The Slow War: Access to Information Acts, Reactions and Actions

One month ago today, I sent a request for information to the DPJ, Quebec’s monolithic Youth Protection bureaucratic machine, to their Access to Information Request email address. Gmail was able to confirm they received the email. It’s amazing how much data is available to you, if you know how to look.

They had 20 business days to reply, either giving me a copy of my file, or giving me some bullshit excuse as to why they “couldn’t” supply me with a copy. I expected the latter not the former.

The DPJ, as always, did not fail to surprise:

They elected not to reply at all.

Yesterday, the 25th of August, was their legally-mandated deadline to respond. So today, I sent a request via email to the appeals board, the “Tribunal Administratif” as they like to call it in this little province of Quebec.

If they manage to fuck me over there, I’ll take them to the Human Rights Commission. If that doesn’t work, I’ll fucking sue them, if I fucking have to.

If that doesn’t work, well…nothing’s off the table.

I asked for access to my file with the DPJ, because as I said in a previous post, I intend to blow the lid off the culture of malfeasance and bad faith that rules the Direction de Protection de Jeunesse, and the vile cockroaches who pretend to be social workers while running it.

Why? As mentioned in a previous post, the Montreal Comiccon fiasco. For another, the time my daughter, while visiting me, asked why M, the social worker at the time, was asking her if I had ever inappropriately touched her. Leia was was afraid, because she knew they were trying to get either her or me into trouble. I tried to reassure her it was SOP, but she told me that neither of her siblings had been asked any similar questions. It should go without saying but I will say it nonetheless: I would never and have never been inappropriate with any of my children in any way.

I cannot communicate the level of disgust I felt when I heard what M had to say, when I called her on it. It boils my blood more than two years later, just thinking about it.

They say I traumatized my children because of my “unreliable” behavior; I ask how much more trauma have several different social workers caused my children in their attempts to alienate them from me? Including one who had me arrested after triggering me into a nervous breakdown, and another who suggested to my ex-wife that she use her texts with me to alienate my children from me.

This entire time, the only goal the DPJ has, has been the destruction of me as a father to my children. They’ve robbed me of the last years of their childhood; my kids are young adults now, and I don’t even know what they look like, because they’ve grown up so much in the last few years.

They say I traumatized my children because of my “unreliable” behavior: I have constant moderate to severe back pain because of a lower back injury suffered when I was a kid. Subsequent to that injury I developed arthrosciatic pain. I have also suffered with irritable bowel and acid reflux since my twenties; this has given rise to Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome in my fifties. I can start my day fine, then out of nowhere and for no good goddamn reason I will become violently ill. I also live with anxiety and depression.

The DPJ WEAPONIZED my disabilities in order to paint me as “unreliable” and “unstable;” despite them being the reason I had a mental breakdown.

Oh, yes, I got into psychiatric care after years of searching for it; oh, absolutely, I’m a new man today for what I went through.

But it is also true that despite even being cleared by the courts of the crime of rage-texting the social worker who drove me into a nervous breakdown and despite meeting every goal the DPJ set for me, instead of seeing my children, they just kept moving the goalposts; they pushed me into this, and they pushed me too fucking far one too many times.

I’ve cursed their souls with the righteousness of the wronged, the oppresed, and the persecuted; for they violated my fatherhood, and my life.

I will never forgive them for it, because I cannot forgive the injuries I’ve suffered and continue to suffer because of them.

But right now, I think I need to take a nap.

If you are a victim of this or any other monolith of bureaucratic authority and qualified immunity, don’t lay down; get up, stand up and fight. Fight as hard as you can, with every tool at your disposal.

…and when or if you run out of legal measures, welcome to the Resistance.

We are Legion, because we are many.