Rob Wilson: The Eugenics Board was there as a 
kind of safe-guard organisation. It was 
there to make sure that the recommendations
 for sterilization that came 
before it were appropriate. 
Recommendations were typically made by people 
associated with institutions where
 people with disabilities were housed. 
And those recommendations often came
 from the director of the institution,
so an institution like the Provincial
 Training School in Red Deer, others
at Ponoka and just outside of 
Edmonton, as well, were also in this 
position, where there would be sort
 of internal reviews or a case would go 
forward and the eugenics board would 
look at the case file and meet with 
the individual.
People were recommended for sterilization
 typically between the ages of 13 
and 20. And a lot of these were cases 
where the people were between 13 and 
15. There were 4785 cases that were 
considered and 99 percent of them were 
approved. There was actually not a 
single refusal of a case, they didn't 
turn a case back, or they turned them 
back in that they deferred in 60 
cases. And not all of those cases came 
back, but the ones that did were 
approved. But it's interesting that only, 
depending which document you 
read, only 2822 or 2832 sterilizations 
were performed. So, over half but 
not less than 60 percent were actually performed.
 And I don't know the answer to 
the question of what happened in those cases.
That's actually just part of the picture 
we don't know and part of what's 
motivated me is there's a lot here to 
know, just about the historical 
record, which really has to inform 
anything we want to do in light of this. 
It's not that we can't have views and
 form judgments without it, but it's
really one of those areas where, 
if you compare our situation, 
epistemically if you like, to the
 situation in many US jurisdictions, you 
know they have access to lots and 
lots and lots of documents and lots and 
lots of records and it's a matter, 
not a simple matter - it may be a long
term matter - for scholars and others 
to sit down and work through that 
material. We do not have that kind 
of privilege right now for various 
reasons that we might 
talk about in discussion.
The Sexual Sterilization Act was repealed
 when there was our last change of 
government in the province in 1972, 
when the Progressive Conservatives came 
to power. I'm pleased to say that my
 own voting district has recently 
broken through and made a change 
here in electing Linda Duncan from the 
NDP, the one out of 28 people elected, 
the sole member who wasn't elected 
out of the Progressive Conservative Party.
David King was a young, influential 
cabinet member and he's actually 
somebody we're working with in this 
network of people, and he's spoken out
at other conferences that I've organized
 around this. He was the minister 
who introduced the repeal, but he's 
very clear that Lougheed was the person 
who was just kind of morally repulsed 
by the Sexual Sterilization Act and 
it was one of the very first things 
they did. They did it within about six 
weeks of coming into power in '72.
After it's repeal, there was the case 
that has been mentioned of Leilani 
Muir who after a long sort of struggle, 
we heard a bit about yesterday at 
the conference Families and Memory 
held downtown, successfully sued the 
province for wrongful sterilization and 
confinement and the judgment from 
Madame Justice Veit, that we heard 
referred to in Martin's talk, contained
quite-and we heard one little snippet-
but really quite strong language and
unusual language for a judgment 
like this from a judge. And many 
interesting things were appended 
as public documents to that decision, 
which again was somewhat unusual, 
which in principle makes them much more 
readily available than other sorts 
of court documents would be, provided we 
can prevail on, for example, the university
 and the province and the courts 
to have them released. But we actually 
think that there's real hope of that 
happening.
Part of what happened after Leilani's 
case was there were between 800 and 
900 cases that were settled by the 
province out of court, so there was a 
kind of class-action suit. Field Law 
was involved in Leilani's case and 
also in just over half of these other 
cases. And we're also working with 
Field Law on considering the possibility 
of getting access to some of that
material as well for 
archival sorts of purposes.
We've heard a bit about the MacEachran 
controversy. Doug Wahlsten was very 
active in psychology and he's actually
 an emeritus there, he now teaches at 
the University of North Carolina, he 
just moved from Windsor last year, and 
he has been working with Leilani on 
getting a book finished, which I am 
shortly going to read. It is done 
and we're going to be looking for a 
publisher for it. That tells her story
 in more detail. And there was this 
subcommittee that Martin was a member
 of that issued this report that 
you've heard about.
So, in the university around 2003 or
 so a bunch of us started meeting and 
talking about this. I'm not exactly
 sure if there was any one cause, but 
there were people like Harvey Krahn 
and Jana Grekul. Jana is one of the few 
people who has actually looked in detail
 at these documents, somebody who 
wasn't directly involved in the legal
 cases and she actually wrote a PhD 
thesis on the basis of it. Tim 
Caulfield and Gerald Robertson, Dick, 
myself, and Glenn, and Lesley Cormack
 when she was here in history. And 
we've also linked up with, as I said,
 Field Law and sterilization 
survivors. We formed a group that
 we chose for its sexy acronym ACHE, 
the Alberta Consortium on the History
 of Eugenics in 2005. If we have a name,
we're real. And then we developed this 
What Sorts Network over the last 
couple years, as was said about 80 
researchers. Around this question: what
sorts of people should there be? We 
have a sort of large project and a few 
people in this room are involved in 
it that operates under that title "What 
Sorts of People Should There Be?" and 
it's interested in a sort of range of 
applications and people can take the 
question any way they want and I think 
what's interesting is to see the 
links that come up between these 
independently started projects 
once we start talking.
