The Quebec Court of Appeal has ruled that Canadian families cannot bring a class-action lawsuit against the CIA, the US government, and the Canadian government for conducting mind control experiments on their loved ones. The families all say their loved ones had their memories wiped out during the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments between the 1940s and 1960s.
The families first tried to bring suit against the CIA back in January 2019. A lower court ruled in March of this year that under a 1982 Canadian law, which regards how foreign governments and entities can be sued, the families couldn’t bring the suit. The court decided that the 1982 law couldn’t be retroactively applied to things that the CIA did decades earlier. The Court of Appeal agreed in a unanimous 3-0 decision.
The MK-ULTRA program in Canada was jointly funded by the Canadian government and the CIA. The experiments took place at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, which is affiliated with McGill University.
Under Canada’s legal system, people can’t just launch a lawsuit and have it end up in court. They have to go through a lengthy and weird application process. It’s wildly favorable to the government rather than to the people since you have to get permission from the government in order to sue the Canadian government.
In January 2019, the families originally petitioned the government for permission to sue McGill University, the Royal Victorian Hospital, and the US and Canadian governments. The Canadian MK-ULTRA experiments took place roughly between 1948 and 1965, led by a Canadian psychiatrist named Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron.
The CIA chose to have some of its MK-ULTRA experiments conducted in Canada because the US government, at the time, enjoyed immunity from legal liability. If anything went wrong in the experiments, the CIA couldn’t be sued. Dr. Cameron was originally from Scotland. He lived in Albany, New York at the time, but commuted to Montreal every day to carry out the ghoulish attempts at mind control on unsuspecting psychiatric patients.
Patients often checked into the Allan Memorial Institute—a mental hospital—for problems like anxiety disorders or postpartum depression. Instead of the regular sorts of treatment for these people—like talking to them—Cameron gave them heavy doses of LSD and subjected them to electroconvulsive therapy (shocks to the brain) at 30 to 40 times the normal amount of electricity. The experiments were done completely without the knowledge or permission of the patients.
Instead of actually taking control of patients’ minds, it reduced almost all of them to a childlike, vegetative state. They had to wear diapers and they couldn’t remember who their own parents or children were. Some, however, mistook their CIA interrogators for their own parents.
Amazingly, while Dr. Cameron was carrying out these secret and highly illegal and unethical experiments on unwilling test subjects, he was simultaneously appointed to be the head of the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. He also became the First Chairman of the World Psychiatric Association. (Who says there aren’t any perks to working for the CIA?)
While the CIA maintains that the MK-ULTRA program never worked and that the program was shut down in the 1970s, most people know that’s not true. It’s subsequently been proven that Charles Manson, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston mobster “Whitey” Bulger, and RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan were all subjected to mind control experiments before being turned into total nutjobs and killers.
The roughly 300 Canadian families that were harmed by the CIA’s experiments say they’ll now appeal their petition to the Supreme Court of Canada.
