Mother blasts $125K payout

Victims of thalidomide

The federal government is offering a $125,000 lump-sum payment to each of Canada’s thalidomide victims, but the family of one survivor says it isn’t enough.

Health Minister Rona Ambrose says the money is tax free and intended to cover urgent health-care needs.

The long-awaited compensation package also includes a total of up to $168 million for ongoing medical assistance based on individual circumstances.

“I would like to express heartfelt sympathy and great regret for the decades of tremendous suffering and personal struggle that exposure to thalidomide has inflicted on survivors and their loved ones,” Ambrose said Friday.

Ambrose said the support package would meet the needs of the 95 victims still believed to be living who are now in their mid-50s.

However, the mother of one severely disabled survivor was angry.

Anne Marie Bainbridge, 75, said her daughter Bernadette was expecting a payment of $250,000 — money the family needs to ensure that she can be properly looked after in the years to come.

“It is a slap in the face,” Bainbridge said from her home in Whitby, Ont. “Ms. Ambrose should be thoroughly ashamed of herself.”

Bainbridge said Bernadette, who is 52, suffered brain damage. The entire right side of her body was paralyzed. She has no right ear and deformed hands.

Thalidomide was a government-approved antinausea drug prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s and 1960s.

Children of those mothers were born with a range of problems including missing or malformed limbs, deafness, blindness, disfigurement and other disabilities.

The lump-sum payments are to be available in the next few weeks.