2. Transforming Orphans Into Psychiatric Patients
Maurice Duplessis hatched a scheme with Church authorities to game the Canadian federal government’s subsidy assistance program to the provinces. The idea 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 construction of hospitals, more so than other social programs and infrastructures. Provinces received a federal contribution of about C$1.25 a day for every orphan, but more than twice that, C$2.75, for every psychiatric patient. So Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church decided to transform C$1.25-a-day orphans into more profitable C$2.75-a-day psychiatric patients. In order to exploit the Canadian federal government’s subsidy program, Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church conspired to turn C$1.25-a-day orphans into C$2.75-a-day psychiatric patients. To carry out their scheme and siphon more federal subsidy dollars, Quebec’s Catholic Church and Maurice Duplessis set up a system to falsely diagnose orphans as mentally deficient.
