The Truth Factory has published this important video about the 20th century history of child trafficking in Canada, as it relates to Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, the Catholic Church and the CIA’s MK Ultra.
The war had ended and the baby boom had begun filling up the orphanages with children. The [Canadian] federal government decided to withdraw most of its funding for public education but was still actively funding health care, meaning that these orphanages would receive the funding of 70 cents per orphan per day, whereas, hospitals with children labeled as ‘mentally ill’ or ‘incompetent’ would get $2.25 cents per day.
“So, in order to get more federal funding, the Quebec gov advised the Catholic institutions to change the facilities’ vocation to ‘Asylum’ in order to benefit from the federal funding. Catholic religious grps received $70 million in subsidies by claiming that the orphans were mentally ill and overnight, many of these schools transformed into psychiatric hospitals or these children were shipped away from one day to the next.
“The rooms became cells, the windows had bars the books were thrown into the trash and medical records were falsified, giving the orphans false medical diagnosis without any assessments. Now that these children held labels, they no longer required education and could be used as slave labor…”
How the hell the gov and citizens allowed this to happen ill never understand. And I thought the religious were good human beings!
The Duplessis Orphans were 20k Canadian children who were wrongly certified as mentally ill by the provincial gov of Quebec and confined to psychiatric institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. The children were deliberately miscertified in order to misappropriate additional subsidies from the federal government. They are named for Maurice Duplessis, who served as Premier of Quebec. The controversies associated with Duplessis, and particularly the corruption and abuse concerning the Duplessis orphans, have led to the popular historic conception of his term as Premier as La Grande Noirceur ("The Great Darkness") by its critics.
A doctor to lie like that!
The Duplessis Orphans have accused both the government of Quebec and the Roman Catholic Church of wrongdoing. The Catholic Church has denied involvement in the allegations, and disputes the claims of those seeking financial compensation for harm done.
Background
During the 1940s and 1950s, limited social services were available to residents of Quebec. Prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, most of the social services available were provided through the Roman Catholic Church. Among their charges were people considered to be socially vulnerable: those living in poverty, alcoholics or other individuals deemed unable to retain work, unwed mothers, and orphans.
Consistent with the values of both the Church and the period, many children were admitted to orphanages despite not having been formally orphaned due to their "bastard" status (being born to unwed mothers). Some of these orphanages were operated by religious institutions, due to a lack of secular investment in social services; they encouraged unwed mothers to leave their children there, so that they might be raised in the Church. Despite the claims of supporting the children, many orphans born out of wedlock suffered from poor care in these facilities.
(Lunatic Asylum Act) of 1909 governed mental institution admissions until 1950. The law stated the mentally ill could be committed for three reasons: to care for them, to help them, or as a measure to maintain social order in public and private life. However, the act did not define what a disruption of social order was, leaving the decision to admit patients up to psychiatrists.
The provincial government of Union Nationale Premier Maurice Duplessis received subsidies from the federal gov for building hospitals, but received substantially fewer subsidies to support orphanages. Government contributions were only $1.25 a day for orphans, but $2.75 a day for psychiatric patients. This provided a strong financial incentive for reclassification. Under Duplessis, the provincial government was responsible for a significant number of healthy older children being deliberately misdiagnosed as mentally incompetent and sent to psychiatric hospitals, based on superficial diagnoses made for fiscal reasons. Duplessis also signed an order-in-council which changed the classification of orphanages into hospitals in order to provide them with federal subsidies.
A commission in the early 1960s investigating mental institutions after Duplessis' death revealed one-third of the 22k patients classified as "mentally incompetent" were classified as such for the province's financial benefit, and not due to any real psychiatric deficit. Following the publication of the Bédard report in 1962, the province ceased retaining the institutional notion of "asylum". When many of the orphans reached adulthood, in light of these institutional changes, they were permitted to leave the facilities.
Fate of Human Remains
In 2004, some Duplessis orphans asked the Quebec gov to unearth an abandoned cemetery in the east end of Montreal, which they believed to have held the remains of orphans who may have been the subject of human experimentation. According to testimony by individuals who were at the Cité de St-Jean-de-Dieu insane asylum, the orphans in the asylum's care were routinely used as non-consensual experimental subjects, and many died as a consequence. The group wanted the government to exhume the bodies so that autopsies may be performed. In Nov 2010, the Duplessis orphans made their case before the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Children don’t have a voice
In 1999, researchers Léo-Paul Lauzon and Martin Poirier issued a report arguing that both the Quebec provincial gov and the Catholic Church made substantial profits by falsely certifying thousands of Quebec orphans as mentally ill during Duplessis' premiership. The authors made a conservative estimate that religious groups received $70 million in subsidies (measured in 1999 dollars) by claiming the children as "mentally deficient", while the gov saved $37 million simply by having one of its orphanages redesignated from an educational institution to a psychiatric hospital. A representative of a religious order involved with the orphanages accused the authors of making "false assertions". In 2010, it was estimated that approximately 300-400 of the original Duplessis orphans were still alive.
God help them all
Child trafficking