Changemaker Tad Milmine: Pushing back against bullying in Calgary and beyond

Yahoo

10-06-2025

It's the kind of childhood so many don't survive: being relentlessly bullied at school, only to return at the end of each day to a home of abuse and neglect.
'Because I had no friends, I had no one to talk to,' Tad Milmine says of his agonizing adolescent years. 'I didn't realize until later how bad it was at home, how I was so different.'
Yet, the now 51-year-old not only survived, he thrived — and has spent the past 14 years helping others avoid his early torment. The founder of bullyingendshere.com has now spoken about his experiences to hundreds of thousands of teens both at home and abroad, forcing out of the shadows an increasingly growing societal problem that brings so much human misery, sometimes resulting in self-harm, suicide and even the rare violent acting out on the part of its victims.
For his efforts, Milmine has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Medal for exceptional leadership, citizenship and community service; the Sovereign's Medal for Volunteers, given out by the Governor General of Canada; the City of Calgary's International Achievement Award; and the Alberta Individual Award for Leadership.
It's a life transformation that Milmine, a constable with the Calgary Police Service for the past dozen years, could never have imagined when he was that scared boy growing up in Cambridge, Ont.
Living with his alcoholic father and stepmother, he was relegated to a dank, dark basement each day after school, his meals delivered to him by his stepmother by a knock on the door. 'I knew it was mealtime when I heard the thud' of his food tray hitting the floor, he says.
While his father ignored the situation, Milmine was so scared of his stepmother that he would urinate in the laundry wash basin rather than ask her to be let out to use the bathroom. 'She absolutely terrified me,' he says of the woman he refers to in his speeches as The Devil.
'I would do anything not to interact with her.'
School offered no reprieve. The constant teasing often went on at lunch in the school cafeteria, where the cruelty would get so bad it brought on tears running down his face.
'That only made it worse,' he says of the bullying.
By adolescence, Milmine also realized he was gay, a fact he feared his tormentors would suss out. He knew his nickname 'Crybaby' was mild compared to what they would do if they knew about his sexual orientation. 'Back then, there weren't role models for gay kids like there are in 2025,' he says, adding it's nevertheless still a factor in bullying in schools today.
'I didn't know what to do with these feelings, other than tell no one.'
In Grade 10, he ran away from home and, with the help of government funding, got his own place. He managed to graduate high school while holding down two part-time jobs. He did attempt suicide once, at age 21. The very next day, he vowed to himself he'd get the help he needed.
'I realized that reaching out was a sign of strength, not weakness,' he says.
After travelling throughout Europe in his early 20s, he came to terms with his sexuality. He called his biological mother — it was during this period that he reconciled with his mom, who he says was barely a kid when she had him — to tell her he was gay.
His confession was met with little surprise, but much support.
At age 32, Milmine realized his longtime dream of becoming a police officer, joining the RCMP in Surrey, B.C.
A few years into his job, he made a pledge to help other bullied kids after reading an article about Ottawa's Jamie Hubley, a gay teen who had died by suicide after years of bullying. 'It lit a fire in me, and I knew then I had to do something,' says Milmine. 'If you had asked me if I was going to tell people about my past, let alone become a public speaker, I would have said, 'no way.' '
At first, his RCMP superiors were supportive of his totally volunteer off-hours vocation, as he began receiving more invitations to talk to teens at schools around the province of B.C. With a change in supervisors, though, came a change in attitude toward his extracurricular activities.
'Politics started coming into play,' he says of a growing list of demands that included emails sent to him in his volunteer capacity instead coming into an RCMP website.
'My options were to continue to be a police officer but not do my charity work, or do my charity work and no longer be an RCMP officer,' he says.
An appearance in 2014 at Calgary's Weber Academy, where he spoke to a crowd of more than 700 teens, sealed his new direction. After making acquaintance with Calgary Const. Andy Buck — who would later join his charity team — Milmine accepted an offer to join the local force. His work in law enforcement has garnered him several accolades, including the CPS' Community Policing Award and The Governor General of Canada's Order of Merit of the Police Forces.
Milmine calls working for the CPS nothing short of a blessing. 'They've supported me in both roles,' he says, noting that he loves both his 'big boy time driving a police car,' and his work helping kids and families in the fight against bullying.
'When you have a voice, it's important to use it in a responsible way,' he says of his powerful talks that include no technology, just him talking for about 90 minutes to his enraptured audiences. 'If people are listening to you, that's power. If you're spreading a positive, accurate message, you can get that positive powerful response back.'
Some of the teens he's helped have even been inspired to pay it forward, forming their own school clubs to help get the word out.
Recently, Milmine took his first steps to realizing another lifelong dream, buying a cottage in Nova Scotia with plans to restore it and eventually live there full-time. 'For the past five years I've been searching real estate listings, hoping one day to live on the East Coast by the ocean,' he says of his new home-away-from-home, where he is currently spending time while on leave from the CPS, dealing with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
'My life is an open book, and there should be no shame in talking about dealing with mental-health issues,' he says of an issue that affects many on the front lines of law enforcement.
He also recently took another trip, this one to Cambridge, to see the old house that has frequently visited him in his nightmares. 'The woman who lived there let me in and I told her my story,' he says, noting he paid a visit to the basement, as dark and dank as ever.
'It was hard to go in there, but I wanted to own it,' he says, noting in the end it was a 'liberating' experience.
'By going back, you're conquering the fear,' he says, adding that on that same trip, he spoke to students in the very school cafeteria where he was bullied nearly four decades earlier, his mission even more important in this new, highly troubling era of online bullying and harassment.
It's a poetic demonstration of how his life has come full circle — Milmine well aware of the positive impact his story could have on a troubled kid like he once was.
'It's amazing to me that to this day, kids still keep listening,' he says modestly of his powerful, life-changing charity work that makes him a worthy Calgary Herald Changemaker.
'There's still a lot of work to do, so I can't imagine ever stopping.'
Changemakers, a regular series in the Calgary Herald, started Feb. 25, 2025. Read more at calgaryherald.com/changemakers. Who are the changemakers you know? If you're aware of someone making a difference — big or small — in our community, send us a couple of sentences, along with that person's name, describing why they deserve a public nod. We'll publish their name, along with your description of why they are a changemaker, at calgaryherald.com. Feel free to send along a photo, too, to [e-mail]