In 2011, the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service investigated my historical complaint about being sexually abused as a child on CFB Namao.
The investigation has since been described, by both CFNIS and the Military Police Complaints Commission, as thorough. They contacted schools. They looked for old yearbooks. They searched for fire records. They interviewed my father, my brother, the sister of the accused, and attempted to interview the accused himself.
On paper, that sounds impressive.
But there is a difference between doing investigative activity and doing a meaningful investigation.
A meaningful investigation does not simply collect statements. It tests them. It compares what a witness says against the available record. It looks for contradictions. It asks whether a witness has reason to minimize, deny, forget, blame, or protect themselves.
That is where the 2011 CFNIS investigation falls apart.
One of the most important witnesses interviewed by CFNIS was my father, Richard Wayne Gill. His statement became a convenient explanation for large parts of the story. According to the CFNIS summary, Richard said he did not remember hiring a babysitter. He said his mother looked after my brother and me for a time. He said a female neighbour across the street would simply keep an eye on us. He said he was unaware of the sexual abuse allegations until I told him years later. He also framed me as a child with discipline problems, school disruption, and behavioural issues that apparently nobody could explain.
That version of events was useful.
It made the babysitter issue foggy. It made the abuse disclosure sound late and unsupported. It made my childhood distress sound like a personal defect. It gave CFNIS a parent’s statement they could place into the file without doing the harder work of asking whether that parent’s version of events survived contact with the documents.
The problem is that Richard’s version did not survive contact with the documents.
It also did not survive contact with Richard’s own history.
Richard and Captain Terry Totzke both knew about the babysitter. This was not some unknown person who drifted into the story decades later. The babysitter was known inside the family context and inside the military social work context. What happened with the babysitter was not treated as abuse of a child. It was treated as evidence that there was something wrong with me.
That distinction matters.
According to my recollection and the family history around these events, what the adults wrongly framed as my “having sex” with the babysitter became the basis for Captain Totzke treating me as though I had a mental illness called “homosexuality.” In other words, the adult system did not begin with the question, “What happened to this child?” It began with the conclusion that the child was defective.
Captain Terry Totzke’s role matters because he did not appear to treat me as a child whose behaviour might be evidence of abuse, trauma, or family dysfunction. That was the problem. In the military social-work frame, I was treated as a behavioural and sexual-management problem. My supposed “homosexuality,” my access to sports, my bedroom door, and my privacy became the focus. The question was not “who hurt this child?” The question became “how do we control this child?”
That poisonous conclusion shaped what happened next.
It explains why I was not allowed to play sports where there might be naked boys in a change room. It explains why the door was to be removed from my bedroom. It explains why my behaviour, my privacy, and my body were treated as the problem instead of asking why a child had been placed in the care of an older boy who was harming him.
That is not a small contextual detail. That is the interpretive framework the adults used.
They did not say, “This child may have been abused.”
They said, in effect, “This child is becoming homosexual.”
Once the adults chose that explanation, everything else flowed from it. The babysitter was no longer treated as the danger. I was treated as the danger. I was treated as contaminated, suspect, and in need of control.
Years later, the blame still followed the same path.
In 1987, when my brother Scott stole Sue’s Pontiac Chevette, Richard blamed me. The logic was grotesque: Scott was turning out this way because I had supposedly allowed the babysitter to touch him. That is not the thinking of a father who knew nothing about the babysitter. That is the thinking of a father who knew exactly which history he wanted to weaponize.
Then, in 2006, Richard and I discussed the babysitter again. During that conversation, Richard said I was wrong to blame him for the babysitter because he had warned his mother not to hire him. He said he did not like the babysitter. He also said that, on occasion, he had to pay the babysitter when his mother did not have the money.
That matters.
Because in 2011, Richard told CFNIS he did not remember hiring a babysitter.
Those are not the same thing.
Saying “I warned my mother not to hire him” is not the statement of a man who knows nothing about the babysitter. Saying “I sometimes had to pay him” is not the statement of a man with no connection to the babysitter. It is a statement that places Richard directly inside the childcare arrangement.
So when CFNIS took Richard’s 2011 statement, they were not dealing with a neutral witness who had no knowledge. They were dealing with a father whose own prior statements, family conduct, and documented child-welfare history created obvious reasons to test his account carefully.
The problem with relying on Richard did not begin in 2011.
The Alberta records had already flagged him as an unreliable source. At the January 26, 1983 case conference, professionals recorded that Richard denied knowledge of my difficulties, current or past, despite documentation to the contrary. They also noted that family contact had been sporadic and only achieved after repeated notes and phone calls. Most importantly, they wrote that Richard often contradicted previous statements from one contact to the next.
So when CFNIS took Richard’s statement in 2011, they were not interviewing a blank-slate parent with no documented credibility issues. They were interviewing a father whose inconsistency, denial, and lack of follow-through had already been recorded by child-welfare and treatment professionals almost thirty years earlier.
By August 2011, CFNIS had been warned that my Alberta Child Intervention file existed. MCpl Robert Hancock recorded that I had left him a message saying I had obtained my 1981 Child Intervention file from the Alberta Government. The file was described as 195 documents. I told CFNIS that the records showed my father did not have much involvement with his children. I also told them that, after the move to Ontario in 1983, I was supposed to receive further care, but my father never followed up on the recommendation.
That should have changed the direction of the investigation.
It should have caused CFNIS to go back to Richard’s statement and ask: does this father’s version fit the independent records?
The answer is no.
The Alberta and Ontario records do not describe a mysterious child whose behaviour was simply inexplicable. They describe a child in distress, in a family system that professionals identified as dysfunctional. They describe poor family follow-through. They describe sporadic attendance at family counselling. They describe professionals trying to arrange continued monitoring and support after the move to Ontario. They describe concern that what was supposed to happen after the transfer did not happen.
The Toronto Children’s Aid Society records are especially important. They record that Alberta Social Services referred the case to Toronto after the family moved. They also record that I was supposed to continue receiving treatment after the move, but that I was instead registered at Sheppard Public School. That is not a minor detail. That is the failed handoff. That is the gap between what adults said would happen and what actually happened.
The paper trail shows that this was not a vague complaint made years later. In August and September 2011, before CFNIS concluded its investigation, I was already telling CFNIS that Alberta and Ontario child-service records existed, that my father had not followed through after the move to Ontario, and that his version of events could not be treated as reliable. Those emails were not lost in the mail. They were forwarded internally and marked to be scanned into the CFNIS/Professional Standards file. The issue is therefore not whether CFNIS was warned. The issue is what CFNIS did with the warning.
Richard’s CFNIS statement should have been treated cautiously because the records already showed a pattern: the adults around me knew there were serious problems, but the practical result was drift, denial, and transfer.
Instead, CFNIS seems to have treated Richard’s statement as if it were stable ground.
It was not.
Take the babysitter issue.
Richard told CFNIS he did not remember hiring a babysitter. But that is not the same as saying there was no babysitter. Later, when I examined him in writing, his answer shifted. He indicated that if a babysitter had been hired, his mother would have been the adult who hired that person.
That is important because the childcare arrangement in the Gill household was not simple. Richard’s mother had been looking after us. But her husband, Andy Anderson, had suffered a serious injury and required care. She had to travel into Edmonton to visit him. That created the practical need for someone else to watch my brother and me.
Richard’s CFNIS statement blurred this by saying his mother stopped looking after the children after his “father” died. But that timeline does not work. Richard’s explanation for why his mother stopped caring for us also collapses on the timeline.
Richard’s CFNIS statement blurred this by saying his mother stopped looking after the children after his “father” died. But that timeline does not work. If Richard meant Andy Anderson, Andy did not die until October 1983, after we had already moved to Ontario. That cannot explain the childcare gap during the CFB Namao period. The relevant issue was not Andy’s death; it was Andy’s injury, hospitalization, and long-term care, which required my grandmother to travel into Edmonton and created the practical need for a babysitter.
That is exactly the kind of contradiction investigators are supposed to notice.
They did not need to accept my memory alone. They had records. They had dates. They had a father’s statement that could be tested. They had enough to see that Richard’s explanation was at best incomplete and at worst misleading.
The same problem appears with Richard’s description of my childhood behaviour.
In his CFNIS statement, Richard described me as having discipline problems since I was little. He said teachers called because I was disruptive. He said I was taken to a child psychologist and that nobody knew what was wrong with me, except that medication was supposedly suggested.
That version is convenient because it turns documented distress into “Bobbie was always a problem.”
The records also show that the problem was being documented long before I was old enough to be blamed for it.
In March 1973, when I was only about eighteen months old, I was admitted to the Izaak Walton Killam Hospital for Children. The medical note described a mild upper respiratory infection, but the summary line is the important part: I was an “18 mo. old boarder, admitted because of parental social problems.”
That matters because it shows the family context was already being noticed when I was a toddler. Years later, Richard would describe me to CFNIS as a child with discipline problems, school problems, and unexplained behaviour. But the paper trail starts somewhere else. It starts with adults documenting parental and social instability around me before I was even two years old.
By the time Alberta Social Services and later Toronto CAS became involved, the pattern was no longer new. The language had changed, but the theme had not: family dysfunction, poor follow-through, disrupted care, and adults trying to manage the consequences while Richard minimized or contradicted the record.
The Alberta records describe family dysfunction. They describe counselling recommendations. They describe poor commitment by my father to family counselling. They describe a child who was bright but emotionally distressed. They do not support the simple idea that professionals had no idea what was wrong and merely wanted to medicate me into compliance.
That was Richard’s version. It was not the record’s version.
And CFNIS had been warned about the record.
This matters because historical abuse investigations depend heavily on credibility. In a case that is more than thirty years old, there may be no physical evidence. Witnesses may be dead, unavailable, unwilling, impaired by memory, or invested in denial. That makes contemporaneous records even more important, not less.
A child welfare file from the early 1980s may not say, in plain words, “this child was sexually abused by this named person.” But that does not make it irrelevant. It can still show behavioural change, family dysfunction, parental non-cooperation, professional concern, failed treatment planning, institutional handoff, and contradictions in later witness statements.
That is what my records did.
They did not prove everything. They did something narrower and more important: they challenged the story Richard gave CFNIS.
Yet the CFNIS investigation and the later MPCC review seem to have treated the social service records as peripheral because they did not directly name the accused as the cause of my distress. That is a serious mistake.
Those records were not being offered as a magic confession. They were being offered as context, corroboration, and contradiction.
They showed that my father’s account was not neutral. They showed that his description of himself as an uninformed parent did not sit comfortably beside records of professional involvement, counselling failures, and child welfare concern. They showed that the Ontario transfer was not just a family move; it was a child welfare handoff that appears to have failed. They showed that the military social work system, through Captain Terry Totzke, was not some distant background feature. It was directly involved.
The CFNIS investigation did many visible things. That is true.
But visible effort is not the same as analytical rigor.
If an investigator interviews a father and accepts his minimizing explanation without testing it against records the complainant specifically identified, that is not thorough. If an investigator records that the complainant has obtained a 195-document child intervention file, but the investigation does not appear to integrate that file into the assessment of the father’s credibility, that is not thorough. If the file contains a parent’s claim about childcare that collapses when compared to basic dates, that is not thorough.
That is box-checking.
The strangest part is that the CFNIS did send the matter to the Crown. The covering letter stated that the investigation supported the elements of an offence under the Criminal Code provision for indecent assault on a male. So this was not a case where CFNIS found nothing at all. They found enough to send the matter for legal review.
But the weakness remained: the investigation treated my father’s statement as if it carried more weight than it deserved.
Richard was not an independent witness. He was the parent who had failed to protect two children. He was the parent whose own conduct and lack of follow-through were criticized in social service records. He was the parent who had a direct emotional interest in minimizing what happened in his household, on his watch, during his military posting.
That does not mean every word he said was false.
It means his words required testing.
CFNIS had the warning. CFNIS had the opportunity. CFNIS had enough information to know that the Alberta and Ontario records mattered. CFNIS also had enough reason to know that Richard’s statement was not the statement of a detached, uninvolved parent.
Yet Richard’s statement was allowed to sit in the investigation as though it were a reliable foundation.
It was not a foundation.
It was one more piece of evidence that needed to be examined.
And when it is examined against the records, the timeline, and Richard’s own prior admissions, the statement looks less like clarity and more like a convenient fog.
The records also show that the problem was being documented long before I was old enough to be blamed for it.
By the time Alberta Social Services and later Toronto CAS became involved, the pattern was no longer new. The language had changed, but the theme had not: family dysfunction, poor follow-through, disrupted care, and adults trying to manage the consequences while Richard minimized or contradicted the record.
In September 2015, I was re-interviewed by RCMP Inspector Akrum Ghadban, Sgt. Damon Tenaschuk, and MCpl Mercier. That interview did not simply repeat the 2011 complaint. It generated follow-up issues, including a former CFB Namao neighbour I identified as a possible witness, Fred R. Cunningham, the earlier McRae/CFSIU connection, and confusion around whether it was the babysitter’s sister or younger brother who may have entered the room. I also introduced my father’s written examination answers. Those answers materially complicated Richard’s 2011 statement. Yet CFNIS does not appear to have gone back and re-interviewed Richard. Once a key witness’s earlier statement is contradicted or complicated by later written answers, a serious investigation should test the contradiction, not quietly carry the original statement forward.
Years later, Alberta’s victim-benefits appeal process reached a different conclusion than the original denial. The Director had denied my claim because police information was treated as insufficient to support that a Criminal Code offence occurred. But on review, after considering the Director’s file, Canadian Forces Military Police information, and my Children’s Services records, the Appeals Reviewer found me eligible. The decision stated that the CFNIS investigation report identified and acknowledged me as the victim of an eligible Criminal Code offence, and that the Children’s Services records confirmed psychological injury incurred as a direct result of the incident.
The problem was not that CFNIS had no warning. The problem was that the warning did not appear to change the analysis. Richard’s statement was treated as useful fog, when it should have been treated as evidence requiring scrutiny. The child-welfare records, the timeline, the later written answers, the 2015 re-interview, and the eventual Victims Appeals decision all point in the same direction: the issue was never simply whether CFNIS made phone calls or opened old files. The issue was whether CFNIS was willing to let the documents disturb the story it had already accepted.
