I need to explain something deeply personal — not just what happened to Ryan, but how I eventually discovered the truth.

For nine years, I have been legally banned from seeing my own son.

People who commit serious violent crimes — even murder — are often allowed contact with their children through visits, calls, or letters.

Yet I — a father who was caring for his disabled son, attending medical appointments, advocating for treatment, and supporting his independence — was completely erased from his life by court order.

There are only two possible explanations for this.

 
Possibility One: I Did Something Truly Sinister

If I had abused Ryan, endangered him, or harmed him in some profound way, then a permanent ban might make sense.

But here are the facts:

No court ever found that I abused Ryan
No criminal charge was ever laid
No doctor, psychologist, or specialist testified that Ryan needed protection from me
Multiple professionals documented Ryan’s bond with me and his desire for autonomy
There is no evidence supporting this explanation.

 
Possibility Two: Something Sinister Happened Behind Ryan’s Back

This is the explanation the evidence supports — but it took years to understand it.

At the time, our family:

Had no lawyer
Had no access to legal aid
Was told by government information that adult guardianship could be done without a lawyer
Believed the courts would follow the safeguards written into the law
We did not know what we did not know.

 
How I Discovered What Really Happened

Years later, while trying to understand how something this extreme could happen without findings, without charges, and without evidence, I came across two independent bodies of work that changed everything.

1. Professor Doug Surtees’ Research on Adult Guardianship

Doug Surtees is a law professor at the University of Saskatchewan who conducted empirical research on hundreds of adult guardianship cases.

His findings were shocking — and clarifying:

Courts routinely grant total (plenary) guardianship orders, even when the law forbids it
Judges often ignore medical assessments that recommend limited or supported decision-making
Adults are frequently excluded from participation in proceedings
The safeguards written into the law are not applied in practice
Surtees concluded that Saskatchewan’s guardianship system looks progressive on paper but fails in reality, and that many adults are over-protected to the point of harm.

His most well-known warning is:

“Guardianship is a crude tool; if it must be used, it must be used with skill.”

Ryan’s case matched his findings almost point for point.

 
2. Tim Korol’s Report: The Secret Shame

I then came across former police officer Tim Korol’s report, The Secret Shame, which explains a concept called plausible denial.

It describes how institutions:

avoid documenting inconvenient facts
limit transparency
restrict participation
and then claim they cannot act because there is “no evidence” — even when the system itself prevented evidence from being created
Reading this was like reading a map of what happened to Ryan.

When a vulnerable person:

is not allowed to participate
is denied access to advocates
is isolated from supportive family
and is governed by sealed or one-sided processes
harm can occur without anyone ever being held accountable.

That is not an accident.
It is a system protecting itself.

 
What This Means for Ryan

Ryan is the one who suffered the most.

He:

lost his civil rights
lost his voice in decisions about his own life
lost contact with a loving parent
lives under a legal structure experts describe as overly intrusive and harmful
Independent scholars and advocates describe outcomes like this as legal psychological abuse — where the law itself becomes the mechanism of isolation, loss of autonomy, and long-term harm.

 
Why I’m Telling You This

I’m not asking you to automatically take my side.

I am asking you to understand this:

Either I committed acts so extreme that I deserved to be erased from my son’s life — without charges, without findings, without evidence
Or a system failed behind closed doors, exactly in the way experts and journalists have warned it does
There is no third explanation.

And after years of research, documentation, and silence from the institutions involved, the second explanation is the only one supported by facts.

 
What I Hope You Understand

I didn’t abandon my son.
I didn’t disappear.
I didn’t give up.

I was removed — and it took years to understand how and why.

Finding Doug Surtees’ research and Tim Korol’s work didn’t create this reality.
It revealed it.

Thank you for taking the time to understand