In 1936 some of Canada’s most prominent citizens convened to hear how their country faced “extinction” unless they were willing to sterilize the “feeble-minded,” the “indigent” and the “degenerate.”
Eugenics policies were already in vogue across Europe and the United States, and if Canada had any hope of embracing a prosperous future, it had to take up the “biological (necessity) of improving its racial qualities,” said Clarence Campbell, a visiting representative of the Eugenics Research Association of the United States.
The location was the Canadian Club, the Toronto-based speaker’s forum that still ranks as one of the pinnacle venues for so-called “thought leaders.” Campbell was speaking from a lectern that had recently featured the likes of Amelia Earhart and Winston Churchill.
The only thing missing was political will, said the eugenicist. Only with “united national attitude and action” could Canada hope to seize the “immeasurable good” of eugenics. In this, said Campbell, Canada should be more like Nazi Germany, one of the only countries at the time that had been “intelligent enough” to embark on its own aggressive program of racial betterment.
The Nazis embrace of eugenics was “wholly human in its intent, and it not only occasions no real human suffering, but prevents a vast amount of it,” Campbell told the Canadian Club.
Eugenics is a little-mentioned part of Canada’s early 20th century history. Canadians might know that “Father of Medicare” Tommy Douglas wrote his master’s thesis on the pressing need to keep the “sub-normal” from reproducing. Reportedly, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board is currently reviewing Douglas’ status as a “national historic figure” for precisely this reason.
Canadians may also know that the Famous Five — the Alberta women who got women recognized as “persons” under the Constitution — also championed the sterilization of the “mentally unfit.” (more...)
The time when Canada's elite wanted to sterilize 'insane' and disabled people
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