back me up on that. In the Canadian Forces you don’t have that ability.

In the Canadian Forces, if you don’t do as your superiors tell you to, you run the risk of being charged with insubordination. Basically you do as you’re told and you can only ignore the order you were given if someone else superior to you instructs you to ignore that order.

Members of the Canadian Forces subject to orders from and decisions by Colonel Munro included, but were not limited to:

  • my father
  • the father of the babysitter
  • the serving parents of the other two boys suspected of bringing kids to McRae
  • the serving parents of the other abused children
  • the investigators within the CFSIU
  • the investigators within the Base MPs
  • military social workers like Captain Lynda Tyrell and Captain Terry Totzke.

Once the Chain of Command decided that the Captain Father Angus McRae matter was going to be dealt with through the military justice system, that was it. This is not to be questioned.

When I talked to Claude Adams of Global News in 2014 about the Captain McRae sex scandal from CFB Namao, Claude assured me that if he was in the Canadian Forces and if the military didn’t want to charge McRae with abusing his children that he’d just go marching down to the city police and lay charges himself.

That’s not how this works. If Claude did that, that would have been an immediate courts martial.

Yes, the ignorance by the Canadian public of how the military works is quite alarming.

Why would the Canadian Armed Forces go through all of this just to keep the McRae matter out of the media? Wouldn’t this have shown the Canadian Public that the Canadian Armed Forces does not tolerate child sexual abuse under any circumstance?

No. That’s not the way the Canadian Forces operated, especially not during the Cold War. The Canadian Armed Forces, much like many other “western” militaries had waged a war against homosexuality as it was seen as a weakness that the Soviets could exploit via entrapment and blackmail to recruit spies.

During the period of the Captain McRae child abuse sex scandal the Government of Canada employed the “fruit machine” to weed out homosexuals. The Canadian Forces had CFAO 19-20.

So imagine the military’s reluctance to prosecute Canadian Armed Forces OFFICER Captain Father Angus McRae for sexually abusing over 25 children on Canadian Forces Base Namao in direct view of the Base MP detachment.

Imagine if the Canadian public had discovered via a public trial that McRae had inappropriate sexual relations with children on other Canadian Forces Base and Canadian Forces Stations that Captain McRae had been moved to by the Canadian Armed Forces.

Can you imagine Colonel Daniel Edward Munro’s fear of having his command ability called into question as it was his Base MPs that failed to detect Munro’s direct subordinate molesting the children of enlisted personnel on the base that Munro was ultimately responsible for the security of?

To top it off, Captain McRae had been investigated at the Royal Military College at Canadian Forces Base Kingston for “Acts of homosexuality” in 1974. It’s not like CFB Kingston and CFB Namao are separate entities. They’re both Canadian Forces Bases under the same command chain and policed by the same police force. So it’s not like anyone in the chain of command on CFB Namao could plead ignorance to Captain McRae’s previous investigation for “acts of homosexuality” in 1974?

Why wasn’t McRae tossed out of the military in 1974? Was it because the military police or the CFSIU couldn’t find enough evidence? No. It doesn’t matter what the Base MPs or the CFSIU found. McRae’s commanding officer would have had the ultimate authority to dismiss the charges that had been brought against Captain McRae.

Even in 2011, the CFNIS had the 1980 CFSIU paperwork and the 1980 courts martial transcripts in their hand, but there was no way that the Canadian Armed Forces were going to allow charges to be brought against the babysitter.

Why?

Angus McRae didn’t die until May 20th, 2011. 3-1/2 months after the start of the investigation. And this posed a massive problem for the CFNIS.

While the CFNIS would have been free to bring charges against the babysitter, the CFNIS would never have been able to charge Angus McRae for ANY service offence that he had committed while subjected to the Code of Service Discipline.

Two flaws that existed in the National Defence Act prior to December of 1998 ensure that child molesters who abused children on Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada ensure that these abusers nor their victims will ever receive justice.

See, even though the flaws were removed, there was no legislation enacted that retroactively allowed the crown prosecutor to become involved with reviewing charges laid by the base military police or the CFSIU prior to the commanding officer of the accused conducting their Summary Investigation as required under the National Defence Act.

In 1980, after the laying of charges by the military police or the CFSIU, all charges were required to be reviewed by the commanding officer of the accused. This included not only charges of a purely military nature, but ALL criminal code charges enumerated into the National Defence Act. The commanding officer had the full authority to dismiss any and all charges, including criminal code offences.

When Bill C-25 passed in 1998 the 3-year-time-bar flaw and the summary investigation flaw were removed, but there was no language added that allowed the base military police or the CFSIU / CFNIS to bypass the language that existed prior to 1998 and to refer service offence charges to a provincial prosecutor. More alarmingly, there was no language added to either the National Defence Act or the Criminal Code of Canada that nullified the 3-year-time-bar prior to 1998.

Why is this important?

Well without a police investigation showing evidence that I was molested directly by Captain McRae it is being hinted that I have no legal claim against the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence. But don’t forget, the investigations being relied upon are investigations conducted by the police of the agency that I am claiming compensation from.

In it’s 10 year report to Parliament that was published in 2010, the Military Police Complaints Commission that allowing the military police and the CFNIS to investigate matters that may subject the DND and the CAF to civil actions is inappropriate as indicated by decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada.

These decisions are why police forces in Canada generally will not investigate matters that could be expected to lead to civil actions against the city they work for. This is why when there is a police shooting in Canada or an allegation of police brutality police from another jurisdiction are brought in to investigate. This is also why when civilian employees of a city are suspected of wrongdoing other police agencies are usually brought in to at least review and offer oversight of the investigation.

As the Military Police Complaints Commission pointed out in 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that when a peace officer is conducting a criminal investigation, that peace officer is to answer to no-one except to the law itself. This is an outright impossibility in the Canadian Armed Forces. Every member of the Canadian Armed Forces is at ALL times subjected to the Code of Service Discipline. There are no exceptions for the base military police, the CFNIS, nor the Provost Marshal.

In fact things are far worse for the base military police and the CFNIS as the National Defence Act allows the Vice Chief of Defence Staff to offer instructions and orders to any MP or CFNIS investigation. As indicated by the Military Police Complaints Commission the Vice Chief of Defence Staff is NOT a peace officer and has no law enforcement training.

Another oddity with the structure of the military police is that the head of the military police, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, directly reports to the Vice Chief of Defence Staff.

Currently the Vice Chief of Defence Staff is a Lieutenant General. The Provost Marshal is a Brigadier General.