Families of patients allegedly brainwashed decades ago at a Montreal psychiatric hospital fear they are running out of time to seek compensation as the federal government and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) have filed motions to have their lawsuit dismissed.
Glenn Landry’s mother, Catherine Elizabeth Harter, was one of hundreds of people who underwent experimental treatments under the “MK-ULTRA” program, funded by the Canadian government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The treatments were administered between the 1940s and 1960s at the Allan Memorial Institute, affiliated with McGill University.
Glenn Landry was born after his mother was hospitalized in 1959 and had to be raised by a foster family because they couldn’t care for him.
While he says the early trauma she suffered before seeking treatment undoubtedly played a role in her mental health issues, he believes the electroshock and drug therapy she received during her months-long stay under Dr.r Donald Ewen Cameron and his colleagues deprived him of his mother-son relationship.
“She wasn’t the person she could have been because I had no way of asking her about her memories,” he said of his mother, whom he saw about once a year until her death in the 1980s. “She spent time with me because I was her son, but I couldn’t know anything about her as a person.”
The defendants plead prescription
Glenn Landry is one of 60 families suing the Canadian government, the McGill University Health Centre and the Royal Victoria Hospital over the “MK-ULTRA” program.
The plaintiffs allege that their relatives were subjected to psychiatric experiments that included powerful drugs, repeated audio messages, induced comas and electroshocks that in some cases reduced them to a state comparable to that of a child.
Lawyer Alan Stein, who represents the group, had hoped the federal government and the hospitals would agree to negotiate an out-of-court settlement to compensate his clients, many of whom are elderly.
Instead, the opposing parties filed motions in Superior Court last week asking it to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing it was “without legal merit” and constituted “an abuse of process.”
Ottawa and the hospitals argue that the statute of limitations has expired – that they should have been filed years, even decades, ago, when the facts surrounding the case first came to light.
Moreover, one of the motions argues that this is an abuse of process in that the lawsuit seeks to re-litigate questions of fact and law that the Quebec courts decided more than two decades ago.
In an email, a spokesperson for the federal Justice Department said the government “recognizes the suffering and pain inflicted on those affected by these historical treatments,” but believes the claims are without merit.
The ministry points out that a 1986 report on the work of Dr Cameron concluded that the Canadian government was not legally or morally responsible for the treatment, but that it had nevertheless agreed to provide assistance to victims in the 1990s for “humanitarian reasons.”
The McGill University Health Centre declined to comment.
“Delaying tactic”
Stein believes the motion to dismiss the lawsuit is actually a delaying tactic by government lawyers. “They feel like my clients are not going to pursue it, that they’re going to lose confidence and just not agree to move forward,” he said in a telephone interview.
He says his clients should still have the right to sue because they didn’t know that option was available to them earlier. And while some victims have been compensated, most of the money hasn’t been paid to their families, Stein said.
The lawsuit seeks nearly $1 million per family for what Stein calls a “complete miscarriage of justice.”
Glenn Landry compares the victims’ long legal ordeal to the wait that Japanese-Canadian survivors of World War II internment camps had to face before obtaining justice; he also points out that the victims of “MK-ULTRA” also want an apology.
A collective action in parallel
Given that another group of alleged victims of the Dr Cameron and another lawyer had already filed a class action lawsuit, but Stein instead chose to file a direct lawsuit, which allows plaintiffs to be mandated by others in similar circumstances to proceed on their behalf.
The Superior Court set the stage for a 2022 trial when it denied the government and hospitals’ request to partially dismiss the lawsuit, but the process was delayed by an appeal, which also failed.
The proposed class action representing the other victims had attempted to also include the U.S. government as a defendant, but the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that the U.S. state could not be sued in Canada for its alleged role in the experiments; the Supreme Court of Canada later declined to hear the case.
Although the two lawsuits are separate, Stein said a victory by the government and the hospitals in his case would make it very difficult to move forward in the class action, which would likely be targeted by a similar motion from the defendants.
Became like a “living death”
One of the two plaintiffs named in the suit has already withdrawn. Marilyn Rappaport said in an interview that she withdrew after her husband’s death. That devastating grief, combined with her constant need to support siblings who were victims of the experiments, made the prospect of reliving her terrible childhood memories in court too difficult, she said.
Ms. Rappaport says her sister Evelyn, once a “beautiful artist,” has become like a “living dead” in the decades since she was hospitalized for treatments, including being put to sleep for “months at a time” and subjected to looped audio messages. Now in her 80s, her sister is institutionalized and her memory is “completely gone,” Ms.me Rappaport.
Although she is no longer part of the prosecution, Ms.me Rappaport still hopes for a victory and is frustrated that the government continues to fight. “I don’t understand why it’s taking so long.”