statism watch

CBC News
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | 11:54 AM ET

Toronto police are holding public meetings to gauge reaction to plans to install surveillance cameras in three high-risk neighbourhoods across the city, but some business owners are impatient for the project to begin.

…Police plan to place 15 cameras in neighbourhoods in Scarborough, North York and the downtown Entertainment District by the end of April.

Full Story

CityNews.ca Staff
Monday January 8, 2007

He’s a man who feels at home in front of the cameras.

And now Dalton McGuinty thinks you should feel that way, too.

Ontario’s Premier is unhappy that officials have taken down the three unblinking eyes that have been watching over the Yonge St. strip since the holidays. Police put them up to ensure there wouldn’t be a repeat of the Boxing Day violence that claimed the life of Jane Creba in 2005.

The three-week pilot project at Yonge and Gould ended at midnight, and the cameras were deactivated. But they captured an image of a shooting, providing valuable information for authorities. And McGuinty wants Mayor David Miller to get them back in the picture on a permanent basis.

Full Story

Dene Moore, Canadian Press
January 8, 2007

Woman seeks to launch class-action case against Ottawa for Cold War-era tests

Montreal — Janine Huard was a young mother of four with mild postpartum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago.

What happened after that still haunts her today, Ms. Huard says, and she will be in a federal courtroom this week seeking to launch a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for brainwashing experiments carried out in the Cold War era on her and hundreds of other patients.

“I was a guinea pig,” Ms. Huard said.

On and off for more than a decade at McGill University’s renowned Allan Memorial Institute, Ms. Huard said, she received massive electroshocks and was fed more than 40 experimental pills a day.

The former patient, who will be 79 at the end of the month, said she was drugged and subjected to so-called “depatterning,” during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family.

“I came out of there so sick that my mother had to live with me for 10 years,” Ms. Huard said. “I couldn’t take care of my children any more.” She said she lost memories and suffered from migraines as a result.

The ordeal came at the hands of Ewan Cameron. The Edinburgh-educated physician based in New York pioneered “psychic driving,” by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.

The idea intrigued the Central Intelligence Agency, which recruited Dr. Cameron to experiment with mind-control techniques beginning in 1950. The McGill experiments were jointly funded by the CIA and Ottawa.

As director of the institute until 1964, Dr. Cameron conducted a range of experiments, often without the knowledge or permission of patients.

He gave patients LSD and subjected them to massive and multiple electroshock treatments. Some underwent sleep deprivation or total sensory deprivation.

Others were kept in drug-induced comas for months while speakers under their pillows broadcast messages for up to 16 hours a day.

The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and brothel patrons without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee.

The CIA eventually settled a class-action lawsuit by test subjects, including Ms. Huard, and the Canadian government ordered a judicial report into Dr. Cameron’s experiments. The allegations have not been proved in court.

A Federal Court hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday to decide whether to approve the class-action lawsuit against Ottawa.

In 1994, 77 of the mostly unwitting Canadian patients were awarded $100,000 each from the federal government but only those who suffered “total depatterning” — were rendered to a childlike state.

More than 250 others were denied compensation because their treatment was less intense and had fewer long-term effects. In 2004, a federal appeal court overruled that decision and awarded a former patient the $100,000.

“There are many, many former patients of Dr. Cameron who applied for the $100,000 whose applications were denied on the same basis . . . because they misapplied the decree,” Alan Stein, Ms. Huard’s lawyer, said.

The federal appeal court’s decision means hundreds of other former patients should also have received compensation, he said.

“Even though [Ms. Huard] might not have had the number of electroshock treatments as other applicants, she was subject to psychic driving, she was given experimental drugs and she had electroshock treatments,” Mr. Stein said.

Government lawyers have argued that too much time has passed for patients to appeal a federal panel decision.

But Ms. Huard said the treatments affected her four children and her marriage.

“Justice has to be done,” the grandmother of four and great-grandmother of four said. “It’s impossible that they ruined our lives like that. They shouldn’t sweep it under the carpet.”

Source

amnestyusa.org
Jan 1, 2007

U.S. and Canadian authorities took Native children from their homes and tried to school, and sometimes beat, the Indian out them. Now Native Americans are fighting the theft of language, of culture, and of childhood itself.

A little while ago, I was supposed to attend a Halloween party. I decided to dress as a nun because nuns were the scariest things I ever saw,” says Willetta Dolphus, 54, a Cheyenne River Lakota. The source of her fear, still vivid decades later, was her childhood experience at American Indian boarding schools in South Dakota.

Boys pray before bedtime with Father Keyes, St. Mary’s Mission School, Omak. (© Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Spokane, WA)

Dolphus is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President Ulysses Grant’s 1869 “Peace Policy,” continued well into the 20th century. Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their children lost food rations.

Virtually imprisoned in the schools, children experienced a devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling labor to widespread sexual and physical abuse. Scholars and activists have only begun to analyze what Joseph Gone (Gros Ventre), a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, calls “the cumulative effects of these historical experiences across gender and generation upon tribal communities today.”

“Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding schools,” writes Native American Bar Association President Richard Monette, who attended a North Dakota boarding school, “where recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering Native words.”

…

The schools were part of Euro-America’s drive to solve the “Indian problem” and end Native control of their lands. While some colonizers advocated outright physical extermination, Captain Richard H. Pratt thought it wiser to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” In 1879 Pratt, an army veteran of the Indian wars, opened the first federally sanctioned boarding school: the Carlisle Industrial Training School, in Carlisle, Penn.

“Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit,” said Pratt. He modeled Carlisle on a prison school he had developed for a group of 72 Indian prisoners of war at Florida’s Fort Marion prison. His philosophy was to “elevate” American Indians to white standards through a process of forced acculturation that stripped them of their language, culture, and customs.

Government officials found the Carlisle model an appealing alternative to the costly military campaigns against Indians in the West. Within three decades of Carlisle’s opening, nearly 500 schools extended all the way to California. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) controlled 25 off-reservation boarding schools while churches ran 460 boarding and day schools on reservations with government funds.

…

A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.

The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure. In 1928 Alberta passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy, police, and business and government officials “rented out” children from residential schools to pedophile rings.

Full Story