Duplessis Orphans to be heard at Supreme Court - Quebec tragedy finally gets to federal court

   Canada's Supreme Court will judge a grievance stemming from an outrageous and grotesque scam Quebec's government perpetuated on children in the 1950s to 1970s. 

    The Duplessis Orphans were children entrusted to the state - namely the province of Quebec under Maurice Duplessis - who in turn forced them to stay in insane asylums and even Bordeaux Prison.

   The arrangment was profitable for the provincial government because it received hefty federal funding for inmates of such institutions, as opposed to a much lower sum for kids in orphanages.

  The children were forced to suffer unthinkable abuses at  the hands of the clergy-run psychiatric institutions. Normal children were treated as mentally deficient and some were detained in straitjackets, forced to stay inside 24 hours a day, not given any education and countless other more intense horrors. Victims of this system were falsely recorded in government files as having mental issues. 

   The group organized with public protests in the 1990s and it ultimately led to a Quebec government compensation package of about $15,000 per orphan under the PQ Landry government in 2001. 

 Those who took the paltry sum were forced to sign off on any other compensation demands, their psychiatric records were not erased and the payments were described as "welfare" rather than compensation.

  Naturally the settlement was peanuts and was notably low compared to the cash given to individuals in the Residential School affair - arguably a far-less egregious situation. So the orphans were unhappy with the arrangment and restarted a legal challenge to get a more complete settlement. 

  Quebec's Superior Court issued a ruling on 21 May turning down the lawsuit. Laywer Alan Stein will now bring it to the Supreme Court, the first time that a court outside of Quebec will see the case. 

   The specific case centers around Marc Boudreau, 66, who did not receive the 2001 compensation package. He reports that he was given electroshock therapy while being detained at the Mont Providence psychiatric hospital in Montreal, among other horrors. 

   Boudreau is asking for $875,000 in compensation and if he wins it could lead to a similar settlement for about 100 other survivors. The defendants are listed as Quebec and Canada's Crown Prosecutors and nine Quebec-based religious orders.