Child sexual abuse in the Canadian Forces

Captain Father Angus McRae became an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1973. Captain McRae joined the military as a chaplain. According to court martial documents, Captain McRae had been investigated for “Acts of Homosexuality” while he was at RMC Kingston at CFB Kingston in Ontario. The reason that “Acts of Homosexuality” is in quotes, is that is also what the Canadian Forces investigated Captain McRae for in 1980 when he was suspected of committing the crimes of Gross Indecency, Indecent Assault, and Buggery, with numerous male children on Canadian Forces Base Namao from the summer of 1978 until May of 1980.
The question is, was Captain McRae involved with young boys on CFB Kingston?

In between McRae’s posting at RMC Kingston and CFB Namao, he had been posted to Canadian Forces Station Holberg on Vancouver Island. According to another base brat from a Facebook group, McRae was known to have been involved with a teenage boy on the station.

After McRae was quietly booted from the military in July of 1980, he made his way to the kiddie-diddler recycling centre called Southdown in Ontario. After his brief stint in “counselling” he was allowed to become involved with a church in Scarborough, Ontario in the late 1980s. McRae was arrested and charged with molesting two brothers. McRae was going to plead innocent until the Ontario Crown informed him that there were at least 10 other children ready to come forward with complaints that McRae had sexually abused them.

McRae wasn’t the only military chaplain with a questionable past. Retired Brigadier General Roger Bazin was arrested and charged in 2011 with molesting a boy on Canadian Forces Base Borden in 1974. I will have more to say about Bazin later.

The military was the perfect place for these perverts to molest children. Rank was very important on base. If the son of a corporal were to come forward and make a complaint against a Captain or a Major, who do you think the military police would believe?

Also, back in the days I lived on the bases, homophobia was very much a thing. No male child in their right mind would want anyone else on base knowing that they had sex, consensual or otherwise, with another male.

Sadly, Captain McRae died on May 18th, 2011. This was two and a half months after the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service started looking into the complaint I had made against Captain McRae’s altar boy, Mr. P.S.. According to Master Warrant Officer Terry Eisenmenger, the CFNIS will not open an investigation into the connection between Captain McRae and his altar boy, Mr. P.S. as McRae is dead.

I’m sure that McRae’s death isn’t the only reason why the CFNIS won’t investigate to see the connection between McRae and Mr. P.S.. There are two flaws in the pre-1998 National Defence Act which conspire to prevent charges from being laid against anyone who was subject to the Code of Service Discipline prior to 1998. I’ll go into detail about these two flaws in upcoming posts.

I was a military dependant as a child. In otherwords, I was an itinerant moving from one side of this country to the other at the whim of my father’s military career.

I lived on military bases from the day I was born until months into my 16th year. I lived in 6 different houses on 5 different bases in four different provinces by the time I was 12. If you include the 2 months that I moved back in with my father when I was 18, I lived in 7 different PMQs on 6 bases in four provinces. But hey, who’s counting.

You would think that living on a military base would be the safest place for a child, but sadly this isn’t the case. A child was just as likely to be sexually assaulted on base as they were to be sexually assaulted off base. The primary difference between the child assaulted on base and the child assaulted off base is that the child assaulted off base was more likely to receive justice that the child sexually assaulted on base.

As this blog goes on, I will be highlighting the historical flaws in the National Defence Act which serve to prevent persons who were sexually abused on base prior to 1998 from receiving any type of recognition or justice for the abuse they endured. Parliament has the ability to rectify these issues. But it remains to be seen if the Minister of National Defence will ever acknowledge these flaws.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

Okay, so I’ve decided to move my blog from Google Blogger over to WordPress.
The biggest change is that I own the domain:  cfbnamao.ca

The next biggest change is that I will be able to use the WordPress Android app to make mobile posts. The Blogger app seems to have become a very low priority for Google and it hasn’t been updated in quite a while.

As usual, this blog is going to touch on child sexual abuse in the Canadian Armed Forces.

I will be posting mainly new content on this blog, but over time I will be bringing most of my content from the blogger site over to this site