In the 1940s and 1950s, quiet Canada became a place where terrible tragedy unfolded. Under the guise of a struggle for "traditional values" and religious morality, Quebec Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis turned the network of orphanages into a corrupt system for making money. The children suffered terrible bullying and humiliation there.
From the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, Canada had a network of “clinics for the mentally disabled,” where people were placed against their will and not at all in order to treat them. Patients were forced into forced labor, tested on medicines, and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. But the worst thing was that the patients of these "clinics" were less than 18 years old. The man responsible for the broken lives of tens of thousands of young Canadians was Maurice Le Noble Duplessis.
Duplessis was an ordinary Quebec lawyer who held conservative views, emphasized his religiosity and adherence to strict morality. Having completed his legal career, he became an equally ordinary provincial politician who did not think about the federal level. Fortunately, according to Canadian laws, the regions are very independent.
Du Plessis's political biography began with the local Conservative Party. And in 1935, the 45-year-old ex-lawyer became the leader and creator of the National Union. In 1936, the new party won regional elections, and Duplessis took over as prime minister of the province of Quebec. True, in the next elections, the National Union lost to the Liberal Party, but in 1944 it took revenge. Then Duplessis returned to the premier's chair to stay in it until his death.
At first, his coming to power did not promise any upheavals. But it soon became clear that conservatism in the understanding of Maurice Duplessis is the maximum restriction of civil rights and the empowerment of the Catholic Church with gigantic powers. In fact, the prime minister began to build a mini-state of religious fanatics in Quebec, for whom every word of any Catholic priest was the ultimate truth and a direct guide to action.
It is not surprising that Duplessis saw the communists as his main enemies. Under him, the activities of the Communist Party were banned in Quebec, the rights of trade unions were restricted and the persecution of any "leftists" began. “Heaven is blue and hell is red!” Read one of the official slogans of the National Union.
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Duplessis closed the newspaper Comba, which tried to criticize his methods, and resolutely suppressed any freethinking. Surprisingly, in this case, the case did without massive repressions or executions of the disaffected. The fact is that Duplessis enjoyed the support of the illiterate strata of the population. They liked what he said about "traditional society," the "national pride of the French Canadians," and the "duty of good Catholics." And soon it bore its ominous fruits.
The more power Maurice Duplessis concentrated in his hands, the more intolerant he became of other people's views. In the National Union, for his authoritarian management style, he was nicknamed the Chief. While the case concerned purely political issues, his categoricalness and inflexibility could not yet cause outright harm. But soon Chief decided to "put in order" public morality.
In Quebec, laws relating to family relations were tightened as much as possible. Henceforth, any child born out of wedlock was subject to placement in an orphanage. Of course, only a marriage consecrated by the Catholic Church was recognized as legal (recall that this took place in the middle of the 20th century).
And the orphanages to which the "orphans" entered were completely transferred to the management of the Catholic monastic orders. It is worth noting that this situation was not unique - the same practice existed in the 1940s in France, of which Quebec was considered the "heir".
Children of too poor or unemployed parents were also sent to orphanages. Outwardly, it all looked like caring for little Canadians. But in reality, the families of trade union activists, communists, or people who lost their jobs for political reasons were primarily on the "black lists".
The Catholic Church, which strongly supported Maurice Duplessis, timely provided the ideological justification for such measures, hypocritically expressing its readiness to take care of the unfortunate "orphans."
At the same time, Duplessis was not at all a fanatic or unmercenary. He soon realized that with the help of an army of "orphans" he could make good money. The fact is that the government of Canada regularly allocated subsidies to Quebec for the maintenance of social protection institutions. The amount for orphanages was calculated on the basis of the norm of US $ 1.25 per day per person.
But for psychiatric clinics, the norm was higher - $ 2.75 per day per patient. Therefore, the unfortunate children taken from their parents began to be massively recognized as mentally disabled. And sometimes, with just one stroke of the pen, they changed the status of the entire orphanage to the status of a psychiatric clinic.
Needless to say, pitiful crumbs came from budget money directly to children? Decent sums were deposited in the accounts of the National Union and church structures, the rest was plundered directly on the ground.
Children who ended up in shelters and declared mentally disabled were deprived of any rights. They were mercilessly used for work on a par with adults. On them without any precautions were tested "new methods of treatment", such as potent psychotropic drugs, passing electric discharges through the body or many hours of fixation in a straitjacket. And some of those who tried to disobey or raise a riot were lobotomized.
But even all this was not the worst. The staff of the orphanages treated the children as their own property and used them to satisfy the most base passions. Both girls and boys were constantly sexually abused, not to mention the daily beatings, humiliation and bullying.
One of the survivors after all this torture, told how every evening the children huddled in their beds, listening with horror to the steps in the corridor and wondering which of them would be taken away for molestation. He himself survived 32 anus repair surgeries.
Those who died without enduring the torture were buried in group unmarked graves. In fact, these were the most real concentration camps, in no way inferior in the cruelty of what happened in them to the Nazi torture chambers.
Only now all this was happening in quiet Canada and after the Third Reich had already been defeated. And Maurice Duplessis, meanwhile, in the intervals between counting money, continued to broadcast about traditional values, religion and national pride.
How many people have gone through this hell is still not exactly calculated. Numbers from 20 to 50 thousand children are named. After they reached the age of 18, they were simply thrown out into the street - completely unfit for life, knowing and not able to do anything, accustomed to considering themselves second-class people, "children of sin", and ready to humbly endure any humiliation.
It is clear that none of them thought to fight for their rights or to publicize the terrible truth. Unable to cope with terrible memories and constant stress, many have committed suicide.
In 1959, Maurice Duplessis died, and the National Union immediately lost its influence. Representatives of the Liberal Party of Quebec that came to power were horrified by the legacy they inherited, but decided not to wash dirty linen in public. The cannibalistic system of "hospitals" built by Duplessis was eliminated, and Catholic orders were removed from the budget trough. This was all, and Canada lived quietly for another 30 years.
In 1989, Radio Canada aired a program in which several people who were kept in "clinics" as children took part. It was then that law-abiding Canadians learned about the nightmare that had been happening in their country for more than ten years.
The emblem of the organization "Orphans of Duplessy"
The victims of the violence united in an organization called the Duplessis Orphans, and since then they have been seeking justice, at least after the fact. By the beginning of the 1990s, there were about 3 thousand of them.
Although very reluctant, the Quebec government nevertheless recognized the rightness of the Duplessis orphans. As victims of the arbitrariness, they were awarded monetary compensation, but even here they were not without problems. The authorities overcame payments with so many bureaucratic procedures that not everyone could get the money.
Meeting of the organization "Orphans of Duplessis"
The Catholic Church still denies any involvement in the Duplessis orphan story and refuses to make an official apology.
Victor Banev