16. When the Church Misdiagnosed Children to Enrich its Coffers
Until the 1960s, Quebec’s Catholic Church held significant sway over that Canadian province. The 1940s and 1950s in particular were an era of widespread poverty, few social services, and Catholic Church predominance. It was then that Maurice Duplessis, a strict Catholic, became premier of Quebec. He immediately placed 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 divert taxpayer dollars into the coffers of Quebec’s Catholic Church.
It included setting 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 the higher subsidy rates for hospitals. It took decades before the scandalous state of affairs was finally uncovered. By then, over 20,000 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.
