Government Subsidy Plan Leads to Deliberate Misdiagnosing of Thousands of Children
Before Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution“- a period of secularization and major social and political changes in the 1960s – the Catholic Church held significant, and sometimes pernicious, sway over that Canadian province. The 1940s and 1950s in particular were considered an era of widespread poverty, few social services, and Catholic Church predominance.
In those dark days, Maurice Duplessis, a strict Catholic, became premier of Quebec. He immediately proceeded to place the province’s schools, orphanages, and hospitals, in the hands of various Catholic religious orders. Duplessis then hatched a scheme with Church authorities to game the Canadian federal government’s subsidy assistance program to the provinces. The goal was to divert as many taxpayer dollars as possible into the coffers of Quebec’s Catholic Church.
Canada’s federal subsidy program incentivized healthcare and the building of hospitals, more so than other social programs and infrastructures. For example, provinces received a federal contribution of about $1.25 a day for every orphan, but more than twice that, $2.75, for every psychiatric patient. So Duplessis and the Catholic Church set up a system to falsely diagnose orphans as mentally deficient, in order to siphon more federal subsidy dollars into the Church’s coffers. As a first step, Duplessis signed an order that instantly turned Quebec’s orphanages into hospitals. That entitled their religious order administrators – and ultimately the Catholic Church of Quebec – to receive higher subsidy rates for hospitals.
It took decades before the 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: the orphans’ schooling stopped, and they became inmates in poorly supervised mental institutions, where they were subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuse by nuns and lay monitors.
