Rod Vienneau's sizzlin' new book on the Duplessis Orphan scandal...

The tireless Rod Vienneau of Joliette has penned a book, in French, revealing some of the fruits of his neverending research into the terrible & ongoing injustices suffered by people such as his wife Clarina Duguay, who was put in an insane asylum as a child because it was more profitable for the Duplessis government to do this than to put them in a proper orphanage.

Here's some. In 1959 Duplessis announced that he would build 10 new sanitoriums. Now a sanitorium, what's that exactly? Well, it's generally thought of as a place to treat tuberculosis. We've had a ton of problems with TB in the past, but certainly not in 1959. So what's the big idea? Anyway Duplessis was soon gone and his successor Lesage presumably ditched that weird idea, right? Nope. Not only did Lesage build the 10 sanitoriums, he built 34 across Quebec! A sanitorium is generally a place far away from the city. Nobody would want to go to such a place. A set up for medical experimentation on children.

Another: in most places graveyards are next to churches. In Quebec they're often next to hospitals.

Another: many hospitals in Quebec had their own municipal status. In Montreal the St. Jean de Dieu in the city's east end (now called Louis Hippolite Lafontaine) was a separate municipality called Gamelin with its own police and fire force. Police, when dropping off a drunk, would not be allowed past the gate. Whatever they did inside those walls was their own businesses. There were credible reports of children - perhaps undergoing mysterious experiments - with swollen heads. Another of a 5 year old child chained to a radiator.

There are mysterious unexplained graveyards and hospital records mysteriously missing.

Vienneau's neighbour Paul St.Aubin, an orphan of the later period, has scars all over his skull from when he was detained as a child, in forced farm labour and incarceration. He's clearly the victim of forced lobotomy but he has no memory of any of it.

Vienneau's quest is to find the truth and create some sense of justice, for example, many of the children involved in this heartless scam still maintain the false records of insanity that were pinned on them to justify their incarceration inside insane asylums, in spite of promises, these were never erased. Nor were the orphans given any kind of just compensation, they were given $1,000 per year inside plus an extra $10,000 each, which is insane considering the settlements of victims of similar tragedies elsewhere (must be mentioned again that the bureaucrats processing the files were paid $1,000 per day! for their work).

Hopefully there'll be a book launch in Montreal for Vienneau's important book, I'll keep you posted.

Rod has asked me to pass his phone number along for anybody who'd like further information about this subject: 1-450-756-4253.