I came across this video on TikTok yesterday and it really blew me away as to how naive people, especially adults, can be.
I can assure you that this is not the way it worked on any military base in Canada. Especially not if you had the misfortune of coming from a dysfunctional family such as mine.
My mother left in 1977 while my father was stationed at CFB Summerside. It wasn’t her choice to leave.
Military housing could only be rented to the serving member, the non-serving parent had no legal rights to remain in the house if the serving member didn’t want them there. In fact the language in the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations meant that the non-serving spouses were only able to remain in the military housing so long as they had the “permission” of their serving spouse. If the serving spouse didn’t want the non-serving spouse there, the non-serving spouse had no options but to leave.
In the aftermath of my mother leaving my grandmother came to Summerside to live with us from the spring of 1977 until the spring of 1978. When she returned to Edmonton my father requested a posting to Edmonton specifically so that his mother could look after his children as his “wife had abandoned him”.
As I mentioned elsewhere in my blog, my grandmother had been through Indian Residential school as a child. She didn’t have much of a formal education having entered school when she was 13 and leaving school when she was 15.
From all accounts she was an alcoholic by the time my father was born in 1946.
When she came to live with us in the military housing in Summerside she was mostly drunk and would often haul my brother and I off to the Royal Canadian Legion or other pubs while she drank.
When my father received his posting from Summerside to Namao he brought her and her husband Roy (Andy) Anderson into the PMQ on Namao to raise my brother and I while he literally buggered off to who knowns where.
It was grandma’s and Andy’s drinking that landed Andy in long term nursing care when he slipped in the bathtub and cracked his skull open. It was because of this that my brother and I ended up in the care of the babysitter.
My father was asked by Alberta Social Services after we became involved with civilian social services in 1981 if he knew why my brother and I were having emotional and behavioural issues.
My father explained to social services that his mother was “extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was intoxicated, which was frequent”.
He would further tell social services on different occasions that his mother would not admit to being an alcoholic, and that she refused to seek help for her alcoholism.
There’s a couple of “not so funny things” about my father’s statements to the CFNIS in 2011 which serve to illustrate just how fucked up the military justice system actually is.
First, my father seemed to imply that my grandmother never lived with us, and even if she did it was just a very brief period of time.
The CFNIS in 2011 knew from my statement to them that grandma had raised my brother and I from the spring of 1977 until the spring of 1981 and that even before we moved to Downsview in 1983 we’d spend a lot of our weekends at grandma’s apartment.
And when I obtained a copy of my social service records from the Alberta government in August of 2011, I gave the CFNIS a copy of the entire set of records.
The CFNIS never attempted to question my father about the discrepancies between his statement and the contents of the social service records. Instead the CFNIS gave Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki my father’s statement with absolutely no mention of my father’s statement to social services after Alberta social services became involved with my family.
This resulted in Jon Werbicki stating that “it was very significant that Mr. Bees never told anyone in a position of authority about the abuse”.
And of course in 2012 the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal did not make the existence of these records known to the Military Police Complaints Commission. So these records became “new evidence” that the MPCC wasn’t able to review. And these records became “new evidence” that couldn’t be introduce during my application for Judicial Review in federal court.
Long story short, unlike in the video there was no one at home that I could run to tell.
My father was living off base with whatever girlfriend he had at the moment. He honestly barely lived with us in PMQ #11 on 12th street on CFB Namao. He didn’t move back into the PMQ until August of 1980.
His mother came to live with us on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. She looked after my brother and I until the summer of 1981 when she moved out and got her own apartment.
My father’s drinking was just as bad as my grandmother’s drinking. And when the two got drunk together there would often be swearing, yelling, and shoving. If my uncle Doug showed up and the three of them were drinking things would really get out of control.
The thing was alcoholism on the bases in the PMQ patches back in the day was always seen as normal. “It’s a tough job”. “It’s a hard life”. “It’s camaraderie and cohesion building”.
It wasn’t until I moved off base and started living in the civilian world that I began to realize that not every weekend was supposed to be a booze fuelled festival.
The dirty secret of the Canadian Forces is that there was a lot of “trailer trash” living on the bases back then.
My new stepmother didn’t like any of this and she decided to try to put an end to my father’s drinking. She blamed my grandmother for my father’s drinking and the relationship between my stepmother and my grandmother was described as “frosty”. One of them had to go, and it wasn’t going to be my father’s girlfriend.
There was one time that I asked my uncle Doug why my father always believed everything that my stepmother said over what I had said. His response was that the father slept with her, not with me. It would be a few years before I would truly understand what that comment meant.
My grandmother lived by two maxims, and no doubt this was beat into her during her stay at Holy Angels in Fort Chipewyan. “Children are to be seen and not heard” and “Children only speak when spoken to”. And yes, Richard was the exact same. Richard did not under any-fucking-circumstance want to be disturbed. You only spoke when he said it was okay to speak. You stood silently beside him and waited for him to acknowledge you before you said anything. And when you said something to him, it had better not be a stupid waste of his fucking time.
Grandma was the same. If you talked at the kitchen table you either got rapped on the knuckles with the wooden spoon, or you got smacked across the mouth.
But yeah, tell me again who exactly I was supposed to tell about the abuse.
My alcoholic grandmother?
My alcoholic father?
My stepmother, who no no doubt had been told nothing about CFB Namao by her new husband, but had been told that his kids were acting up like they were because they liked their mother better than her?
And besides, with the comments of my father and Captain Totzke, everyone knew what had happened.
It wasn’t like I should have had to tell anyone. That base was a secured defence establishment. How the base chaplain and at least one of his altar boys could molest over 25 children for over 2 years is something that I will never understand.
But whatever. It doesn’t matter if my father lied to the CFNIS in 2011 or if the CFNIS guided my father into saying what he said, the CFNIS accomplished what it needed to do. And that was to sever any potential connection to myself and the babysitter as the babysitter and the babysitter’s documented abuse of young children on the base is what led to the discovery of Captain Father Angus McRae.
Beeshive 