Rob Wilson: There simply has been much less 
work done on the history of Canadian 
eugenics than there has been on the 
history of other countries like the 
United Kingdom, interestingly, in 
which eugenics wasn't practiced as there 
wasn't eugenic sterilization legislation
 in the UK. But a lot of the 
eugenic ideas obviously came through 
Galton of the UK and it was topical, 
there was a lot of support for it. 
But, more particularly in terms of 
practices in the US and Germany.
And there's also been, and this is 
what Simo referred to sort of 
indirectly, there's a book out by 
Broberg and Roll-Hanston that came out in 
1996 on Scandinavian eugenics that 
was itself a result, as I understand it, 
I may have my facts wrong here as well, 
a fairly concerted effort in the 
four Scandinavian countries to try 
and come to grips and try and do a 
systematic study of the kind of history
 across the different countries. So
 what you get in this book, is you get 
rough 40 to 60 page essays on each of 
Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden 
and then a bit of framing of that.
When this book came out, again as I 
understand it, it caused a big media 
splash in the late nineties, partly 
because a number of the findings that 
were reported in there were kind of 
mischaracterized in the press. One of 
the things that came out was that 
the sterilization rates, if you look at 
sterilization rates one thing that 
people will often do instead of talking 
about the raw numbers of sterilization, 
they talk about them relativized to 
per a hundred thousand people or something
 like that. And we know that if 
you do that in Alberta, the sterilization
 rates in Alberta were about the 
same as California and Virginia, which
 were the two most sort of heavily 
sterilizing states in the US throughout
 the entire history up until 1972 
when they repealed the Sexual Sterilization
 Act of Alberta. When you do 
those same kind of figures on some 
rawish-looking data that came out of the 
Scandinavian countries, and this was 
true across the board, but especially 
in Sweden, it looked like they sort of, 
they won all the prizes here. The 
rates were very, very high per hundred 
thousand of population, BUT it 
looked as though they, and those figures 
being reported and it going very
 public, they'd blended together sort 
of voluntary and forced sterilization
 measures. And, you know, people I 
think rightly made the argument that in
 at least certain core of cases, 
you need to firmly distinguish between 
those because of the different way in 
which the welfare state was operating 
in one half of this as opposed to the 
other. It doesn't wash away all the 
problems, it raises more questions, 
but it meant that the, you know the 
initial reactions that I understand sort 
of this book and associated events 
around it, brought about, were um, 
they weren't really justified. They were
 misleading and they lead to a kind 
of hysteria that itself I think was 
perhaps sort of counterproductive. 
We may hear from Simo on corrections 
and adumbrations of that.
So, we know eugenic sterilization was 
practiced in the province from '28 to 
'72, that's 43 years. In North American 
terms that's a very long time. As 
we saw in Matt's talk, the university 
itself was involved in some sense 
from the very outset. When the Eugenics 
Board was formed it was typically 
referred to as the Eugenics Board 
it was formed in 1929, and began 
approving sterilizations in that first
 year and right through for most of 
its existence the chair was John McEachran
 who, until he retired in 1945 
was provost and head of the department 
of philosophy and psychology. And 
one thing that this certainly did, 
if it didn't do anything else was it 
leant a certain amount of institutional
 credibility to the eugenics 
movement and the ideas that it represented.
 Now, just to give you sort of
 an idea, this is a fairly well-known
 quote in the literature that's 
around. Here's the quote: "We should 
endeavor to get away from a very 
costly form of sentiment and give 
more attention to raising and 
safeguarding the purity of the race. 
We allow men and women of defective
 intelligence or of criminal tendencies
 to have children. There is one 
remedy for such eventualities and we 
fortunately have begun to make use of
 it in Alberta-although not yet nearly 
extensively enough. This is the 
Alberta Sterilization Act."
And that's a quote from McEachran in
 the 1932 address while he was the 
provost of the university and he had 
just been appointed as the chair of 
this board a few years before. You can 
also find Martin will point this 
out, this is not an uncommon sort of 
idea, amongst many of the community 
leaders and amongst some of the most 
progressive people in the province, 
like Emily Murphy for example. Robert 
Charles Wallace, who was a geologist, 
who was president of the university 
around this time, 1934, makes another 
speech that's often quoted as well along 
the same kinds of lines. It's not 
out of line. As provost and president 
of the university these people would 
be talking to each other. We don't always
 do this in a big institution, but 
their offices would have been most 
likely right next to each other and 
their appointments would in some sense be linked.
