The Duplessis Orphans (French: les Orphelins de Duplessis) were a population of Canadian children wrongly certified as mentally ill by the provincial government of Quebec and confined to psychiatric institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of these children were deliberately miscertified in order to acquire additional subsidies from the federal government. They are named for Maurice Duplessis, who served as Premier of Quebec for five non-consecutive terms between 1936 and 1959. The controversies associated with Duplessis, and particularly the corruption and abuse concerning the Duplessis Orphans, have led to the popular historic conception of his term as Premier as La Grande Noirceur (“The Great Darkness”) by its critics.
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Duplessis worked with the catholic church to scare people into voting for him or risk getting excommunicated, which was a terrible thing to happen to you in a time when the church held so much control over many things like education and healthcare and other social services.
