Tragic Discoveries from the Canadian Indigenous Schools and other Events

1. When the Church and a Dirty Politician Conspired to Ruin the Lives of Orphans for Money

In order to exploit the Canadian federal government’s subsidy program, Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church conspired to turn orphans into psychiatric patients. To implement their idea and siphon more federal subsidy dollars into the Church’s coffers, they set up a system to falsely diagnose orphans as mentally deficient. As a first step, Duplessis signed an order that instantly transformed Quebec’s orphanages into hospitals. That entitled their religious order administrators – and ultimately the Catholic Church of Quebec – to receive the higher subsidy rates for hospitals.

It took decades before the tragic and scandalous state of affairs was finally uncovered. By then, over 20,000 otherwise mentally sound Quebecoise orphans had been misdiagnosed with psychiatric ailments. Once they were misdiagnosed, the orphans were declared “mentally deficient”. It was not just a paperwork technicality. Once misdiagnosed as “mentally deficient”, the orphans’ schooling stopped, and they became inmates in poorly supervised mental institutions. There, the children were often subjected by nuns and lay monitors to physical, mental, and sexual abuse.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

All That is Interesting – Why Isn’t Belgium’s King Leopold II As Reviled As Hitler or Stalin?

Australian War Memorial – Rain and Mud: The Ypres-Passchendaele Offensive

Canadian Encyclopedia – Doukhobors

Clement, Dominique – Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movement and Social Change, 1937-82 (2008)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Hitler Youth

History – How the Hitler Youth Turned a Generation of Kids Into Nazis

History Collection – The Dark Side of Great Historical Figures

History Learning Site – The Edelweiss Pirates

Holocaust Research Project – The Hitler Youth

Horne, Alistair – A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1978)