B.C. extends asylum-abuse compensation
The B.C. government is offering compensation to former residents of the Woodlands provincial mental institution in New Westminster who were shut out of a previous legal settlement.
On Saturday, Premier John Horgan announced payments of $10,000 each for patients of Woodlands who were at the facility before 1974. The former “provincial asylum for the insane” was the site of horrific physical and sexual abuse, but government payments to former patients in 2010 only covered those who suffered at the facility starting on Aug. 1, 1974, based on a legal technicality.
“What we’re doing is righting a wrong,” Horgan said. “We’re ensuring all currently living survivors of the Woodlands experience get the respect and compassion they deserved throughout their lives but, most importantly, since the government excluded them from the class action suit.”
The decision caps years of fighting by pre-1974 patients who argued they were unfairly left out of a provincial apology and settlement because their claims predated a B.C. law that allowed citizens to sue the government for wrongdoing. The new payments by Horgan’s government are ex gratia, meaning they are voluntary and don’t come with any admission of legal liability. Horgan said while the government legally doesn’t have to compensate the survivors, he felt a moral obligation to do so and help them achieve a semblance of closure.
Woodlands opened in 1878 as the province’s insane asylum, was renamed Woodlands School in 1950 and finally just Woodlands in 1974. It housed children and adult with developmental disabilities or mental illnesses, as well as runaways and wards of the state. B.C.’s ombudsperson concluded in a 2002 report that Woodlands had been the site of widespread physical, sexual and psychological abuse against residents. Patients were beaten, kicked, shackled, isolated and bullied, concluded the report. Some girls were sexually assaulted, resulting in pregnancies.
The Liberal government of the time reacted by publicly apologizing to the almost 1,700 former residents estimated to still be alive at the time of the report. But a $2-million trust fund was harshly criticized when goodwill cheques to patients were linked to a point system that assigned rating values to the type of physical and sexual abuse suffered, to determine how much money to provide.
A class-action lawsuit was certified in 2005, which prompted the government to settle in 2010. The province offered between $3,000 and $150,000 for each patient in compensation.
NDP MLA Adrian Dix spent almost 12 years advocating to expand the settlement and offer fairer terms. Now health minister, Dix praised the survivors who “have persisted against prejudice and mistreatment from the province for decades.”