North America's Crime of the Century?

Up to 50,000 innocent children may have died or disappeared in Quebec’s psychiatric institutions.

Survivors demand justice.

Clarina Duguay remembers what life was like before her mother, Clara, moved away. The eldest daughter among five children, she recalls the happy life of a family, cash-poor but rich in love, in Cap d’Espoir, a fishing village on Canada’s Gaspe peninsula.

Every morning, with her dog, Coffee, she helped her mother gather up the eight or nine cows the family owned so they could be milked. From her mother, she learned many things, including how to bake delicious bread — a skill that today, more than 60 years later, she still enjoys.

In a rural community where horses were the primary means of transportation, Clara encouraged Clarina’s dream of one day becoming an airline stewardess. It was a close-knit family, one where each member supported the others.

The idyllic life ended in 1945, when Clara, stricken by tuberculosis, moved to a sanatorium.

Clarina’s father, Joseph Duguay, a lumberjack frequently away from home, was persuaded by the family doctor and the parish priest to send Clarina and her younger sister, Simonne, to an orphanage in Rimouski, on the St. Lawrence River. He was told they would be well educated.

But in 1946, shortly after Clarina turned 11, she and perhaps 10 other children from the facility were loaded onto a bus. Told they were being taken on a tour of Rimouski, they were instead driven to the town of St. Ferdinand, hundreds of miles away, and through the gates of the St. Julien psychiatric institution. There, Clarina’s horror story began.

Click here to read the full story >>