Tag: Medical Assistance in dying

If there’s one thing about having grown up on Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada during the ’70s and ’80s taught me it was to just ignore homophobic slurs.

Mind you I didn’t start hearing these slurs until after the CFB Namao affair, but they started nonetheless once my family was moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach in October of 1980.

Captain Terry Totzke was the first to refer to me as a homo. Yes, he would use the clinical word “homosexual”, but he would also drop “homo” at times as well.

Totzke was also adamant that if I didn’t stop being a homosexual that I would end up in prison like the priest.

Although I had no idea of what priest Captain Totzke was talking about, he was talking about Captain McRae, the base chaplain from CFB Namao. The base chaplain that had just been investigated for having committed “acts of homosexuality” with young boys on the base.

My father, Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill, would use “homo”, “fag”, and “cocksucker” at home.

And once news spread from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach that I was the boy that had been caught being buggered by the babysitter in his bedroom it didn’t take long for the kids at school to start using slurs and isolating me.

So, when I get this shit on social media, I don’t really care.

Yes, somebody sent me the suggestion to go hang myself.

I report it.

Sometimes it gets taken down.

Sometime it doesn’t.

But, when that’s the language that was used at home to describe you, you just get used to it.

Especially back in the ’70s and ’80s.

If you were a kid living on base and you were suspected even in the slightest of possibly being queer or a little light in the loafers, you had to grow a very thick skin, otherwise this shit was gonna kill you.

I remember I was in Richard’s car once. I forget where we were going, but we were heading north on Keele St.. We had just passed Sheppard Ave. Richard asked me why I had joined Sea Cadets instead of Army Cadets. I said that my friend John was in Sea Cadets and John took me to one of the parade nights, so that’s why I wanted to join. Richard said that everyone knows that the grunts are in the Army. I looked at him puzzled. He said that the grunts are queer, and maybe I’d be better off in Army cadets.

The worst base I lived on was Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Toronto.

CFB Downsview didn’t have a school on base for military dependents. We went to the local schools like Sheppard Public School, Downsview Public School, Elia Jr. High., Pierre LaPorte Jr. High and others.

I never really had much issue with the civilian kids.

It was always the other kids on base.

And when you come from a visibly dysfunctional home, the other kids have absolutely no sympathy. It’s like you were to blame for your father’s alcoholism and violent tendencies.

There were three kids on that base that made every living moment of my life a fucking hell.

The homophobia, the slurs, the taunts, the teasing, the fights.

Yeah, if you didn’t fit in, you were mocked relentlessly and shunned.

I’ve talked to other former base brats over the years, a majority of them absolutely refuse to admit that there were issues with alcoholism, or family violence in the PMQs on the bases.

But that’s the way things were back then. Dysfunctional families were ignored. They were an embarrassment.

When queer kids got beat up or shunned, everyone ignored that.

And yes, I realize that these attitudes existed out in the civilian world.

But living on base, everything was concentrated.

There was no escape.

So, you just learned to be extremely self sufficient.

And you grew a thick fucking skin.

Recently I finished my 54th orbit around the sun and have embarked on my 55th orbit.

I don’t know how much longer I want to keep working.

Now that I’m 55 I’m eligible for my pension via work, but as I don’t have my full 30 years yet, I won’t get maximum payout.

Yes, I have a class action against the Government of Canada at the moment, but I’m not pegging my future on this.

I’ve worked since I was about 11. My first job was cleaning cages in a pet shop in a mall across 97th street from Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. Home life sucked so badly in the fallout from the events on Canadian Forces Base Namao that I did whatever it took to keep as much distance between my father and I as possible.

I started working for the family that owned a pizza shop in Kingsway Garden Mall. CFB Griesbach was on 97th street and 137th avenue. Kingsway Garden Mall is down on Kingsway and 111th avenue. That was a good walk. Again, any chance that I’d get I’d go down as this was far preferable to being at home.

When my father got his posting to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in January of 1983 to avoid my apprehension by Alberta Social Services I didn’t have any jobs at the time. But by 1985 I was actually servicing video games, pinball machines, and jukeboxes which was an odd job for a 14 year old to have.

When I was 16, the employer I was working for realized that things were really bad at home. He arranged for me to rent a room from a friend of his.

And I’ve been on my own since.

With no support from home I never had the luxury of taking trade training that I would have loved to. Which meant that even though I was qualified to do the work, I couldn’t be paid for the work at the higher rate as I wasn’t qualified.

And with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke interfering with my mental health treatment in the aftermath of the CFB Namao Child Sexual Abuse scandal, I was always going to be the “outsider”. The freak.

Spent my early years living paycheque to paycheque.

And let me tell you, when there is no safety net, you don’t take any fucking chances.

Sure, it would have been nice if my father could have helped out, but that was never going to be an option. And I knew much better than to ever ask.

My mother? No idea where she was. I had always lived my life with my father’s explanation as to her disappearance. It wasn’t until 2013 that I would learn the truth about what my father had done.

So the jobs that I’ve held over the years are the ones you get by slowly climbing the ladder.

My background in electronics and computers allowed me to bring skills to jobs that normally wouldn’t have these skills.

For instance when I got into servicing bowling alley equipment my skills in electronic were able to massively reduce costs as the centres no longer had to send logic boards out for repairs. I could do the work in house.

And with my background in mechanics, repairing machine assemblies was dead simple. Instead of ordering entire rebuilt gearboxes in from the manufacturer, I could press shafts and press bearings.

One centre that I worked at they ended up firing their head mechanic because I easily demonstrated that a lot of the issues the machines were having were due to his incompetence. But you know what, at the end of the day they couldn’t pay me what they were paying him as he was factory trained and qualified and of course I wasn’t.

Could they send me for factory training like they had sent him?

Don’t be silly, I know too much already, it would be a waste of money for them to send me.

Even in my current employment I’m haunted non-stop by the “you’re not qualified” taunt. I would have much rather been an Instrumentation and Automation tech. But I’m not qualified. And no, taking a four year course at BCIT isn’t in the cards.

So I took the Chief Engineer position instead. The pay is close to what the tech makes, but I really don’t get to spend time doing the kind of work that I like.

So yeah, I think that it’s time to throw in the rag and call it a day.

And as I’ve said elsewhere in my blog, I’m going to keep fighting for the right to avail myself to Medical Assistance in Dying to be free of Captain Totzke, my father, and the mental illness that I’ve been dragging around since my days of living on Canadian Forces Base Namao.

If I’m lucky, the Department of Justice and the Department of National Defence will settle with me, but I ain’t holding out any hope. It took the DOJ to settle with Captain McRae’s accomplice, so I can only imagine how long the DOJ will string my civil action out.

I’m often left wondering where I would be in life right now had it not been for the events of Canadian Forces Base Namao.

My life was always going to be on the rough side considering the issues that my parents had. But throw into that mix growing up in the military community where the public image of the military is of paramount importance to the mental health of children growing up on the bases.

Trying to move forward in life while the babysitter, Captain Terry Totzke, Master Corporal Richard Gill, and various others up and down the chain of command keep dragging me into the past makes advancement impossible.

And please, don’t give me any crap about just moving on or just growing up and recognizing that there are people who’ve had a much rougher time than I have.

It doesn’t work that way.

If you had a happy life, received encouragement and support from your parents, and more or less ended up in life where you wanted to be, enjoy what you have.

Not everybody had that opportunity.

Home life before the events of CFB Namao were already fucked up.

CFB Namao just pushed my life over into the abyss.

There were multitudes of stories in the media back in the ’80s about child abuse and neglect in the military community, but the Canadian Forces just circled the wagons and the problem went away.

Of course the problem really didn’t go away no matter how much the chain of command ordered it to.

My father, Master Corporal Richard Gill, was a piss tank alcoholic before his military career started in 1963 when he was 17. Richard had grown up in a dysfunctional family himself. His mother was an emotionally damaged survivor of the Indian Residential School System in Canada. His father, Arthur Herman Gill wanted absolutely nothing to do with grandma or his kids, so he walked out on the family.

Grandma took my father and her other son Doug and moved from Peterborough, Ontario back to a community she was familiar with, Fort McMurray, Alberta.

My father believed in physical punishment, and I’m talking more than just the belt. Open handed slaps and closed fist punches were not beyond him. And the thing is he didn’t care where he unleashed his anger. In the PMQ, on the base, on civy street, in a shopping mall. Didn’t matter. Once you tweaked his PTSD fuelled rage, he would unleash.

I know where Richard got his temperament, it was his mother.

She had absolutely no problem with the belt, kitchen utensils, sticks, tree branches. Anything she could hit us with, she’d hit us with. And just like her son, she had absolutely no impulse control.

From 1977 until 1981 grandma moved into our PMQ. First at CFB Summerside in PEI, and then at CFB Namao in Alberta. This was primarily due to my father’s idea that raising kids was “woman’s work” and not his concern.

Grandma was angry.

Grandma was violent.

And grandma was an alcoholic.

Yes, she had been to Indian Residential School as a child, but that wasn’t any excuse. And before I get attacked, no, I’m not claiming First Nations intergenerational trauma, but to say that Indian Residential Schools didn’t fuck up and destroy my family would be downplaying things a little too much.

It was grandma’s alcoholism that ultimately lead to the need for Scott and I to require the babysitting services of the pedophile babysitter.

Here’s my father, Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill, blaming my emotional issues on his own mother, the same woman that he brought into the PMQ to raise my brother and I because he couldn’t be bothered.

What were the “false stories” that Richard accused his mother of telling my brother and I? When our mother “abandoned” the family on CFB Summerside in PEI my father would tell my brother and I that our mother was a whore who would spread her legs for anyone and that she ran off with a guy named Gus from the PPCLI.

I would have been 5 when my mother left. Scott would have been about 3. And Richard’s vulgarity didn’t care about our ages.

I was old enough to understand that my father was a bad man. Scott on the other hand never knew our mother that well, and I think he swallowed Richard’s lies and bullshit.

My grandmother would always tell me brother and I not to listen to or believe anything Richard said about our mother, that we would learn the truth one day.

Grandma was right. We learnt the truth. I learnt the truth at least. Scott was still holding on to his hatred of Marie right until the end. The way he hated her you would have sworn that she beat his cats to death in front of him.

The truth was that Richard used the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations to have our mother ejected from the PMQ and barred from coming anywhere near the PMQ. He had her ejected because she wanted to take Scott and I back to Nova Scotia to stay with her brother Al as Richard’s drinking and violent outbursts had greatly amplified after we were posted from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside.

And make no mistake, Richard didn’t do this ’cause he loved Scott and I. As he told his buddy Jacques Choquette around 1986, Richard never kept Scott and I ’cause he liked us. He kept us for his taxes, so that he could rent a PMQ, and as long as we lived under his roof he could control the costs as opposed to having to pay our mother child support.

Richard wasn’t some mastermind criminal.

He was just a self absorbed and self centred little asshole.

Civilians accessing Defence Establishments were subjected to the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations. Defence establishments included and lands and any buildings that were owned or leased by the DND for the CAF.

PMQs were considered defence establishments.

Non serving spouses and the children of military service members were always subject to the Defence Establishment Trespass regulations.

A study commissioned by the Canadian Forces in the mid ’90s found that service members were known to use the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations to eject their civilian spouses when their marriages broke down.

So yeah, home life was extremely dysfunctional.

But things were only going to get so much worse.

Enter the babysitter.

And yes, the babysitter grandma hired was quite the pedophile.

My grandmother didn’t encounter this babysitter on her own.

My grandmother had a weird devotion to the Catholic church. This I will never understand. She was a devout catholic. When she came to live with us on CFB Summerside she put me into Sunday school, and she got my brother and I involved with the Knights of Columbus. When we arrived at CFB Namao she would get Scott and I dressed in our Sunday best and off to church we went.

When Andy Anderson slipped and fell in the bathtub and ended up in a long term nursing home she needed someone to look after my brother and I while she took the two hour bus ride from CFB Namao to the Mewburn Nursing Home at the University of Alberta.

I have absolutely no qualms about saying that it was Captain McRae himself that had suggested the babysitter. The babysitter after all was one of his altar boys. McRae was the base padre. The base padres were expected to assist families in need. I remember on two different occasions that he gave grandma a drive to the nursing home, and on one occasion he took grandma, Scott and I to a local lake for swimming. These trips always occurred in a motor-pool vehicle.

In the aftermath of the CFB Namao child sex abuse scandal my family was moved 10km down the street to CFB Griesbach. This came about because I was the boy discovered being buggered in the babysitter’s bedroom and I was tormented, teased, and attacked by the other kids on base. It was plainly obvious to anyone involved that I couldn’t remain on CFB Namao.

When we arrived on CFB Griesbach I was brought to the attention of Canadian Forces social worker Captain Terry Totzke. Totzke was adamant that the only reason that I was abused and why I did nothing to protect my younger brother Scott was because I had a mental illness called “homosexuality”. The truth was since about 5 or 6 I had identified as a girl, and for the longest time I had thought that the reason that I got abused by the babysitter was that I was acting too much like a girl.

If you thought that my father was unhinged prior to CFB Namao, you should have seen how unhinged he had become after CFB Namao and after Captain Totzke had labelled his son a “homosexual”.

Richard would be sure to remind me at every opportunity that I had fucked with his military career, and that if he got thrown out of the military it was my fucking fault.

The first time that I tried to kill myself was back in 1981ish. We were living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach in PMQ #70. Between my father, my grandmother, my stepmother, and the teasing I was enduring from the kids on base who knew about what happened on Namao, I wanted off the planet.

I tried with a plastic bag and some packing tape.

Didn’t work. Richard discovered me. That was a beating. If I wanted attention, he’d give me the fucking attention.

There have been other attempts over the years. Usually ends up in frustration with Richard in my brain telling me that I’m a fuckup. Also, one of my greatest fears is fucking up and not doing it right. Ending up in a nursing home being spoon fed soup while being trapped inside my brain would be a punishment worse than living.

By 1982 my mental health deteriorated to the point that my civilian counsellors and psychiatrists were trying to get me institutionalized in a psychiatric facility for children.

When social services wanted to remove me from my father’s house for my protection, Captain Totzke informed my father’s chain of command and my father received a posting to Ontario before Alberta Social Services would have been able to act.

I spent ages 11 until 38 not knowing why I was such a fuckup in life. Couldn’t make friends if my life depended on it. No idea of what my gender or orientation was. No ability to form intimate relationships. No self-worth to take the course or the training required to get the credentials to recognize the abilities that I have.

And then on top of this I spent 2011 onwards being actively lied to by members of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service. Each and everyone of those silly fuckers knew the truth about CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980. They had CFSIU DS 120-10-80 and CM62 in their possession.

They knew the fucking truth about the babysitter.

They knew the fucking truth about Captain McRae.

They knew the fucking truth about how the chain of command in 1980 intentionally buried the whole Captain McRae child sexual abuse scandal.

A also gave the CFNIS copies of my social service records in August of 2011, so they knew that my father’s version of reality covering the years of 1978 to 1980 was absolute bullshit.

And each and everyone of the silly fuckers involved with the 2011 Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit knew that the whole fucking investigation was nothing more than a dog’n’pony show that would never be allowed to lay charges against the babysitter.

All my life I’ve been treated as an inconsequential joke.

I’m involved with a job that I don’t like and I don’t want, but it pays the bills.

And with the daemons that plague me, it’s not like I’ve really ever had other options.

And I just feel so fucking numb and tired all of the time

I really don’t want to be here, and I don’t really have a need to be here either.