This Plan to Help Orphans Tragically Backfired
The Canadian federal government’s subsidy program backfired because it was vulnerable to exploitation. Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church conspired to turn orphans into psychiatric patients. They 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 Quebec’s Catholic Church – 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 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 and mental abuse.
