The matter is still with the lawyers, and it does seem to be moving forward.
The Department of Justice has indicated that the government would like to settle this matter out of court.
The DOJ is no longer objecting to me being the representative plaintiff due to my very public desire to obtain Medical Assistance in Dying at the conclusion of this matter.
The DOJ is even entertaining the inclusion of base brats that may have been abused by Captain McRae and his “agents” on previous posting such as:
Canadian Forces Station Holberg on Vancouver Island;
Canadian Forces Base Portage La Prairie in Manitoba;
Canadian Forces Base Kingston in Ontario from when McRae was at the Royal Military College at Kingston.
And any other base or station that Captain McRae may have been stationed at during his brief career in the Canadian Forces.
The feeling that I get is that the DOJ would like to exclude the children abused by McRae’s “agents” if they can.
“Agents” are the older kids that Captain McRae abused and groomed and in then in turn used these “agents” to bring younger children to visit with Captain McRae.
In my case I can remember five very distinct visits to the rectory at the base chapel. Each visit ended with me being given a tumbler full of what I remembered at the time as being a “sickly sweet grape juice”.
I have no memories of what happened after the “grape juice”.
I don’t even remember how I got back home after the visits.
And no, there would have been no one at home who would have noticed that their 7 – 8 year old charge was shitfaced drunk as both of his guardians were piss-tank alcoholics. My father was rarely home, and my grandmother was usually in the city on the weekends visiting with her husband in the nursing home, at the Rosslyn Inn drinking, at the Canadian Legion drinking, or just pissed drunk in the PMQ.
And yes, it doesn’t matter that I lived on a Canadian Forces Base in housing for military families. Dysfunctional families existed in the military community just as they existed in the civilian world. But unlike in the civilian world, it was very hard for the children of these dysfunctional military families to receive any type of assistance as the military communities on base were the epitome of the “company town”.
For instance, when my family was shuffled off from CFB Namao in the aftermath of the Captain McRae fiasco the teachers at the school for the children of military families ob CFB Griesbach brought my brother and I to the attention of the military social worker.
When our teachers brought us to the attention of the civilian social workers with Alberta Child and Family Services, the military social worker didn’t cooperate. The military social worker ran interference and acted to stymie our civilian social workers.
But back to the matter of “agents”.
The DOJ is trying to argue that the Government of Canada should only have to pay damages to those for whom Captain McRae was charged with molesting and that no damages are owed to the victims of the “agents” or the victims of Captain McRae who were drugged or intoxicated prior to their sexual abuse.
Remember that in my case when the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service conducted their investigation into my complaint against Captain McRae’s agent “P.S.” the CFNIS had in their possession the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the 1980 court martial transcripts that indicated:
- that the investigation into Captain McRae was commenced as a result of the base military police investigation of Captain McRae’s teenaged “agent” that had been accused by numerous parents on the base of sexually assaulting their pre-pubescent children.
- that Captain McRae admitted to the military police in 1980 that he took boys into the rectory of the chapel, gave them beer, wine, and alcohol, and then took them into the bedroom and “messed around with them”.
- That during McRae’s court martial, his defence officer tried to use the fact that his “agent” P.S. had molested numerous children on base as a way to discredit the testimony of “P.S.”
- That P.S. was in fact receiving treatment for his sexual attraction to children.
- And that Captain McRae had confessed during his ecclesiastical trial with the Archdiocese of Edmonton that he had abused children for numerous year.
Yet, during the 2011 Canadian Forces National Investigation Service investigation the CFNIS was hellbent on the following:
- Portraying me as a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military”
- Portraying me as someone who frequently jumped from job to job and was unable to hold down steady employment and therefore I was only doing this for money.
- Changed statements that I had given to them such as when I told master corporal Christian Cyr about the five visits to the chapel ending with the “sickly sweet grape juice”, master corporal Cyr entered into his log books that “Mr. Bees remembers going to visits at the chapel, but that nothing sexual ever occurred”
- Master corporal Christian Cyr would try to convince me that I was confused and that I didn’t know what I was talking about in relation to the chapel as his insisted during our various telephone calls that the chapel I indicated to him didn’t exist in 1980, and no military chapel on that base ever had a rectory, and that the military chaplain never lived on base. The CFSIU paperwork from 1980 clearly indicates everything that I told him about the chapel was true. So did the blueprints that I obtained of the chapel.
- Investigators with the CFNIS tried their utmost to convince me that I was “misremembering things”. For example they tried their damndest to convince me that there was no house fire at PMQ #26 in the summer of 1980 and that I was attributing a fire from a different base to my memories of 1980. It turned out that the CFNIS had the Canadian Forces Fire Marshal’s paperwork for the June 23rd, 1980 house fire that did $56k (1980) dollars in damage to a house worth $75k (1980) dollars and that a construction engineer suffered a fatal heart attack during the fire while trying to shut off the natural gas.
- Warrant officer Blair Hart told the Morinville RCMP in July of 2011 that the investigation into my complaint was likely to go nowhere due to a lack of evidence. This was well before the CFNIS had tried to talk to any of the other victims / witnesses.
- The CFNIS removed all mention of my grandmother from the investigation, and never questioned my father about his failure to mention my grandmother when I supplied the CFNIS with my social service paperwork in which my father acknowledges that my grandmother was brought into his house to raise my brother and I after our mother “abandoned” us.
- The CFNIS had access to the CPIC of P.S. that indicated that he had numerous charges between 1982 and 1999 that were for sexual crimes against children. Even still, on November 4th, 2011 Petty Officer Steve Morris called me and told me that the CFNIS “just couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that P.S. was capable of the crimes that I had accused him of”.
Why would the CFNIS do this? Why would the CFNIS go all out to ridicule and belittle a victim of childhood sexual abuse?
No matter the PR spin that the Canadian Armed Forces like to give the public, the CFNIS are NOT independent of the Chain of Command.
The Minister of National Defence has unfettered command authority over the CFNIS via the military chain of command.
The VCDS is only a step or two away from the Minister of National Defence.
It is extremely concerning that the National Defence Act gives the Vice Chief of Defence Staff the ability to advise and issue instructions to ANY CFNIS investigation.
Yes, the Provost Marshal is supposed to notify the public of this advisement or of the directions, but the VCDS also has the authority to issue “lawful” commands to the Provost Marshal, such as to NOT release this information to the public.
Remember, under the National Defence Act that the penalty for “Insubordination” which is to disobey a “lawful” command from a superior is “Life in prison or a lesser sentence”. The Provost Marshal is subject to this, so is the CFNIS chain of command as are the investigators with the CFNIS.
No civilian police officer in Canada or for that matter anywhere in the western world faces life in prison for disobeying the commands of their superiors.
The only place you find civilian police officers under this type of threat are in third world dictatorships or in goon-thug theocracies.
I mention this for two reasons.
First is that in February of 2016 I met with then Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan at his constituency office on Victoria St. in Vancouver. Mr. Sajjan spared no time in accusing me of “playing games” and of “having an angle” insinuating that I was just trying to milk the Canadian Forces for some easy money.
Second is that the DOJ will rely heavily upon the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service to conduct investigations into the victims of Captain McRae and his various “agents”. I have no doubt that the CFNIS will conduct investigations in such a manner as to minimize the number of victims of Captain McRae and to totally prevent the establishment of a valid connection between Captain McRae, his various agents, and the children abused by those agents..
The Canadian Armed Forces are in a public relations battle with the general public. The CAF have been in a PR battle for a very long time. This is why in 1980 the court martial of Captain McRae was moved in-camera and why the number of charges against McRae were minimized and why the Canadian Forces refused to call the RCMP in to deal with the pedophile babysitter. It was a PR battle then, and it’s a PR battle now.
Can you imagine how the Canadian Public would react if it were to discover that the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence have been aware for a very long time of the problem of child sexual abuse in the military communities on base and how the chain of command would rather bury the victims instead of punishing the offenders, all for the optics of public relations.
Or for that matter, can you imagine how upset the general public would be to discover that victims of male-on-male child sexual abuse were treated as homosexuals and were given life altering “conversion therapy” at the hands of the Canadian Forces military social workers?
Child sexual abuse in the Canadian Forces 