So, just sitting down eating a bite for lunch and enjoying a soy cappuccino.
I’m probably going to ride my scoot over to the VCC-Clark skytrain station and take a run out to Value Village in Coquitlam and maybe the one out in Port Coquitlam.
People have asked me repeatedly how I can live without a car.
I say very easily.
I haven’t owned a car since 1998 when I moved downtown.
But even before that, when I did own cars, I usually couldn’t afford to drive them.
I bought a 1977 VW Rabbit when I was 15. This was so that I could get a membership at the base auto club. The car really wasn’t drivable, but it was something that I could learn mechanics on from guys like Bill Parker and Bob Wrightson at the autoclub.
In a way I wish I had never been a member of the autoclub. My brother had a friend named Greg. Greg was younger than me, but much like my brother they were both built larger than me.
I stayed clear of Greg. Avoided him at all costs.
Anyways somehow Greg got it in his head that because I could tinker on cars that I was going to fix his V6 Chevy Nova.
Straight fours is all I had ever worked on at the autoclub. Never had touched an American car, especially not a V-anything. Anways, I was at work on night at Bob Becker’s workshop when my brother, Greg, and a few of their buddies show up. My brother told Greg that I could fix cars, so therefore I was going to fix Greg’s car. The car that showed up with no distributor, no ignition coil, no spark plugs, and no spark plug wires. These were all in a jumble in the trunk of the car.
As could be expected, I couldn’t fix the car.
Greg and his buddies caught up with me at a Plaza on Keele just to the south of the entrance to the base. Fuck did they ever beat the shit out of me. And it wasn’t like it was anywhere near a fair fight. I was maybe 110 lbs tops. There was Greg. Greg had to be about 5″ taller than me and maybe weighed close to 150 to 160 lbs. And the other 3 were about the same size and stature. There was also this older guy, can’t remember his name, but he had to be around 40 or 50 years old.
I remember avoiding home and instead heading over to Billy Donuts on Wilson Ave.
The owner called the cops.
But ratting out on Greg would have been the end of me so I refused to say anything.
I knew that telling Richard would have been an absolute waste of time.
This was pretty well when I started to make sure that no one knew that I had any interests in cars or fixing things.
The first road worthy car that I ever owned was in Edmonton, AB.
I bought that car in August of 1990.
I made a mistake and I quit the job that I had prior to ensuring that the job I was going to was going to work out.
So I ended up on welfare.
A guy in my apartment building noticed that I liked to work on cars so he asked me if I wanted to make some extra money under the table working on cars for his brother. Who could turn down extra money to make ends meet when you’re on welfare. Welfare barely paid the rent at the time, let alone bought goceries.
I worked on a few cars for his brother Adam who owned a used car dealership on the south east side of Edmonton.
There were some sketchy things going on in that shop. So I didn’t stay very long.
It wouldn’t be until sometime in the 2010s that I would find out that in the years after I had involvement with Adam that some skectchy shit really was going down in that shop.
The car that I bought in 1990 was my transport when I decided to leave the welfare rolls in Alberta and try my luck in Vancouver in February of 1992.
I spent so much time on and off living in that car. The best place for car camping at the time was Stanley Park. There were also industrial areas that one could camp out in.
Around the spring of 1993 I couldn’t afford to keep the car any longer so I got rid of it for free with a scrap dealer.
I ended up moving back to Toronto around the fall of 1993. That didn’t work out so well so I ended up back in Vancouver by May of 1994.
I lived down at the Sally Anne until about August of 1994.
From ’94 to ’95 I primarily rode the bus, rode a bicycle, or walked to work from New Westminster to East Richmond.
In 1996 I got my hands on a very good condition 1984 Diesel Rabbit.
Kept that until I moved downtown in 1998.
I’ve owned a few motorcycles through my life, but I’ve only kept them for a few seasons.
Most were used, only one was new of a showroom floor.
That one was written off by a cab driver that ICBC found 100% at fault for the incident.
After getting cut off by that cab driver and seeing how easily someone else could end my life for the sake of beating a green light I realized that motorcycling wasn’t for me.
My greatest fear of getting injured in a motorcycle collision isn’t dying. It’s surviving. Motorcycle helmets really don’t protect the rider when struck by another vehicle. Motorcycle helmets, much like bicycle helmets are meant to protect the rider from incidents involving the motorcycle rider alone.
My father had a friend named Jacques Choquette. One night while Jacques was riding home on his motorcycle Jacques hit a pedestrian. Jacques ended up losing part of his skull and part of his brain. The guy was a fucking psychotic nutcase after the incident. No impulse control. Anger outbursts from nowhere. Seizures. Jacques was the one who tried to strangle me in the basement of the PMQ on CFB Downsview while my father stood to the side chuckling.
That’s what I’m most afraid of. Ending up with brain damage and having to live for 40 or 50 years like a fucking psycho like Jacques.
I bought a motorcycle back in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. I rode it for that first summer. It has sat in the under ground parking lot since.
I wanted to do some modification to it, but my depression told me that I’d get started and never finish the fucking thing off like I never finish anything else off.
So all in all, I’d say that even though I’ve had my driver’s licence since I was 17, I’ve actually only driven a car for maybe 5 years of my life. That’s about 14% of my adult driving life.
Total riding time of motorcycles would be less than 8%.
Riding bicycles would be close to 20%, riding the bus would be another 20%, walking would be almost 46% if not more. I’m probably a little high on the bicycle and the bus.
I think that I can credit my father and his driving skills and his belittling attitude.
Richard could be a complete asshole behind the wheel.
Everyone else on the road was a stupid asshole, a stupid cunt, a fucking idiot, or some fucking goddamn asshole that got their licence from a cracker jack box.
This is why he was forever rear ending other vehicles.
I could never figure out why he would never get his pride and joy fixed after various collisions. But as I would learn later in life, you never wanted to claim against your insurance for any accident that you were at fault for. That’s how the ’83 Mustang GT went from being a showroom new car in 1983 to a wreck with the driver’s seat falling through the floor and needing wood to hold it in place by the time I moved out of the house in 1987.
The collisions I know of from being in the car when they happened were the time he rear-ended a Jaguar over by the Don Valley parkway. Slammed right into the back of the car at an intersection. As usual it was my fault becuase if I hadn’t asked him for a ride to work this would never have happened.
The next time was on Keele Street just before we got back on to base. He rear ended a Metropolitan Toronto Police Service cruiser. And this was back in the day when they were bright white with yellow reflective strips. I didn’t stick around to see who he blamed the collision on. I just walked home.
Richard wasn’t adverse to throttle blips to let the driver infront of him at the lights know that he was displeased with the fact that because they were driving so slow he got caught behind them at the light.
He also had this habit of passing cars as we were coming to intersections and once he passed through the intersection he’d start swearing at the light to change and teach that silly fucker a lesson.
Of course there were also the times that he drove drunk.
He wrote off his 1969 Ford Thunderbird that he had bought with his retention bonus. Wrote that car off around 1975. Wrote it off in the PMQs of Canadian Forces Base Shearwater. That put me in the hospital for stitches.
The next time that he crashed a car due to drinking was after our mother left in 1976 / 77. He had gone to the junior ranks mess on CFB Summerside and was driving back home to our PMQ at 353 High Street in Summerside. Somewhere on the highway he crossed the centre line and clipped an on coming car.
My brother and I were more or less unscathed. But I ended up with a fat lip after the other driver asked my father if he had been drinking and I told the other driver that my father was drink at the bar on base. Guess I wasn’t supposed to rat out the rage fueled alcoholic, was I?
Maybe that’s why I don’t care much for driving. My father’s rage behind the wheel and his alcoholism ruined driving for me.
Also, not having help with my cars in the early days made me realize just exactly how much of a fucking money pit cars are and how one’s paycheque just goes into the endless pit of car culture.
So, as it turns out a coworker and their spouse have discovered my blog, and they’ve been reading it.
We had a little talk on Thursday about the contents of my blog.
Of course they haven’t had the chance to digest the entire blog, so I thought that I would write this post which quickly recaps everything I feel to be of importance.
At the end I’ll recap my reasons for desiring Medical Assistance in Dying.
I was born into a very dysfunctional military family.
My father’s mother had been through Indian Residential school as a child and bore the emotional damage that one could expect. Grandma was a full fledged alcoholic by the time she was in her late teens / early twenties. She had my uncle Norman when she was about 16. She had my father when she was 23. Uncle Norman was full Cree. My father was half Cree half Irish.
My grandmother raised my father and my uncle Doug on her own and she obviously transferred her emotional damage to my father as he was already a very heavy drinker when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at age 17. His academic abilities were nothing to be proud of as his grade 9 math had to be upgraded before he could officially join the navy. His academic skills left a lot to be desired and he was of no help to me with school related topics.
In fact, teachers calling home would often enrage him beyond all reason. To him, school was a daycare centre where children were sent to keep their mouths shut and to stare at the chalkboard.
I was born in 1971. And since the day I was born until age 16 I lived in military housing. 7 PMQs on five different bases in four different provinces by the time I was 12.
My mother left in 1976. She couldn’t take my father’s drinking or physical abuse any longer. Due to the unique nature of military dependents (children and non-serving spouses) living in military housing, my father was able to have the base military police remove my mother from the PMQ and to bar her from contacting my brother and I.
My father brought his alcoholic and emotionally damaged mother into the PMQ to raise my brother and I. She lived with us in the PMQ attached to Canadian Forces Base Summerside from 1976 until the spring of 1978 when she returned to Edmonton, AB. During her time with us on Summerside she put me into Sunday school and we also had involvement with the Knights of Columbus.
In the spring of 1978 my father obtained a compassionate posting from Captain Lynda Tyrell, military social worker for the Atlantic region of the Canadian Forces. The Canadian Forces paid to relocate him to Canadian Forces Base Namao just north of Edmonton, AB. Richard took my brother and I with him from Prince Edward Island to Alberta without sole custody and without the permission of our mother. Doing so is a criminal code offence called “kidnapping”.
The ability of serving members to use the Canadian Forces to transfer them and their children to a different jurisdiction from which the freshly ejected spouse was residing in was documented in a 1996 study commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces titled “Canadian Forces response to Spousal Abuse”.
If it wasn’t for my grandmother calling my mother in the fall of 1978, I don’t think my mother would have known where we ended up moving to.
In August of 1978, Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Father Angus McRae had been posted to Canadian Forces Base Namao from Canadian Forces Station Holberg due to allegations that he had inappropriate relations with a teenage boy on the station.
On CFB Shearwater and CFB Summerside my father was rarely home. He was happy to have his career in the military as it gave him a reason to not be at home raising his children. He could go off on “military exercises”, drink and hang out with the boys and leave a woman at home to raise his kids as raising kids was obviously woman’s work.
In order to do this on CFB Namao he brought his mother into the PMQ to raise my brother and I. Grandma brought her husband Roy William (Andy) Anderson into the PMQ with her. Grandma and Andy lived in the ground floor bedroom.
Much like on CFB Summerside, grandma put me into Sunday School at the base chapel. Grandma would take my brother and I to Sunday service at the chapel. In fact we had our Sunday church clothes that we’d wear, and after church we had to change into our regular clothes before we could go out and play.
Grandma also put me in the Red Cross learn to swim program, the base hockey team for 6 to 8 year olds, the Youth Bowling Council at the base bowling alley, Beavers, and basketball.
My grandmother had a fierce temper and an equally fierce temper. She wasn’t above using sticks or whatever else was at hand to inflict corporal punishment. Her two actual maxims were “Children are to be seen and not heard” and “Children only speak when spoken to”
Towards the winter of 1978 both grandma and Andy had been drinking very heavily in the PMQ. Andy took a shower one night to “sober up”. He slipped in the shower and cracked his skull. Once Andy went into the hospital, he never came out again. And this is what led to my brother and I requiring the babysitting services of one of Captain Father Angus McRae’s altar boys. This altar boy was born in June of 1965 and had the initials of P.S..
P.S. would turn out to be quite a pedophile. He had an intense sexual attraction to children, especially boys. P.S. was late 13 when he started abusing children on Canadian Forces Base Namao. He wouldn’t stop until he was investigated by the base military police in May of 1980.
May of 1980 is the same period of time that the babysitter had been found buggering me in his bedroom with his penis firmly inserted into my rectum. It’s just too unbelievable that I was found being buggered by the babysitter right around the time that the military police, specifically Sgt. Mossman and Sgt. Clark, investigated P.S. due to numerous complaints that the base military police received due to the complaints of “numerous parents” on the base.
P.S. was a very angry teenager. He didn’t have the self restraint and self control that Captain McRae would have. See, Captain McRae would get us intoxicated before he abused us. Captain McRae would also be very careful with what he did so there wasn’t any evidence.
There were times when the babysitter would cause me to have rectal bleeding. All grandma would say when she saw my underwear is that I had to learn how to wipe my ass properly and that I had to stop scratching myself.
As I said, there was no confiding in grandma.
And there was no way I could confide in my father.
Even at 7 and 8 years of age, kids on base knew what queers and fags were. And you knew sure as fuck that you didn’t want it known that you touched another boy’s penis or let another boy touch your penis. And getting fucked by another boy? You were just asking for a beating.
So no, there was no telling my father.
The babysitter wanted every type of sexual pleasure. And if you didn’t perform and pleasure him he’d make his displeasure felt.
The memories of what he did to me, what he made me do to him, what he did to my brother, what he made me do to my brother, what he made my bother do to me, and what he did with the other kids will be with me until the day I die.
As I told Master Corporal Christian Cyr of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service on May 3rd, 2011, there were 5 visits that the babysitter took me to see the father at the base chapel. I don’t remember anything about the visits after the “sickly sweet grape juice”
In the aftermath of CFB Namao, my family was moved off the base and sent down to Canadian Forces Base Griesbach.
At the school on base for the children of military families I started seeing a man named “Terry”. Terry was upset at what I had been doing with the babysitter on CFB Namao. He said that boys who had sex with other boys had a mental illness called “homosexuality”. He said that because of what I let the babysitter do to my brother that I was a sexual pervert. On the days where my father would attend meetings with Terry my father would agree with Terry like Terry had some magical power over my father.
Terry would warn me that he had the base military police watching me and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy that I would be going to psychiatric hospital for treatment.
Terry told my father that it was a good idea to not let me play in sports any longer as I obviously couldn’t control myself around other boys. I know that my father took this to heart as there was a school field trip that he specifically wouldn’t allow me to go on as “there would be naked boys in the change room and that I wouldn’t be able to control myself”.
In the spring of 1982 the relationship between my father and his girlfriend was deteriorating. He told me and my brother that in no uncertain terms that if she left, he’d put our bodies in a duffle bag and that no one would ever find us.
In the summer of 1982 I started going to a “special school” that treated homosexual children. Or so my father and Terry used to say.
In the spring of 1983 my father said that I had been “expelled” from the special school for kissing another boy. When we moved from CFB Griesbach in Edmonton, AB and went to CFB Downsview in North York, ON in April of 1983 I asked my father why we had to move. He said that the counsellors wanted to give me drugs to stop me from liking boys, and that he didn’t want me to take these drugs so in fact he was saving me and that I owed him for that.
When we arrived in Toronto, I hated it. I was big. It was polluted. And going to civilian schools was a nightmare.
When I told my father that I didn’t like Toronto he unleashed on me. Said that the was sick and tired of me fucking with his military career. Said that I cost him dearly.
Over the time on CFB Downsview my father would often lay into me whenever my brother would get into trouble. He’d say that my brother was acting the way he was because I had let / allowed the babysitter to touch my brother, that I wasn’t raising my brother the way that I was supposed to.
I have no doubt in my mind that because of my grandmother’s alcoholism, she’d often get pissed for days and that it would be my father’s responsibility to raise his younger brother Douglas. Out of the two, Doug was the more casual and more laid back. Richard was the anal retentive prick. Doug was grandma’s favourite of the two. Whereas Richard was the more dependable of the two.
In the summer of 1985 while my brother and I were staying in Edmonton with our grandmother over the summer Richard and Sue got into a massive domestic dispute that seemed to revolve around the fact that my father hadn’t divorced my mother until the spring of 1985 even though he had married Sue in a private ceremony in the spring of 1982.
September 1985 was the first birthday that I had had since my mother left in 1976. Richard promised that he would never forget my birthday again. He never acknowledged my birthday after that.
I quit school at the end of grade 8. I only went to school for one month of grade 9.
I left the house when I was 16, not too long after my 16th birthday.
I didn’t know at the time that 6 years prior that I had been diagnosed with major depression, severe anxiety, an intense fear of men, and an intense fear of being touched. I was found that I didn’t have the ability to form friendships. I also couldn’t express my emotions.
All I knew from my father’s constant reminders is that I was a lazy fucking cocksucker who couldn’t get out of bed on time for school. My suicidal ideations were just my attempts to “get attention”. My frequent outbursts of tears were just because I was just a fucking crybaby trying to get attention. Etc, etc, etc.
I didn’t have many conversation with my father after that.
In June of 1990 he called me up and invited me to move back to Edmonton with him on his final posting. He said that he was going to try to make the family work this time. This of course was more bullshit from Richard.
In August of 2006 I had an intense conversation with Richard. He wouldn’t accept any blame for the events leading up to us requiring a babysitter. In fact, he blamed his mother for hiring the babysitter even though he claimed he told grandma not to hire the babysitter. I told Richard of my plans to press charges against the babysitter as I was sick and tired of being blamed for what the babysitter did to my brother. Richard warned me about doing that. He said if I went sticking my nose into that I might not like the smell of the shit.
After this I started changing.
Not coming out of the closet, but not afraid to try to figure out what I was. This is the period of time that I started wearing dresses and playing with makeup.
This is also when I legally changed my name to Bobbie Garnet Bees.
I don’t think Richard reacted too well to me changing my name. I did write him a letter explaining why I legally changed my name. But I think it was the fact that I wasn’t sure of my gender or my orientation at the time that caused him to break off all communications with me. After this he would never answer my calls again and my letters to him were always sent back “RTS”.
In 2010 I left the hospital to go work for a private employer. This didn’t last too long as there were massive fights and disagreements going on at the shareholder level. One faction of shareholders decided to fire everyone at the business. I took these shareholders to the Supreme Court of BC and just before a trial date was to be booked, their lawyer called me and offered to settle out of court.
Due to this I decided that enough was enough, that I was going to go after the babysitter.
I emailed the Edmonton Police Service and gave them a brief explanation of what happened and what I wanted to do. From certified tribunal records I would learn that the Edmonton Police Service contacted the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team. ASIRT contacted the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service. And the Master Warrant Officer Terry Eisenmenger told Warrant Officer Blair Hart to explain to the Edmonton Police Service that “at the time of the offences, the RCMP would have had the jurisdiction for this investigation, but that the CFNIS were going to take this investigation”. MWO Eisenmenger then instructed WO Hart to check with the RCMP to see if I had ever tried to report this matter to them.
I was contacted on March 5th, 2011 by Petty Officer Steve Morris from the CFNIS Western Region. He told me that the military police were going to investigate this matter. I asked him what had changed as when I tried to report this to the military police in 1984 and 1990 I was told that this was a matter for the civilian police. PO Morris gave me a brief description of how the CFNIS came to be. Of course he left out the whole matter of the troubled missions in both Bosnia and Somalia and how the CFSIU were found to be utterly useless due to direct exposure to manipulation by the chain of command.
One of the first things that the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service did in March of 2011 was to request the investigation paperwork from the Canadian Forces Special Investigation Unit investigation into the matter of Captain Father Angus McRae in 1980 along with the Courts Martial transcripts from Captain Father Angus McRae’s courts martial which ran from July 15th to July 18th, 1980.
The fact that the CFNIS in March of 2011 knew to request CFSIU DS 120-10-80 and the transcripts from Courts Martial CM62 indicates that the CFNIS in 2011 knew what this investigation was all about even before my statement was taken on Thursday March 31st, 2011 at VPD headquarters by master corporal Robert Jon Hancock on the CFNIS Western Region.
I have no doubt in my mind that I am not the first person from CFB Namao to go after the babysitter, and as such I have no doubt in my mind that the CFNIS have experience with the babysitter and his relationship as Captain McRae’s accomplice.
In fact, with the sheer number of victims that the babysitter abused along with the sheer number of children that the babysitter escorted over to the chapel to be abused by Captain McRae I have no doubt in my mind that the ghosts from the babysitter’s past keep coming back to haunt him and are probably what drove him to attempt suicide in the year 2000.
I March of 2001, due to his suicide attempt, the babysitter launched a civil action against the Minister of National Defence. The Minister of National Defence, the Canadian Armed Forces, and the Archdiocese of Edmonton settled with the babysitter in November of 2008. The settlement cheque was disbursed to the babysitter in December of 2008.
I also have no doubt that the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal are well aware of the babysitter’s civil claim and subsequent out of court settlement with the Canadian Armed Forces.
As such, I have no doubt that the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, and the Vice Chief of Defence Staff all have specific protocols and procedures in place for dealing with complaints against the babysitter.
Due to very odd and unique language in the National Defence Act, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff has the authority to issue directives to any CFNIS investigation. As the Military Police Complaints Commission has indicated in the past, the VCDS has no legal training, no legal background, and is very political in nature only being one or two steps removed from the Minister of National Defence who is a political appointee.
Why else would the CFNIS in March of 2011 request CFSIU DS 120-10-80 and the Courts Martial transcripts from the archives?
As I was told by Sgt. Damon Tenaschuk in 2017, it was odd that this paperwork still existed. Paperwork like this is usually destroyed seven years after it was created, unless it was used periodically. This paperwork should have been destroyed in 1987. But it has obviously been frequently used since 1987.
My interview with Mcpl Hancock was interesting. It was the first time that I had told anyone outside of my father and “Terry” of the abuse and what had happened on CFB Namao.
Everything in the interview was going okay until towards then end when Mcpl Hancock kept asking me if there was anything else I wanted to talk about, anything at all, was there anything that I wasn’t telling him about from CFB Namao.
What Mcpl Hancock didn’t share with me at this time was that he already read the CFSIU investigation paperwork and that he already knew what the babysitter had done.
On May 3rd, 2011 I was contacted by Mcpl Christian Cyr. I don’t know why Cyr had bothered to contact me. And in many ways it probably would have been much better of he didn’t. But Cyr has a problem. He is one of those types of guys that once he knew a secret, he has to gloat to others about his secret.
Cyr called me and left a voice mail message for me to call him back, so I returned his call. Cyr, being the braggart that he was, blurted out two pieces of information that would prove that he had seen the CFSIU paperwork from 1980 and that he had seen the Courts Martial transcripts.
He first tried telling me that when the babysitter was found buggering me in the spring of 1980, that the babysitter was only 12 or 13 years of age. Next Cyr asked me if I knew anything about the base chaplain being charged with molesting children during the same period of time that I was accusing the babysitter of abusing me.
The problem with the date of birth, and this was confirmed by the Military Police Complaints Commission in the November 2020 final report, is that the speculation of the babysitter’s age only exists in the CFSIU paperwork from 1980. The babysitter was in fact born on June 20th, 1965. The was the D.O.B. given to me my the RCMP in August of 2012. This D.O.B. was also confirmed by two newspaper articles involving the babysitter in his adult years.
Why did this error in the babysitter’s age exist at all? It seemed to stem from the CFSIU investigation back in 1980 as a way to block the RCMP from being called on base to deal with the babsitter. If the babysitter was under 14, then it wasn’t much use calling the police in as the Juvenile Delinquents Act really didn’t call for any type of punishment for offenders under 14.
But at the time, the Canadian Forces had to be aware of the babysitter’s true age as the Canadian Forces couldn’t conduct a service tribunal for sexual assaults where consent wasn’t a possibility. In 1980 the age of consent was 14.
And the Military Police Complaints Commission in November of 2020 confirmed that the CFNIS had done CPIC checks of the babysitter and that these CPIC checks had the correct date and age of the babysitter. Again, the MPCC noted that this error in age existed only in the CFSIU paperwork and no where else. Meaning that Mcpl Cyr had read the investigation paperwork from 1980 and already knew what the babysitter had done.
Because of my interaction with Cyr, I was able to do a Google search for “CFB Namao Molesting Priest”. This is how I discovered the whole sordid history of what happened on that base and how even back in 1980 the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence “threw a veil of secrecy” over all aspect of the courts martial. The Canadian Forces in 1980 didn’t want the Canadian public to know that children on bases weren’t safe from the pedophilic children of other service members or predator priests, especially not seeing as how these priests were members of the regular force and held the rank of Captain.
Because of my interaction with WO Hart on July 18th, 2011 and his insistence that my case wasn’t going anywhere due to a complete lack of believable evidence I decided to track down my records for that “special school” that I went to for treatment of my homosexuality.
Was I ever in for a very rude awakening.
There was no program for homosexual children. I was in a program for emotionally disturbed children.
But even more shocking than that was who “Terry” was and why my ball-less wonder of a father hung from every word that Terry said. Terry was Captain Terry Totzke, military social worker with Canadian Forces Western Command. My ball-less wonder of a father would have had to pay attention to every thing that Terry had to say of he wanted to keep his career in the Canadian Forces.
Terry, seeing as how he knew about the babysitter, and that he knew about Captain McRae, was obviously working on blaming me for what had happened to me and my brother on CFB Namao with the goal of having me forever keep my mouth shut about the abuse.
Other interesting things I learnt from my social service paperwork.
My brother and I had both been brought to the attention of Captain Totzke due to our bizarre behaviour when we started to attend school once we moved from CFB Namao in October of 1980.
I was sent for psychological testing and I was found to:
be suffering from major depression
be suffering from severe anxiety
be terrified of men
was extremely terrified of being touched.
was convinced that my father was going to drown me in the toilet
My father was found to:
Not take responsibility for the family
Blamed others for problems with his family
Blamed his son’s emotional problems on his alcoholic mother who was cruel to his children, especially when she was inebriated, which was frequently.
claimed that he had sole custody of his children.
The expulsion? Nope, I wasn’t expelled. Captain Terry Tozke was warned by Albertya Social Services that I was supposed to be removed from my home and placed into foster care or residential care as a means of persuading my father to participate in the family counselling as they were beinging to form the opinion that my issues were all related to major dysfunction in the household that was due to known issues with my father. I was pulled out of the Westfield program days after this meeting.
The surprise move to Ontario from Alberta was no doubt due to the desire of Captain Totzke and my father to get me out of the jursidiction of Alberta Social Services.
According to my social service paperwork, I was supposed to have been instutionalized in a psychiatric facility for children both in Alberta and then in Ontario. Captain Totzke, Captain Tyrell, and my father never followed through with any psychiatric treatment.
If I was so emotionally disturbed as a result of the 1-1/2 years of sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao, why were Totzke and my father so against me receiving treatment?
Secrets.
As long as I lived at home with my father, Totzke had direct control over me. If he wanted me to believe that I was the author of my own misfortune on CFB Namao, then so be it. If he wanted to cement this belief any harder, then he could just make sure that I understood that I was to blame for what happened to my brother.
If I was removed from the home, then Totzke would lose his control over me. And whoever it was up the chain of command that decided that CFB Namao was to remain a secret would not have been happy. I guess that the reasoning was that if I was taken out of my father’s care that I would start talking about CFB Namao and then the civilian authorities might start sticking their nose into the military’s business.
My father also had his own reasons for not wanting me placed in foster care or residential care. He lied to Alberta Social Services when he said that he had been awared sole custody of my brother and I. In 2013 the PEI government revealed that Richard only made an application for custody, but never follow through. He was never awared sole custody by any legal authority in Canada. He committed parental kidnapping. If the courts found out about this, Richard would have been looking at not only the loss of his kids, but also the loss of his military career, and possible jail time, and the very real possibility of monthly child support payments.
The CFNIS investigation was ended on November 4th 2011 when PO Steve Morris contacted me and said that the CFNIS couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that the babysitter was capable of what I accused him of.
On November 27th, 2011, after a plea in the Facebook groups for former military dependents I contacted a man named Fred Cunningham whom lived in St. Albert, AB.
Fred had a lot to say about the 1980 investigation into Captain McRae. He said that the investigation was started because of P.S.’s molestation of numerous young children on the base. I asked Fred how old the babysitter was in 1980. Fred said that he was certain that the babysitter turned 15 just before Captain McRae’s court martial in July of 1980.
Fred stated that the military police tried to have the matter moved to civilian court seeing as how the majority of children were under the age of 14. According to Fred, the “brass” intentionally dismissed all of the charges brought against captain McRae for any child under the age of 14. P.S. was the only child over the age of 14. This meant that Captain McRae’s accomplice was officially recognized by the Canadian Armed Forces as Captain McRae’s only victim. The rest of us were thrown under the bus.
Fred said that when the charges for the other children were dropped one boy in particular became enraged and swore that P.S. had stabbed him in the back. Fred said that this boy, who was also named Fred was a prolific pyromanic who had set numerous fires on the base. I asked Fred if he was insinuating that the young Fred had any responsibility for the fire at the babysitter’s PMQ which caused $56k in 1980 dollars worth of damage and resulted in the death of a civilian gas fitter. Fred said that he was going to refuse to answer that.
Fred did confirm to me the fire that occured in PMQ #26 on June 23rd, 1980 and that this fire did in fact result in the death of a person, but he wouldn’t say who this person was.
I submitted two FOIs to DND for fire information related to addresses that the Namao telephone book indicated that this boy’s family resided in on CFB Namao. Both of these FOIs came back and indicated that this boy was in fact a known pyromanic and had set the fires that had occured at this family’s PMQs. That he had a tendency to light fires and then “play the hero” after “discovering” the fire. One of the fire marshal reports indicate that Fred A. and P.S. were friends and that they had been playing together prior to one of the fires at F.A.’s house. The fire marshal report also indicated that F.A. was currently not in school as he was in the process of being sent to an institution for treatment related to his pyromania.
Fred also said that the military police did everything in their power to try to bring the RCMP in to deal with the babysitter, but that the brass wasn’t going for it.
Fred implored me to keep this information to myself as he wasn’t legally allowed to discuss this. He wouldn’t tell me what he meant. I would later learn that the Official Secrets Act / the Security of Information Act makes it an offence for anyone who was ever subject to the Code of Service Discipline to discuss ANY information that they had learned of while they were on a defence establishment. Basically anyone who was ever a member of the Canadian Armed Forces is barred from talking about anything they were involved in while they were on a base. This would easily apply to members of the military police or the CFSIU for any investigation that they were involved in while on a base.
As I would learn later on, there were two flaws in the pre-1998 National Defence Act that allowed the Canadian Armed Forces to hide and bury not only the events of CFB Namao but quite honestly.
The first and most horrific flaw that was removed from the National Defence Act in 1998 was the Summary Investigation Flaw.
In the military justice system at the time there was no such thing as a “prosecutor”. After an investigation the CFSIU would lay charges directly against the alleged offender. The charges were then forwarded to the commanding officer of the accused. The commanding officer would then review the charges and either cause them to proceed to summary investigation, to a court martial, to a civilian tribunal, or the commanding officer could dismiss any or all of the charges.
The Canadian Armed Forces confirmed that captain father Angus McRae’s commanding officer was the base commander of Canadian Forces Base Namao, colonel Daniel Edward Munro. Daniel Edward Munro is a retiree living in Victoria, BC. He retired from the Canadian Forces a Brigadier General.
As the base commander of CFB Namao, Munro would have had direct control over the base military police and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit Western Region detachment.
I contacted Mr. Munro in 2016. Oddly he didn’t want to discuss anything about CFB Namao. I should also point out that it was Munro’s decision to not call in the provincial fire marshal to review the fire at P.S.’s PMQ.
After my telephone call with Mr. Cunningham I wrote a letter to the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal and discussed what I had been told by Mr. Cunningham. This letter was sent in the last two weeks of December 2011.
In January of 2012 I received a telephone call from lieutenant colonel Gilles Sansterre. Sansterre was the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal at the time. He told me that I couldn’t believe anything that this “Fred Cunningham” person had told me. The military couldn’t find any records of Cunningham. Sansterre said that maybe this “Cunningham guy” was giving me information that he had heard second or third hand.
I would learn in 2017 that Fred Cunningham was warrant officer Fredrick R. Cunningham. WO Cunningham was the Acting Section Commander of the CFSIU at the time and had been personally tasked by the base security officer, captain David Pilling with investigating captain father Angus McRae for having committed acts of homosexuality with young boys on the base. WO Cunningham was also the prosecution’s main witness against captain McRae.
And, more importantly, everything Mr. Cunningham had told me was backed up in the CFSIU paperwork. The very same paperwork that the CFNIS had in 2011.
In 2012 I filed a complaint with the Military Police Complaints Commission. This review went nowhere as reviews are extremely limited and in my matter the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal willing and intentionally withheld information from the Military Police Complaints Commission. The Provost Marshal hid the existence of CFSIU DS 120-10-80 and the court martial transcripts from the Military Police Complaints Commission. These were two very important documents as in CFSIU DS 120-10-80 is the babysitter’s statement to the military police in which he admitted to molesting numerous children on the base and in the court martial transcripts captain McRae’s defence counsel is using the babysitter pedophilia and current psychological treatment for being sexually attracted to young children to discredit his testimony against captain McRae.
Even when submitting the CFNIS brief to Alberta Crown Prosecutor Jon Werbicki in October of 2011, master corporal Robert Jon Hancock failed to disclose to the crown that P.S. had already been investigated by the military police for sexually abusing young children on the base and that the colonel Daniel Edward Munro had prevented the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from being brought in to deal with the babysitter.
I wonder if former Alberta Chief Crown prosecutor Orest Yeriniuk realizes that the Canadian Armed Forces intentionally withheld information from him and made him look like an absolute fool. I wonder if Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki realizes that he was played like a cheap violin.
Giving fucked up briefs to the provincial crowns in nothing new. This was a tactic that the CFSIU employed. Give the crown such a fucked up and useless brief that only a moron would allow charges to be proceeded with. This allows the military police to state that “they thought for sure they had enough evidence” while at the same time blaming the provincial Crown knowing that the victims would almost never be allowed to see the communications between the military police and the crown.
I know exactly what the CFNIS sent to the Crown and I know what the Crown’s replies were back to the CFNIS. Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki said that what I had endured on Canadian Forces Base Namao was nothing more than childhood curiosity and experimentation and that it was very suspicious that I never told anyone about the abuse.
Yeah, it seems that the CFNIS excised a lot of information to the Alberta Crown.:
They removed any mention of my grandmother living on base raising my brother and I.
They removed any mention of military social worker Captain Terry Totzke and the conversion therapy that I had been receiving as a result of my sexual activities with the babysitter and McRae.
They didn’t tell the Alberta Crown that the psychologist hired by the Canadian Forces in 1980 found that my father had a severe issue with personal responsibility and would often tell people he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought that they wanted to hear.
The CFNIS failed to disclose to the Alberta Crown that Alberta Social Services was of the opinion that my father frequently lied, or as they politely said “Mr. Gill has a tendency to tell conflicting stories from one meeting to the next”
They didn’t disclose to the Crown that my father described my grandmother a heavy alcoholic who refused to admit to her problems and that my father described her as being very cruel to his children.
They didn’t tell the Alberta Crown that the babysitter had been investigated in 1980 for having molested numerous children on the base.
They didn’t tell the Alberta Crown about the babysitter’s predilection for young prepubescent children.
They didn’t tell the Alberta Crown that the babysitter was receiving psychiatric treatment at the time for his attraction to children.
The CFNIS didn’t disclose to the Alberta Crown that when P.S. was contacted by CFNIS investigator mcpl Robert Jon Hancock in August of 2011 that P.S. told Hancock that “anything he had been involved in as a youth has already been handled by the military and that if charges were brought against him a lawyer would handle that”. Does this allude to Munro’s decision to not allow the babysitter to be handed over to the RCMP in 1980, or does this allude to the terms of the out of court settlement agreed to between P.S. and the DOJ, the DND, and the CAF in November of 2008.
The CFNIS got the response they wanted from the Crown. No charges.
My father died in 2017.
Believe me, the world is a better place without that asshole.
But the sad thing is, he’ll never have to apologize for what he did.
It was his alcoholism and anger that caused my mother to be ejected from the PMQ.
It was his inability to take responsibility for his family that allowed his children to be cared for by his alcoholic and emotionally damaged mother.
It was my father’s fault that grandma was anywhere near us.
It was ultimately my father’s fault that my brother and I ended up with a pedophile babysitter for 1-1/2 years.
I hope that you can understand why I want Medical Assitance in Dying.
I’m not giving up.
I’m not letting the DND or the CAF “win”.
There is no winning in this matter.
The DND and the CAF are completely untouchable.
Nobody of any consequence will ever have to apologize.
There is nothing that anyone can do to erase the trauma that I suffered through, not only at the hands of the babysitter and captain McRae, but also at the hands of my own father and the hands of captain Terry Totzke.
Nothing will ever undo the fact that the CFNIS in 2011 and 2015 to 2018 did everything in their power to gas light me and to portray me as a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military” or someone with money troubles who frequently jumped from one job to another.
Even during a face to face meeting with then Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan, he accused me of being a scammer trying to scam the Canadian Forces for easy money.
Nothing will ever erase the 40+ years that I’ve suffered with severe mental illnesses gifted to me by P.S., captain McRae, captain Totzke, colonel Dan E. Munro, and the whole host of other members of the Canadian Forces that wanted the events of CFB Namao to stay a secret dead and buried in the past.
Medical Assistance in Dying is something that I want.
Even just thinking about my death and being put to sleep fills me with a serene peace and tranquility.
No matter what people wish, there is no way that I can ever get over the betrayal, the pain, the suffering.
And I refuse to live with the damage from horrific chain of command decision both from 1980 and from the present day.
Four simple medications:
Midazolam
Propofol
Rocuronium
Bupivacaine
And all the suffering, misery, and torment are gone forever.
My life will forever be full of regret until the day I die. Regret for things that were denied to me, regret for things that I was not allowed to do.
One of the hard things about putting these videos together is I’m so fucking numb to what happened, how it was dealt with or more importantly how it wasn’t dealt with that it no longer really means anything to me.
But still I need to talk about it because this was such a major part of my life during my formative years and it had such a profound impact on who I am.
This isn’t a track and field meet that I lost. This isn’t a goal that I didn’t score in an overtime period in junior hockey. This shit destroyed my world.
Anyways, I’ll have a new video by tomorrow, I’ve had a couple of things swimming around inside of my skull.
One of my curses if you will is that I seem “so normal”. Facial piercings and tattoos aside. This was especially truer back in my teens and twenties when I really had to appear “normal” in order to gain and keep employment.
I have never once in my life stuck a needle in my arm nor have I ever snorted anything up my nose. I don’t even like weed.
I can honestly remember the handful of times that I did drink. And not surprising these events often went way out of control. I honestly believe that alcoholism is genetic. My grandmother was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And I more than like was destined to be an alcoholic.
Outside of the wine that I had been given in the rectory of the chapel on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and outside of the occasional sips of Baby Duck or my father’s rum & coke mixes, the first time I had alcohol as a kid was in the summer of 1984 when I was staying with my grandmother over the summer. Grandma and her friend Hazel were drinking. Grandma asked me to get her and Hazel another beer each out of the fridge. I took two beers out and popped the caps off. I sucked the foam off the top like I would always do when getting grandma a beer. This time though she told me to get her another beer out of the fridge, and this time I wasn’t to drink any of it. So I got her the beer, I popped the cap off, and I let the foam run down the side of the bottle. I put the bottle on the table in front of grandma. Grandma slid the other bottle over towards an empty chair and told me to sit down and drink my beer. This was cool I thought. I’m drinking beer with my grandmother. What twelve year old boy doesn’t want to hang out with his sixty-one-year-old grandmother and get drunk with her. I finished two bottles and then it was time for me to go pass out in the bedroom.
I didn’t drink again until I was about 15. I know “drink again” isn’t something you want to hear somebody brag about when discussing their childhood, but in my household, the fact that I wasn’t a raging alcoholic by the time I was 18 was a miracle.
Bob Becker, a man that I was working for on the weekends at the time, had given me a small bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label to give to my father as a present. When I got home my father took one look at the bottle and said that he wouldn’t drink that horrid piss. Richard was a Lamb’s Navy and a Pilsner kind of guy. Anyways, Richard told me to put the bottle on a shelf in my bedroom and that he didn’t want to see me drink it until I was 19.
A friend from cadets happened to be over at my house for lunch one school day. We went downstairs to my bedroom. He spied the bottle. He saw my father’s shot glasses over by my father’s computer desk. Peter grabbed a pair of shot glasses and challenged me to drink more shots than he did before we returned to school. After about four shots each I grabbed the bottle from Peter’s hand and chugged it until it was empty. I don’t remember how long I stayed upright for. But I woke up the next day on the floor of my bedroom laying in a copious puddle of vomit.
My bedroom in the basement didn’t have a door. Richard said that military housing rules didn’t allow bedrooms in the basement and the military housing authority agreed that as long as there was no door on the bedroom that it wouldn’t be considered a bedroom. But I don’t think this was the housing rules were the true reason. My bedroom door was off for most of the time on CFB Griesbach, and the door was off for most of the time that I lived in the upstairs bedroom on CFB Downsview before giving my bedroom over to Sue’s son in early 1986.
Richard’s computer workstation where he played with his computers, sometimes until 02:30, had a view right into my bedroom. So there was absolutely no way that Richard didn’t see me laying on the floor with all that vomit and the bottle of Johnny Walker laying beside me.
All I got from Richard was a warning that he was going to start locking up his rum in his desk and that if his rum ever went missing that he was going to make sure that I knew there was a price to be paid.
The next time I had a drink of alcohol was in the spring of 1990 when I was on the road with Canshare Cabling. Michael and I had stopped at a hotel in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This was the first time that I had ever joined Michael for dinner. We had both stopped at the bank earlier in the day and I had pulled out about $300.00 for the week. Mike invited me to the bar at the hotel after. He encouraged me to keep up with him. I was 18 at the time but no one asked me for I.D. as I honestly looked like I was in my early 30s with my moustache and the grey hair that was peppered though my hair. I remember making it back to the hotel room that we were sharing. As soon as I laid down on the bed to room started spinning. No matter how tightly I gripped the mattress the room would just start spinning. And once it started spinning it wouldn’t stop. I spent the night going between the bed and the bathroom throwing up. I vowed to never drink again after that.
The next time I would ever go drinking was in August of 2005. I had just gotten my new job at St. Paul’s. And to reward me for the previous 5 years of employment, the Board of Directors with Equitable agreed to allow me to celebrate at the Lion’s Pub with some coworkers from Equitable and some other workers that I had previously worked with at a previous employer. We ran up a tab of about $3k for I think 8 people, most of it was for steaks and other foods. I’m also sure that other engineers from other buildings started showing up too. I didn’t get pissed drunk this time, but still I knew that something was wrong as the depression started to get out of control. I spent most of the evening crying to Harry about what had happened on CFB Namao. This was the first time that I had ever, and I mean ever, talked to anyone about this. This was supposed to be a happy day for me and it turned into a disaster.
I wouldn’t drink again until I took a short leave in 2010 from work to go to a job in Surrey. At my going away party a bunch of the boys from the plant took me out for drinks. I only had a glass or two. No problem this time.
On July 18th, 2011 I had gone downtown to pick up a MIDI cable for my new Yamaha keyboard that I had at the time. I figured that with the CFNIS finally going to hold P.S. responsible for what he had done all those years ago, I was going to start trying to learn some of the things my father had denied to me as punishment for my involvement with P.S.. I missed the Tom Lee store by about 20 minutes. On my way home I stopped at a bar. This was a bar that I had gone to a couple of times recently with the chief engineer and the steam fitter from work. They’d have beer and I’d drink Ice Tea. So, I was gonna grab an ice tea and maybe an order of fish and chips before heading home. As I was sitting there I started to realize that I hadn’t heard any case updates from the CFNIS lately and I was curious. So I called the case manager. We had a couple of back and forth calls. Basically his response to me was that he had been transferred and wasn’t really involved with my case anyways anymore. But he also said that the CFNIS couldn’t find anything about P.S. that would indicate that P.S. had ever been suspected of abusing children. (Remember, at this point in time the Canadian Forces had the court martial transcripts which indicated that P.S. was the star witness against Captain McRae and that Captain McRae’s defence counsel was trying to discredit P.S. because the military police knew in 1980 that P.S. had been sexually assaulting younger children on the base).
I ordered a beer to calm my nerves. But here’s the thing. When you suffer from major depression and severe anxiety, and alcoholism runs in your family, alcohol doesn’t calm you down. It just drives you further down into maddening depression.
I had a few more drinks. And because I didn’t really drink at the time, 3 or 4 beers would hit me a lot harder than let’s say someone who had been drinking a beer a day for 10 years. I think I had about 6 beers, each one driving me down deeper into despair.
I called the CFNIS case manager back and asked him what the point of living was if assholes like P.S. don’t get held responsible for what they’ve done in life. Again he started off with the “Mr. Bees, we can’t find any evidence against P.S.”. So I said fine, fuck it, I was going to go home and kill myself. How he asked. I said either jump out the window or slice my femoral arteries. After I got off the phone with him I realized that I was too drunk, and that I was now very depressed and angry. I also realized that I was probably going to hurt myself if I went home. I decided to go get checked out at a safe place. Work. I went in and started talking to the staff in the Emergency Dept at St. Paul’s. As I was in there, the CFNIS case manager called me back and asked me where I was. I told him I was at St. Paul’s and that I was going to get myself checked out. Fine, sure, okay. So I got admitted to the psych unit for observation.
I had a talk with a psychiatrist the next morning. I explained to him what had transpired between me and the CFNIS case manager. I explained to him what had happened on CFB Namao almost 30 years previous. He said that it was understandable that I had the reaction that I did. He asked me if I had ever wanted to harm myself previously, I told him that I had, but that I was never able to act upon it. He asked me if I still wanted to harm myself. I looked at him and said no.
So he released me that morning. Basically told me that with what had transpired 30 years previously and the previous evening that my reaction was to be expected. His discharge summary said “Adjustment Disorder with depressed mood”. It also listed “Alcohol Intoxication” as the pre-admission diagnoses. In his summary the psychiatrist mentioned that the police showed up after I had self-admitted. This is important as the CFNIS case manager in his account of the evening indicated that he literally saved my life by putting out an alert to the VPD and that the VPD had picked me up and brought me in to the hospital.
When I was released from the Comox unit I was setting in the waiting area. One of the porters came over and sat down beside me. He said ” So I see you spent the night”. I replied “Yep”. He said ” Don’t worry, you’d be surprised at how many staff members have actually spent a day or two in the psychiatric units”.
I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since then. That’s ten years and two months. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t require a stint in A-A to quit. I think the fact that I drank so infrequently had a lot to do with this. Wasn’t hooked on the stuff so quitting something that I wasn’t addicted to was very easy.
Which brings me to the million dollar question.
WHY?
WHY AM I NOT AN ADDICT?
A counsellor that I was seeing in 2011 agreed with me that it was very surprising that I wasn’t an addict pushing a shopping cart up and down the alleys collecting cans to feed my drug habits considering my history of neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, and the fact that alcoholism is so prominent in my family.
As mentioned at the start of this entry I’ve never done heroin, I’ve never done coke, crack, meth, crystal meth, LSD, Special K, or any of the other multitude of drugs. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t eat mushrooms. I can’t stand prescription pain killers. And I can remember each and every time that I’ve had alcohol.
My childhood, all of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse, my untreated mental illnesses, these all should have put me on the streets.
When I first arrived in Vancouver back in 1992 I spent time living at some of the rooming houses in the DTES. I spent time staying at the Catholic Charities Hostel for Men on Cambie Street. I was in the prime habitat for starting a drug infused spiral into oblivion.
But I didn’t.
Even when my anxiety and my depression would keep me from sleeping and I’d wake up with horrific night terrors, I never once felt the need to self medicate.
And let’s face it. Not being an addict is a double edge sword.
On one hand I’ve had a clean life.
But on the other hand medical and psychiatric professionals are very doubtful of my stories when I tell them about my past because research shows that a high percentage of drug addicts were sexually abused as children and came from dysfunctional homes as children and had substance abuse problems in their genetic lineage.
And yet here I am, the only needle marks I have are from my tattoos or piercings.
So, did I really suffer that abuse?
And that’s when the self doubt sets in.
Maybe I wasn’t sexually abused for 1-1/2 years by P.S.
Maybe I was given wine in the rectory at the chapel because Captain McRae was a really nice guy and he just wanted me to enjoy a cup of wine.
Maybe I misunderstood Captain Totzke when he told me that I was a homosexual.
Maybe Richard really wasn’t that abusive, maybe he was a fun loving parent that spent every waking moment doting on his children, and maybe social services in three different provinces were really just good for nothing do-gooders that liked to stick their noses into other people’s business.
And you can see how the self doubt can start to be just as bad as the major depression and the severe anxiety.
Is there something special in my brain that makes me resilient to drug addiction or even the desire to try drugs?
That I don’t know.
Was it my exposure to my father’s alcoholism and my grandmother’s alcoholism that made me generally steer away from alcohol and illicit drugs?
I don’t know.
Was it my father’s abusive behaviour and rage anger that scared me away from ever taking drugs?
I don’t know. I really don’t.
But what I do know is that if anyone wants to study my brain to see what’s up, it’s available. At the moment it’s attached to a set of vocal cords and a pair of lungs and it can answer any questions you have. You’re even welcome to do fMRIs on it.
And if I do proceed with M.A.i.D. it’s yours to pop out of my skull and slice up and pickle with formalin and study to your little heart’s content.
Maybe my brain will help understand why some people from traumatic backgrounds never go on to have drug dependencies and why others who have had less traumatic experiences turn to drugs without a second thought.
In this post I will briefly touch on some of the issues that I’m facing and why I am pursuing some of the paths that I am pursuing.
I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted this blog to go when I started it.
I envisioned this blog ( beeshive.ca ) as being separate from ( cfbnamao.ca ). And it will be.
My other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is more about the trauma and abuse I went through as a child living on a Canadian Armed Forces base that was gripped by the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal that the Canadian Armed Forces buried out of fear of the public humiliation that would have resulted had the Canadian public found out that an officer of the regular force had sexually abused children on a secure defence establishment for just short of two years.
The other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is also where I go through the flaws in the National Defence Act which allow DND to hide and bury pre-1998 incidents of child sexual abuse.
This blog is intended to deal with the day to day or week to week goings on in my life.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to post in this blog or how personal I wanted to get.
There are things I will talk about on this blog, and there are things I won’t talk about on this blog. The ones I won’t talk about are more to do with how boring they actually are.
I’ve been told by one of my counsellors before that I should write a book about my life. The problem is that I’m not a writer. I can type, and I can write blogs. So I figured that I would at least get my story out. It will be in blog form, and it will probably jump around from topic to topic a lot. Sure, I won’t make any money from this, but at least it gets my story out and allows me to tell my side of things.
Some of the issues that I write about will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. And that’s fine. It’s been a really weird life, and I’ve got a lot of issues and a lot of demons.
For a brief refresher, I was a military dependent as a child. My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces. I lived on military bases in military housing from birth until age 16. My father was an alcoholic with anger issues, he had depression and he also suffered no doubt from PTSD due to a naval incident that happened in 1969. He self medicated with alcohol and was quick to anger. Everyone minded their own business in the military housing on base and lots of people, including the military police would just turn a blind eye. My mother left when I was 5. She couldn’t take my father’s drinking or physical abuse. My father brought his own mother, a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools, into the house to raise my brother and I as my father was frequently absent. It is because of my grandmother’s heavy drinking that my younger brother and I ended up being sexually abused by the base chaplain and his 14 year old altar boy for just over 1-1/2 years. In the fallout of the CFB Namao scandal, I spent 2-1/2 years in the care of the military social worker receiving conversion therapy. A couple of years later, I would end up being sexually abused by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces who was working as a commissionaire at the armouries where I was in cadets. There’s a lot more dysfunction in my life, but that’s a basic run down.
In 2011 I obtained my foster care records, which I never knew existed. Turns out that in the aftermath of the CFB Namao matter, I was so depressed, so anxious, and so emotionally disturbed that I was supposed to have been institutionalized. That never happened though because the Canadian Forces needed to keep the Captain McRae matter under the rug and out of the public eye. In fact, my father was posted out of the jurisdiction of Alberta in order to ensure that I was taken out of the jurisdiction of Alberta Social Services so that my apprehension would never occur.
So, I suffered with diagnosed but untreated mental illness for 42 years.
Mental illness that various doctors were noting was getting more and more out of hand.
And for the most part I think I got everything “under control” and “hidden”. You learn quickly in life how to hide mental illness and depression and anxiety.
Things have popped up in the past, but you can only keep the lid on a boiling pot for so long before the roiling bubbles lift the lid.
I’ve had an interesting career trajectory.
Most employers that I’ve work for hired me because they could see that I was very technically skilled and that I had a very obvious ability to deal with technical issues. But, the one thing that most employers had remarked is that I lacked the personal skills required for advancement.
In 2011, after the Canadian Forces military police let slip to me that my babysitter had been involved with the base chaplain and that the base chaplain had been kicked out of the military for molesting children, I started to see a counsellor.
I started going over my history with this counsellor. I started discussing all of the paperwork I had uncovered. All of my personal records that I had found. The lawsuit between my babysitter and the Minister of National Defence in 2001. The out of court settlement in November of 2008.
My counsellor said to me that I reminded him of a character in a series of books that he had read, and he wanted to know if I had ever heard about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I had actually. I had already read the books and had already seen the films. My counsellor said that the parallels between my life and the life of Lisbeth Salander were remarkable. We were both very damaged people, but we were both very smart, very tech savvy, and able to put the puzzle pieces together.
And yeah, that’s pretty true. I have no interpersonal skills. I can relate with people on technical issues and in technical discussions, but outside of that I’m lost. I don’t make small talk. I’m not interested in discussing family life. Wanna talk about work, sure, I’m your man. Wanna talk about your sister’s wedding, or what happened in the sportsball game last night? Nope, not interested in the least.
Due to the “conversion therapy” I received from the military social worker I have no honest idea of what my gender is or what my orientation is. And sex is kinda a moot point anyways as (a) I really don’t like being touched, (b) I really don’t like being touched in a sexual manner, (c) I find sex to be repulsive, (d) I honestly don’t know if I’m GLBTQ. And it probably doesn’t help that my years of untreated and unmanaged depression and anxiety mean that I don’t like getting personal with people. I have honestly had very few partners of either gender in my life.
So, for the record I am the Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, BC. This is a position that I’ve held since May of 2020. Prior to that I was the Acting Chief Engineer while we reclassified the power plant. Prior to being Acting Chief Engineer I was the Assistant Chief Engineer since about 2017. Prior to that I was a maintenance power engineer for about 11 years.
Power engineering was recommended to me back in 2002. It was a pathway to a decent paying job for a person who didn’t have the funds or the support to take a trade course.
St. Paul’s Hospital is being relocated to the False Creek Flats. Construction of the new hospital should be completed in about 7 years. I’ve had involvement with the planning and design of the new hospital. The old St. Paul’s Hospital will probably continue to operate for at least one or two years after the new hospital is open in order to ensure that all of the programs and clinics transfer from one site to the other without any disruption.
St. Paul’s hospital on Burrard will more than likely be my final place of employment. The hospital and I have been taking care of each other for the last 17 years. And we’ll take care of each other for the next few years.
Now, I will unequivocally state that the future of St. Paul’s Hospital has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to explore the possibility of Medical Assistance in Dying.
I am not looking at M.A.i.D. out of fear for my future. Even though the new St. Paul’s will have either a 2nd class power plant or a 3rd class power plant, which means that I cannot be the chief at the new hospital, there would still be ample positions for me in the power plant none the less.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that because of what I’ve done over my tenure at St. Paul’s that Senior Leadership would create a position for me if they had to.
I bring this up because I forgot that one of the Senior Leaders from Providence Health Care follows my twitter feed and saw my postings about M.A.i.D.
I am actually very proud of the work that I’ve done at St. Paul’s and the innovations that I’ve brought to the Physical Plant. I have a good team under me and I have good leaders above. The other trades and I get along very well.
In a way, being at St. Paul’s has probably allowed me to deal with my mental health issues as I could take off sick days on the days where I was completely incapable of getting out of bed in the morning.
Being at St. Paul’s has also allowed me to be as odd and weird as I want because so long as you’re doing the work required of you both HR and the union don’t care, and if they don’t care then the personal opinions of others don’t matter.
COVID last year was an absolute disaster and extremely disruptive to the physical plant. But COVID was far from the sole reason for my breakdown this past spring.
I’ve run as far and as hard as I can.
For 42 years I’ve been hauling around baggage that no person should ever have to carry.
For 42 years I’ve been denied treatment, help, and acknowledgement for issues that were far beyond my control.
The years of childhood neglect, the physical, mental and sexual abuse, the years of self loathing, self hatred, the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness, and the realization that I had been sacrificed by the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their secrets hidden finally came home to roost.
All of it is finally catching up.
I’m tired.
I want to go to sleep.
I don’t want any memories of the past.
I don’t want to remember being caught in P.S.’s bedroom.
I don’t want to remember the sexual abuse on CFB Namao. And let’s be very clear, P.S. could be very aggressive and depraved. This was not, as Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki opined in October 2011, “childhood curiosity and experimentation “. P.S. would vent his own anger and hatred on the kids he was abusing, so let’s not mince any words here. There was no fun enjoyed by his victims.
I don’t want to remember watching P.S. sexually abuse my younger brother.
I don’t want to remember P.S. sexually abusing the other kids.
I don’t want to remember the five distinct visits to the chapel on CFB Namao to see Captain McRae in his living quarters. Visits that always ended with a sickly sweet grape juice. One of these visits hurts the most and will always stand out in my mind. I was with my father over at the storage unit he rented for his motorcycle. My father wasn’t around a lot. He’d bugger off for weeks or months on end and leave us in the care of his mother who was living on base with us. I really wasn’t helping him work on his motorcycle, but I just wanted to be near him. P.S. came walking by and asked my father if he wanted P.S. to look after me. I looked at my father hoping that he would say no. My father told me to go with P.S. and stay with him. P.S. took me right to the chapel.
After Mcpl Christian Cyr let slip to me in May of 2011 that the base padre Captain McRae had been arrested for molesting children on the base in 1980, I broke down and told him about the five visits to the rectory and the sickly sweet grape juice. And not having any memories after the grape juice. The CFNIS spent the entire rest of the investigation trying their best to gaslight me. When I finally received the court martial transcripts and the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork it killed me to find out that the CFSIU in 1980 knew that Captain McRae was luring children into the chapel and would give them alcohol before sexually assaulting them. The CFNIS had these documents in their possession through the entire 2011 CFNIS investigation.
I don’t want to remember my father threatening to kill me for fucking with his military career. When my father received his compassionate posting from CFB Summerside to CFB Namao in 1978 he ended up being attached to 447 squadron. 447 was the home of the tandem rotor heavy lift and troop transport helicopters. He arrived at that squadron when it was brand new. 447 Sqn wasn’t officially stood up until January 1979. I never knew what position my father had at 447. He would always go off on training exercises sometimes for 6 to 8 weeks at a time. The Chinooks were his escape from the responsibilities of his family. He could run off with his military buddies and leave me and my brother at home with his alcoholic mother who would hire P.S. to be our babysitter. In 2019 I learnt about my father’s death in 2017. I filed an ATI request with Library and Archives Canada for his service records. LAC complied and released a partial amount. But it was more than enough for me to understand that I really wasn’t exaggerating when I say that Richard despised me for “fucking with his military career”. Just after our arrival on CFB Namao in the summer of 1978, the Canadian Forces sent my father to Boeing-VERTOL for Maintenance Management training on the Chinook. Here he was, a kid from Fort McMurray, a kid with bugger all for formal education, and he was going to be a key player in the hierarchy of 447 Sqn. My abuse at the hands of P.S. caused us to be relocated off CFB Namao and sent down to CFB Griesbach. And then when Alberta Social Services divulged their plan to remove me from the home, the Canadian Forces arranged for my father to be posted to CFB Downsview in Ontario. Yeah, it looks as if he was right when he would often rage out that I had “fucked with his military career”. Sure, as a 50 year old man I fully understand that none of this was my fault. However when you’re 11 years old, you don’t understand this. When your father tells you that you fucked with his military career, that’s it, you fucked with his military career. You can’t undo the yelling, the screaming, the backhands, the belts. I lived through his rage, and there is no removing it from my brain.
I don’t want to remember the times my father would beat me and then beat me again for crying. Nothing would get Richard more enraged than crying. And what’s a sexually abused child with major depression and severe anxiety going to do? They tend to cry.
I don’t want to remember trying to hide under my captain’s bed to keep my father from getting hold of me. Richard could lose his temper. I learnt quickly that I could hide from Richard under my captain’s bed. Once he figured out where I was hiding he took all of the panels off the bed. I lost my safe space.
I don’t want to remember hoping and wishing all the time on CFB Griesbach that I would die in my sleep and never wake up again.
I don’t want to remember my grandmother’s alcoholism or my father’s alcoholism.
I don’t want to remember how Earl Stevens used his position of authority at the Dennison Armouries in Toronto to entrap me into providing sexual favours to him. Somehow Earl knew that I was a military dependent and that my father was in the Canadian Armed Forces and that I lived on a military base. Earl was retired from the Canadian Armed Forces and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he preyed upon children living on the bases that he was stationed at. He knew that if he touched me that blackmailing me would be very simple as male on male sexual assault is something that no one ever talked about on base. In fact you knew that if you got sexually abused on base the last people you ever wanted to find out were the military police or your own family.
I don’t want to remember the times my father would get angry at my school teachers for wanting to help me or to encourage me to take my hobbies seriously. This one I can’t really speak to or understand. Most parents would have died to have their child put extra effort into school. Not Richard. Just go to fucking school, stare at the fucking blackboard, and stop showing off.
I don’t want t remember being mugged in 1995 by a guy and his girlfriend only to have a Vancouver Police Officer tell me that he wasn’t going to investigate my mugging because he was certain that I was a homosexual prostitute. Even when I found a video tape that had the two suspects on it and showed the proximity to me in a line-up, this police constable refused to look at the matter.
I don’t want to remember all of the people in positions of authority who took advantage of my technical skills to make themselves look better while at the same time limiting my potential due to my lack of education.
I don’t want P.S., Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, my father, or my grandmother living in my head. They all need to go.
I don’t want to remember all of the kids who beat the shit out of me as I left P.S.’s house the day I had been caught in his bedroom.
I don’t want to remember the kids at the various schools who used to beat the shit out of me for being different and not normal. Sure, I might have been odd and a bit of an asshole, but the Canadian Armed Forces decided that their secrets were worth more than my psychological well-being.
I don’t want to deal with the crushing major depressions or the severe anxiety anymore. I don’t want to wake up with night terrors, or have to have teeth removed because Ive cracked them due to excessive grinding. The anxiety is not fun. The major depression is a literal killer.
Sure, the Lexapro has brought the anxiety under control and seems to have tamed the anxiety monster, but they’re still there. I can feel their presence. I know they’re just waiting for my body to build up a tolerance to the serotonin and then they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance.
I’ve had the suicide monster lurking in my brain ever since the days of living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. The suicide monster is kinda easy to keep under control. But it’s there none the less. If I didn’t have a suicide monster living in my head after all that I’ve gone through then that would truly indicate that something was wrong.
So yeah.
There’s a lot of baggage in my skull. There’s a lot of trauma. There’s a lot of damage.
I’m tired, and I don’t want any of this anymore.
Knowing that the end is possibly within reach actually fills me with hope.
Beeshive 