Conclusion
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a decisive moment in the history of social regulation. The existing system was overwhelmed by the needs of families seeking social protection. The financial crisis clearly demonstrated what the labour movement had been claiming for decades, namely that families were vulnerable because they depended on the labour market for their livelihoods.
The system reflected societal choices typical of contemporary liberalism. Rather than promote higher wages and reduce social inequality, liberalism preferred to have destitute members of society, who could no longer be cared for by poor families, placed in charitable institutions. Rather than serve as a replacement for families in crisis, these facilities were generally designed to take over certain functions of the family only until such time as it could re-establish itself under the authority of a male breadwinner who was deemed socially respectable.
These institutions provided services that were often highly appreciated by the most disadvantaged members of society. . Nevertheless, their way of doing things tended to isolate people and restrict personal freedom. They operated based on power relations that encouraged frequent acts of humiliation and abuse.
A Troubled Legacy
Exploring the history of institutional responses to social problems can cause painful memories to resurface. Indeed, there have been persistent accusations of physical and psychological abuse in jails, orphanages, reformatories, residential schools, hospitals, refuges, asylums, and hospices.
Above all, responsibility for these issues lies with governments and religious institutions that worked together to develop and fund a system for institutionalizing poor, vulnerable, and marginal individuals beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Survivors’ stories and official reports have uncovered extensive evidence of abuse. But many, including the newspaper Le Devoir in 2021, have called for a public inquiry to more thoroughly assess how the institutional system managed to undermine human dignity over the decades.
Without a doubt, in recent years, the most significant such initiative has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which concluded that so-called Indian residential schools were at the heart of a “cultural genocide” against indigenous peoples. The history of these residential schools clearly demonstrates how the logic of institutionalization can have devastating consequences when based on racist and colonialist ideologies.
The Insane Cry Out for Help
After the Second World War, medical advances in psychiatric care led many to reconsider the primary role played by asylums in addressing mental health disorders. At the same time, overpopulated asylums faced scathing criticism. For example, in the 1950s, journalist Jacques Hébert condemned the poor psychiatric care provided at Quebec asylums in the pages of the weekly newspaper Vrai.
Such criticisms culminated in 1961 with the publication of Jean-Charles Pagé’s book, titled Les fous crient au secours! Témoignage d’un ex-patient de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.. Speaking on behalf of “men without a voice,” the former patient condemned the degrading housing conditions and lack of medical follow-up at the asylum, as well as the widespread use of punitive and arbitrary punishments. The book, which included an afterword by psychiatrist Camille Laurin, produced a public scandal that led to the creation of a commission of inquiry on psychiatric hospitals.
Released in 1962, the Bédard Commission report described the disturbing state of mental asylums in Quebec. It highlighted the need for a set of comprehensive mental health reforms to ensure better care and greater respect for personal autonomy and individual rights. The proposed reforms focused on the “deinstitutionalization” of care, along with the development of new, community-based patient services. However, such services would be chronically underfunded, negatively impacting many of those dealing with mental health problems.
The Duplessis Orphans
The Duplessis Orphans were not orphans in the strict sense of the word. Rather, they were a group of thousands of children born out of wedlock during the second third of the twentieth century. Their shared experience was shaped by years spent confined to institutions such as nurseries, orphanages, industrial schools, reformatories, and asylums. Having remained silent for decades, several of them came together in the 1990s to demand compensation for the harm they had suffered: false diagnoses of mental illness, arbitrary detention, lack of educational opportunities, forced labour, physical and psychological abuse, and sexual assault.
In 2001, those who had been falsely labelled as mentally ill accepted an offer from the Quebec government that included modest financial compensation of about $25,000 per person. Six years later, individuals who had been committed to non-psychiatric institutions and labelled “deficient” received $15,000 each. In 2018, another group of survivors filed a class action (still ongoing) against the federal government, the provincial government, and certain religious communities.
“Orphelins Duplessis : Leur nouveau combat” [The Duplessis Orphans: Their New Struggle], Le Téléjournal 18h30, Ici Radio-Canada Info, March 2018.
Quebec Clergy and the Canadian Residential School System
Catholic missionaries from Quebec and France maintained a strong presence across the Prairies and on the West Coast from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a French Catholic congregation that arrived in Quebec at the request of Mgr. Bourget in 1841, established themselves throughout the Indigenous territories of western North America beginning in 1845. Even before the residential school system was developed by the Canadian government in the 1880s, the Oblates attempted (and sometimes succeeded) in attaching such institutions to their missions. In fact, Oblate schools served as a model for the later implementation of a larger network. Oblates Vital Grandin and Albert Lacombe were both involved in the design of the system established by J. A. Macdonald’s government in 1883. Lacombe, a heroic French Canadian figure in the 1870s, was named principal of one of the first three industrial schools to receive federal funding.
However, not all early funding for the residential school system came in the form of government subsidies. In fact, the Catholic populations of Quebec, Canada, and France supported the Oblates with donations of money, human resources (teaching sisters, lay brothers, etc.), and goods required to maintain the institutions. For example, in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Quebec dioceses organized annual province-wide fundraising drives to support the “Northwest schools.”
Residential Schools for Indigenous Children
Except for a boarding school attended by about ten Huron-Wendat children each year between 1829 and 1853, Quebec had no residential schools before 1931. In the years that followed, six such schools were established in the province. They included the Pointe-Bleue (Mashteuiatsh) residential school in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, which closed in 1991. Furthermore, the many Catholic residential schools located in other parts of Canada were often staffed by members of religious communities based in Quebec.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, residential schools became a key feature of the federal policy for assimilating Canada’s Indigenous population. Most Indigenous children started attending at age 5 or 6. They were forbidden from speaking their native language and prevented from bonding with their siblings. Civil and religious authorities portrayed the curriculum as a means of “civilizing” Indigenous children by cutting them off from their traditional way of life. The institutional environment proved conducive to widespread psychological, physical, and sexual abuse.
Between 2008 and 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to acknowledge the shared experience of more than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada. It highlighted the devastating impact of residential schools on children, families, and communities. The commission’s report recognizes knowledge of the history of residential schools as a key aspect of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada.
From Charity to Social Law
In the twentieth century, various social movements, secular and religious reformers, and individuals receiving social assistance succeeded in convincing public authorities to stop institutionalizing people living in poverty and start investing in social policy aimed at bolstering family incomes. As a result, a series of new programs were introduced: unemployment insurance (1940), family allowance (1945), old-age security (1951), hospital insurance (1960), and health insurance (1970).
Unlike charity, these protections were recognized as citizenship rights, based on the principle of universality. And whereas the shameful notion of destitution had previously underpinned institutional charity and the public welfare system, the Social Aid Act of 1969 adopted a new approach. The legislation recognized a citizen’s right to receive a minimal income without regard to race, sex, religion, or moral standing.
Granted, the recognition of these social rights failed to eliminate poverty, exclusion, and discrimination. To begin with, they addressed a limited range of social problems. Furthermore, their implementation has never lived up to their underlying ideals, especially in the case of social assistance. Finally, these rights have been increasingly contested by the proponents of a neoliberal ideology that sees them as a threat to family integrity and individual responsibility.
History shows that demands for social rights are rooted in the sometimes painful and traumatic experiences associated with an institutional response to social problems. As a result, social and community movements have a crucial role to play by keeping the memory of these experiences alive. Such movements also serve to remind us that a society’s democratic potential is tied to its ability to demonstrate social solidarity and to ensure the well-being and dignity of its most vulnerable members.
