military – Beeshive

Roger Bazin pt ?.

In the aftermath of the investigation of Captain McRae in May of 1980, Captain McRae was relieved of his duties.

Major Roger Bazin was brought in to assist Captain McRae with his duties.

In the time after I had been discovered being buggered by my babysitter (McRae’s altar boy) in his bedroom in May of 1980, and before the fire at the babysitter’s PMQ on June 23rd, 1980 the babysitter had caught me in the change rooms at the base swimming pool.

He aggressively escorted me over to the sauna where there was a man waiting in the sauna for me to perform oral sex on him. The questions that the man asked about my ability to perform oral sex and the answers the babysitter gave indicated to me that this man and the babysitter weren’t just randomly in the sauna at the pool.

I turned 9 in September of 1980 if that’s any indication. The babysitter at this point in time was just weeks shy of his 15th birthday. The man had to have been in his 40s.

Anyways, when I received the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork in 2018 the name Bazin jumped out at me. After Bazin had retired from the Canadian Forces he was involved with paying a cash settlement to a family for inappropriate sexual relations with their son. Apparently this occurred in a small religious community in northern Ontario and the family didn’t want to make a fuss. And more importantly Bazin had been investigated in 2010 for molesting a young child on Canadian Forces Base Borden when he was the base chaplain in 1974.

The case against Bazin was strong enough that it made it to court. Sadly this case got derailed by the 3-year-time-bar.

And that’s more or less what happened with my complaint.

Apparently the CFNIS contacted Bazin and asked him if he remembered anything from Canadian Forces Base Namao. Nope. Couldn’t remember anything.

Now, what I don’t understand is why the CFNIS never went any further and tried to contact the babysitter to see who this man was that he provided me to. Was it Bazin or was it someone else?

And if it was someone else, who was it?

Was it a member of the reserves?

Was it a member of the regular forces?

Was it a civilian relative of a service member like a brother or a brother in law?

I feel pretty safe in saying that middle aged men just don’t randomly hang out in the saunas at the Rec Centres on Canadian Forces Bases hoping to get blown by 8 year old boys.

Comments from my babysitter to Corporal Robert Jon Hancock

I wonder what the Canadian Armed Forces actually knew about the babysitter and the extents of what he did on CFB Namao from 1978 until 1980. I wonder why the Canadian Forces are “handling” things for him.

Did the Canadian Forces know in 1980 who this man was?

How many other kids was the babysitter pimping out to “men in saunas” and military chaplains?

When the military agreed to “handle” things for the babysitter, was the military trying to protect the babysitter, or was the chain of command trying to cover their own asses and limit their liability?

The only reason I can think of for the CFNIS in 2020 not wanting to talk to the babysitter to positively identify the man in the sauna is that this would result in yet another civil action.

Well, missed this one.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/priest-guilty-of-assault-and-sex-assault-at-nordik-spa

This apparently happened back in 2016.

Another Canadian Armed Forces military chaplain was involved with unwanted sexual touching.

I can’t be the only one sensing a trend going on here.

Captain Father Angus McRae (chaplain).

Captain McRae’s altar boy.

Brigadier General Roger Bazin (chaplain)

Corporal Donald Joseph Sullivan (instructor of altar boys)

and now Captain Jean El-Dahdouh (chaplain).

And no, these aren’t the only chaplains.

Unfortunately the way military record keeping worked is that military convictions via summary trial or courts martial were not compiled in a database or made known to the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC). The only way that the sexual escapades of a member of the Canadian Armed Forces ever made it into the public realm is if the member appealed their military conviction in the Courts Martial Appeal Court of Canada (CMAC). Only after the conclusion of a CMAC appeal would the fact that a courts martial occurred become public knowledge. This is how the Ontario Crown was completely unaware of Donald Joseph Sullivan’s military convictions for child sexual abuse when he was sentenced in the 2000s for sexually abusing children in the ’80s.

Who knows how many kiddie diddler chaplains there were in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Somehow Captain El-Dahdouh got the bright idea to assault women at a nordic spa in Chelsea in the province of Quebec.

Two of his known victims were 17.

Apparently the Canadian Armed Forces took swift and decisive move in 2016 of suspending the good Captain until he was convicted in 2019. Not sure if he was confined to barracks, or suspended with pay.

Going to go out on a limb here and I’ll just assume that the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service conducted one heckuva detailed investigation to see if the good Captain had any interactions with military dependents under the age of 18 on which ever bases Captain El-Dahdouh had been stationed at or had visited.

All I can say is that it’s a damn good thing that these incidents of abuse occurred OFF-BASE and after December 1998 and the passage of Bill C-25(1998).

Had these abuses occurred on base prior to 1998, then the 3-year-time-bar would have been in full effect as well as the summary investigation flaw. Even if the women had reported Captain El-Dahdouh to the military police or the CFSIU right away, the women would have had to hope like hell that Captain El-Dahdouh’s commanding officer didn’t simply dismiss the charges brought against Captain El-Dahdouh.

“He was just being overly friendly”

“He had a little too much to drink”

“Ministering to the military causes a lot of stress”

I wonder how his commanding officer would have explained this away.

Daily Prompt 2062

Daily writing prompt

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

View all responses

I really wish that I had learnt earlier in life that the Canadian Armed Forces were nothing to look up to.

As a child growing up in a military family living on military bases you get exposed to the military in a way that civilians aren’t exposed to.

I’ve flown in a Sea King.

I’ve flown in a Chinook more than a few times.

I’ve flown in a Hercules at least once.

These flights were typically on “family days” on base, but with the Chinooks it was when I was at the squadron I could go on test flights if I promised to keep my mouth shut and just sit there.

And when the Canadian Forces used to operate passenger planes for transferring personnel, I flew in one of these from Canadian Forces Base Shearwater to Canadian Forces Base Namao.

I don’t remember going to the squadron on CFB Shearwater or on CFB Summerside, but I was a frequent visitor to 447 Sqn on CFB Namao in the days prior to the Captain McRae fiasco. I knew how to turn on the DC breakers to get power to the cockpit radio and I knew how to select the AM band and tune in the local radio station and kill time in the cockpit while my father was busy doing who the hell knows what. Yeah, I knew how to tune into the base tower or the local civilian towers, but this wasn’t as much fun as the radio.

I followed a mechanic up on top of a Chinook once. The rotors were off the helicopter and he was doing something with the swash plate assemblies. This was prior to us moving off CFB Namao in September of 1980 so I would have been around 8. I was out of my father’s hair so he didn’t give a shit so long as I didn’t fall off and create paperwork.

This was the best I could get Chat to do. The first time I asked Chat to make an image like this it created a Chinook that looked like a giant R/C model with the mechanic standing beside it and the boy sitting on top. The next image chat created from my prompts had the mechanic and the boy looking at the forward gearbox like it was an engine under the “hood” at the nose.
So, this is as good as it gets.

Sure, my father was a drunk and an asshole, but so were a lot of the other guys. And they all seemed to love hanging out together at the mess. Yeah, my father could get angry and issue beatings, but that was my fault. He wouldn’t hit me or beat me if I didn’t deserve it, right?

And after what I had done on CFB Namao with the babysitter and Captain McRae I really deserved his anger and his fury, right?

For the majority of my life I held the Canadian Armed Forces in high regard.

And of course that didn’t change until May of 2011 when Master Corporal Christian Cyr let the beans out about the whole Captain Father Angus McRae fiasco.

To this day I can’t believe that I was so fucking stupid to believe that the Canadian Armed Forces had any honour.

The more I dug into the whens and whys of the Captain McRae fiasco the more it became crystal clear that the Canadian Armed Forces is an organization that places more concern in its public image and its ability to “wash the laundry in house”.

It cares not about the children living on base.

It cares not about the families living on base.

And it really doesn’t care about the individual members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

It’s a soulless entity that will destroy lives in order to protect its image.

Men like my father?

Just fucking mindless robots that go along with what they’re told because they’re not allowed to think on their own. They’re part of the hive-mind or the Borg. Completely fucking useless automatons that can’t do fuck all unless the chain of command tells them to.

The Canadian Armed Forces will never reward individuality. The Canadian Armed Forces is all about conformity and following orders.

If the Chain of Command tells you that you 8 year old son is a homosexual because he was found being buggered by his 14 year old babysitter, well who the hell are you to question the wisdom of the chain of command?

If a Colonel doesn’t want the public to know that over 25 children were sexually abused for a two-year period on his base, then the public isn’t going to find out. Fuck the victims. Just charge McRae with enough crimes to get him the boot from the military, but don’t charge McRae with the full extent as this will only call your command ability into question and your plan of retiring from the Canadian Armed Forces as a Brigadier General will be at risk.

And don’t forget, in 2011 the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service knew the whole sordid affair from CFB Namao as they had the CFSIU DS 120-10-80 investigation paperwork as well as the Courts Martial transcripts for CM62 in their possession. They knew the full fucking truth. But they still insisted on running a dog’n’pony show investigation because there was no way that the Canadian Armed Forces was ever going to willingly suffer the public humiliation of having the Canadian public discover that the military had historically hidden child sexual abuse that occurred on the bases in Canada and that the problem was quite extensive.

And that’s the lesson that I wished I had learnt earlier in life.

Maybe not too young, but at least by my early 20s.

94 days

July 22nd, 1969 was 94 days prior to the worst peace time disaster in the Canadian Navy.

July 22nd, 1969 was when my father was photographed aboard Canada’s only French helicopter destroyer, the HMCS Ottawa.

He was a half Cree / half Irish boy from Fort McMurray.

He was born in Peterborough Ontario.

His father, Arthur Herman Gill abandoned grandma, so grandma packed up and moved back to Fort McMurray with Richard and his younger brother Doug in tow.

Richard attended a single room school house in Fort MacMurray.

Two of his three maternal uncles had been members of the Royal Canadian Army during WWII.

Jimmy Waniandy

Johnny Waniandy

George Waniandy

Trooper George Waniandy died in WWII in Italy. His brother John had been wounded in Italy as well.

Lance Corporal Jimmy Waniandy, a section commander, had been interviewed during the Korean war and been involved in stopping an attack.

Richard obviously had some pretty big shoes to fill.

As grandma lived with us from 1977 until 1981 I knew that she was an overbearing and domineering person.

In 1980, I had mentioned to a psychiatrist that I had been sent to for evaluation by military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that “my brain says that I’m going to kill myself unless grandma leaves the house”. My father would later tell Alberta Social Services that he blamed his mother for the issues my brother and I were having as she was “extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was frequent”.

I could see him volunteering to serve aboard the HMCS Ottawa to prove to his mother that he was just as good as George, Jimmy, and Johnny.

Just after the unification of the separate branches of the Canadian military into the Canadian Forces in 1968 he moved from the ships to the Sea King squadron on CFB Shearwater. The HMCS Ottawa was one of the Restigouche class destroyers that were converted to have a helicopter hangar. Richard could go to sea with his former shipmates on the HMCS Kootenay, but he would go with the prestigious submarine hunting Sea Kings. And even though he was with the Sea Kings, he could still go hit the local pubs and get shitfaced with his former navy buddies when the ships pulled into port.

And wouldn’t his mother ever be impressed with his ability to learn French? Learning French might also endear him to his wife who was part of the Dagenais clan from Province Quebec.

But, fast forward to October 23rd, 1969.

The HMCS Ottawa, HMCS Kootenay, HMCS Bonaventure, HMCS Saguenay, were amongst 10 ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom a few weeks prior as part of naval exercises and they were on their way back to Canada.

The HMCS Kootenay has just been instructed to fire its boilers up to full steam and the turbines had been ordered to full throttle.

Unfortunately the HMCS Kootenay had the original version of the Restigouche class reduction gearbox. This gearbox required that the bearings for the gear shafts to be installed in a particular direction to receive lubrication. The second version of the reduction gearbox allowed the bearings to be installed in either direction.

One bearing had been installed backwards and had starved for oil and was overheating. The stress of the full speed run didn’t help the situation.

The gears in those gearboxes were of the herringbone type. This design minimizes the axial loading on the shafts and gears, but leads to a large amount of oil shear which causes a large amount of vapourized / atomized oil.

This oil vapour came in contact with the red hot bearing and caused the vapour to ignite and then explode.

Three of the eight men killed in the explosion were friends of my father that he had served with.

The Sea Kings were called in to remove the injured off the Kootenay. This of course included the Sea King from the HMCS Ottawa.

It’s of no doubt that the HMCS Kootenay incident cooked my father’s noodle.

I can also see the Kootenay incident as sparking my father’s life long hatred of French. And I don’t mean he just didn’t want to speak French. Whenever the topic of French was brought up in the house, his full hatred came out. Even when I tried to practice French at home for school he would ridicule me for trying to learn French because French was, in his opinion, a complete fucking waste of time. Only fucking frogs spoke French was his constant refrain.

I can see his superiors on the HMCS Ottawa insisting to the point of complete idiocy that French and only French be spoken.

While my father’s drinking buddies were burning to death on the Kootenay I can see my father’s superiors yelling and gesticulating wildly “Arrêtez de parler anglais Gill! Nous parlons en Français sur ce navire”.

If that’s the one thing that I know about my father, he didn’t entertain “silly decisions by silly fuckers”.

Nothing screams Canadian Armed Forces like adhering to the “rules” during times of disaster, especially if the rules are petty and useless.

In 2014 I had returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia for the first time in my life since my father was posted to from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside in 1976. I met a man named Chris LeGier out by the HMCS Kootenay memorial at Point Pleasant.

He said something that stuck with me all these years later.

The Canadian Armed Forces turned their backs on everyone that was involved.

The military stuck to the rules regarding PMQs on the base in that the housing could only be rented to serving members of the military, not their spouses. Accordingly non-serving spouses were told to move out of the PMQs.

Members that had been traumatized by the events were ignored by the military. And this makes perfect sense because back in the day mental health issues were pretty well a one way ticket to civvy street.

According to Chris, it wasn’t unheard of for traumatized members of the HMCS Kootenay event to hit the bottle, use heroin, or even cocaine. And no, drug use in the Canadian Armed Forces wasn’t unheard of. And he said that it wasn’t just the members on the Kootenay that suffered. CFB Shearwater and CFB Halifax were a tight knit community and they all knew each other.

A Blast from the Past

Here’s something that I never expected to see.

I had been going through searches on Newspapers.com when I came across a picture of my father from 1969.

The fact that Richard would have been a member of a ship’s company when that crew was expected to speak French at all times is fucking mind blowing to say the least.

He was a prairie boy growing up in Fort McMurray, AB before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at a stone frigate in Edmonton, AB. I can’t see him as ever having learnt French at home. When grandma came to live with us I can’t ever remember her speaking a single word of French, and I don’t think that she would have learnt French in the two years that she attended Indian Residential School.

When I was a kid, Richard had absolutely no time for French. Even though the schools on base were giving military dependents French classes, Richard would get upset if I tried speaking French in the PMQ.

The photo answers a bunch of questions. The HMCS Ottawa DDH 229 was fitted with a landing pad and a hangar for the Sea King helicopter. And the HMCS Ottawa was amongst the ships that had sailed to the United Kingdom and were involved with the HMCS Kootenay incident on October 23rd, 1969.

As Bill Parker had said to me in August of 1985 on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario, “I wish you had known your father before the Kootenay, he was a much different man then, I think you would have liked him”.

This photo was taken on July 22nd, 1969. That’s almost 3 months before the events of October 23rd, 1969 when the HMCS Kootney suffered a massive explosion due to overheated oil vapour in one of its reduction gearboxes. 9 men died that day, and according to Bill Parker in 1985, and my mother in 2013, three of those men were close friends of my father that he had served with in the Royal Canadian Navy before unification in 1968.

This photo was taken two years and two months before I was born. The man in the photo is not the man I grew up with. The man in the photo looks calm and inquisitive. The man that I grew up with was a piss tank alcoholic with rage issues and a hair temper trigger who had copious amounts of contempt for just about everyone else around him.

Looking at this photo I can only wonder what Richard would have been like had the HMCS Kootenay event not occurred. Or even if it had still occurred, I can only wonder what home life would have been like had the Canadian Armed Forces treated mental health as a priority instead of simply turning a blind eye to mental health issues and expecting the guys to deal with it on their own and self medicate through abusive behaviour, alcoholism, or hard drugs.

I know from my personal involvement with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke that the mental health and wellbeing of military members was the least of the military’s concern.

Does seeing this photo make me change my opinion of my father.

No.

He was still a broken inconsiderate self centred man who should never have been allowed to father children.

But what this photo does show is that Bill Parker and my mother weren’t lying when they said that Richard was a completely different person before the HMCS Kootenay disaster.

The search continues

While poking around on the intertubes yesterday I came across a story related to me that flew completely under my radar.

David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen has actually filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of National Defence in order to try to discover who ordered the CFSIU paperwork and Courts Martial transcripts to be withheld from me, and to be as heavily redacted as they were the first time that DND released these document to me in mid 2020.

I applaud David for digging deeper into this story.

At this point in my life I’ve all but given up on dealing with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence.

If there is one thing that I’ve learnt in my dealings with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence is the truth is whatever they want it to be no matter how many lives they destroy in the process. Collateral damage is a minor expense when it comes to protecting one’s public image.

This was the response to an ATI that I had filed back in 2018 asking for copies of any emails that I had sent to the Minister of National Defence.

First, what is the “Corp Sec DSCS”?

The Corp Sec DSCS is the Corporate Secretary in the department of the Director Strategic Corporate Services (DSCS), Department of National Defence.

What is the function of the DSCS?

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corporate/organizational-structure/corporate-secretary.html

Basically the DSCS-DSMS is the gate keeper for information contained within the Department of National Defence that could prove detrimental if said information were to be released to the public.

You know, like a military police report from 1980 that runs in 180 degrees of opposition to what a military police investigation in 2011 concluded.

The DSCS-DSMS also function as the creative storytellers for the Minister of National Defence / Chief of Defence Staff / Vice Chief of Defence Staff carefully coordinating and concocting the BS that comes from all three of these entities so that a unified story is presented to the Canadian public.

In this above email between Denis Paradis, Major Zenon Drebot (Zenon Drebot Canadian Armed Forces – Office of the Judge-Advocate General) and William Bain they actively discuss hiding my correspondence with the Minister of National Defence from any ATI request.

How do they do this?

The first step is to encrypt the correspondence. Encrypted data is difficult to search, especially without the required decryption key.

Basically what’s supposed to happen is any email that is sent to the government is searchable and can be located by the ATI office, once located the ATI office is supposed to go through the email to assess if it can be released to the public and make any redactions as required prior to releasing the document.

However, the “space saver” is a literal fucking black hole. Once documents disappear into that black hole they’ll never see the light of day again unless they prove beneficial to the Department of National Defence, the Canadian Armed Forces, or the Minister of National Defence.

To further complicate matters, my emails were almost always to do with the subject of “child sexual abuse”. The CAF and the DND probably receive 1,000s of emails every month that don’t have anything to do with “child sexual abuse”. By stripping the true subject matter of my emails from the email and replacing the subject of my emails with “concerns with the Canadian Forces” the DSCS is making it all but impossible to find any trace of my emails.

And finally, my name is spelt “BOBBIE”, not “BOBBY”.

This is important as when the ATI section scans the email servers for emails from “Bobbie Bees” it won’t indicate any traces of “Bobby Bees”. Those are two separate persons. And under ATI guidelines “Bobbie Bees” is not entitled to the personal information of “Bobby Bees”.

The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence have a knack for obfuscation.

National Post February 1st, 2019 page A6

By referring to Vice-Admiral Mark Norman as anything but his name, the Chain of Command within the Canadian Armed Forces and the hierarchy in the Department of National Defence could freely discuss Vice-Admiral Mark Norman and the military’s tactics for dealing with Vice-Admiral Mark Norman without risking their plots coming to the attention of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman or Vice-Admiral Mark Norman’s lawyers.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4901599/mark-norman-code-names-alleged-military-information-block/

Even the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada investigated this matter and released a report.

https://www.oic-ci.gc.ca/en/resources/reports-publications/access-issue-nine-recommendations-regarding-processing-access

And here is a PDF copy of the report.

OIC_AccessAtIssue-EN-Web-20-07-20 Download

The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence are organization the rely heavily upon being able to control the narrative and the optics.

The attitudes within the CAF and the DND are that civilians are simpering whelps that could never measure up to military standards and therefore the CAF and the DND will not be held to the same standards as mere civilians.

This attitude is endemic within the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence.

Everyone within the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service that was involved with GO2011-5754 in 2011 knew the full fucking truth about what had transpired on CFB Namao from 1978 until 1980, but they had assumed that I would never know the truth because the original courts martial in July of 1980 had been moved in-camera and everything had been sealed away from the public.

And if it hadn’t been for Master Corporal Christian Cyr flapping his trap on May 3rd, 2011 in an obvious glib attempt to show me that he knew what the truth was and that he knew that I was just trying to scam the military for money, I would never have been any of the wiser and I would never have been launched down this trajectory when Petty Officer Steve Morris told me on November 4th, 2011 that the CFNIS could find absolutely no evidence to indicate that P.S. was capable of what I had accused him of.

However, after hearing Morris basically call me a liar on November 4th, 2011, I wasn’t going to stop.

And after almost ten years, the truth came out, it was the babysitter’s abuse of younger children that brought Captain McRae to the attention of the CFSIU and that the CFSIU was in turn well aware that Captain McRae was giving children alcohol in the rectory at the base chapel and then taking them into the bedroom to “fool around” with them.

This has been a very slow battle with an extreme power imbalance between the CAF, the DND, and myself as the CAF and the DND both enjoy the ability to hide and withhold information from anyone or anything they declare to be an adversary.

I know that there’s so much more information that the DND and the CAF have related to child sexual abuse on the bases. But I also know from personal experience that the DND and the CAF can withhold any information that they want and that they do so knowing that they will face very little in the way of consequences.

Your life is really not your own

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

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

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

I didn’t ask for this life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that really didn’t change things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The independence of the military police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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