Eugenics and the Firewall: Catching on in Canadian media

Eugenics and the Firewall: Good discussion begins

Jane Harris-Zsovan writes to say that her just-published book Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), has received favourable reviews so far.

Ian Stewart, reviewer for the Winnipeg Free Press opens,

IN this suggestive piece of investigative journalism, Albertan Jane Harris-Zsovan exposes one of her home province’s wretched little secrets.
Published, oddly enough, by a Winnipegbased house, Eugenics and the Firewall retells the story of how Alberta’s progressive and populist Social Credit government abused some of its most vulnerable citizens’ basic human rights for almost half the 20th century. Its message is clear: somebody’s Utopian vision can lead to another’s Orwellian hell.


In 1928, Alberta elected its first Social Credit government, led by the apocalyptic "Bible Bill" Aberhart. The government was under the sway of the burgeoning eugenics movement and quickly passed the British Empire’s first sexual sterilization legislation, which was not rescinded until 1972.

He also cheered her on personally, no surprise from a seasoned reporter who knows when someone is taking a risk to just start talking about the documentary evidence.

Similarly, Lana Michelin for the Red Deer Advocate did, in Harris Zsovan’s view, “an amazing job sorting out all those facts and figures I gave her in lightening time.”

While B.C. used eugenics sparingly, sterilizing only a few hundred citizens, Alberta seized the opportunity from 1928 to 1972 to target nearly 3,000 “undesirables,” including the mentally disabled, chronically ill and sexually promiscuous.


Many of these 2,832 sterilizations were done at Red Deer’s Michener Centre, said Harris-Zsovan.

The author has been interested in Alberta’s dark eugenics history since she overheard, as a young girl, her parents discussing a neighbour’s son who they suspected was sterilized.

I first became interested in the early1970s, when I noticed that the whole episode was a memory hole as far as just about everyone was concerned.

Why does it matter?, some ask. Compulsory sterilization was done in Alberta a long time ago, and the enabling laws were repealed in 1971. Well, two reasons it matters:

First, for the sake of the facts: Social Darwinism (the belief that a government-directed application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to a human population would produce a fitter human) is far more often denounced than it is explained. There is a good reason for that. As Harris Zsovan shows, progressives and evangelical Christians promoted and enabled it, not just goose stepping Nazis. Everyone was wrong, but the last group was socially despised, thus in line to take the fall. While everyone else acted self-righteous, false history drove out true history.

Second, social amnesia is no way to prevent a similar occurrence. Put simply, it happened because it was widely popular, and a similar event would happen today, if it were as popular. So we really must look at what made it popular and with whom. And that’s a fascinating read.

Many Canadians are in the process of recovering our history, and no, it is not always fun, but - as with our bodies - the less fun parts may be the most necessary.

Note: Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), is distributed by University of Toronto Press.

Excerpt from Firewall, exposing social Darwinist eugenics in Canada

Recently, I advised readers of Jane Harris Szovan’s new book on the shameful secrets of social Darwinist eugenics in Canada. The Alberta-based author tells me,

People have been asking me what Eugenics and the Firewall is about. Basically, it is about the history of eugenics in the Western countries. But it looks specifically at what happened in Alberta, how our province's somewhat bizarre political culture allowed it to happen (and why the vulnerable are still at risk for disaster, not just here but worldwide.) Then it compares Alberta to British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Then, we look at how Alberta's experience compared to the rest of the Commonwealth, specifically the U.K. where forced sterilization was judged contrary to our shared constitution.(How a province in a dominion was allowed to get away with violating the constitution just shows how far the federal gov. will go in not challenging 'provincial rights.'

Hmmm, it shows that for sure.* But it shows something else too.

Here is the gist of the book:

It’s a dirty little secret the heirs to Alberta’s populist legacy don’t want Canadians to talk about.

In 1928 the non-partisan United Farmers of Alberta passed the first Sexual Sterilization Act. The UFA’s successor, the Social Credit party, led by a radio-evangelist William Aberhart, and later by his protégé Ernest Manning, removed the need to obtain consent to sterilize “mental defectives” or Huntington’s Chorea patients with dementia.

Between 1928 and 1972 nearly three thousand citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on, and subjected to daily abuse at the hands of provincial staff in Alberta. Most Albertans have forgotten the victims whose names made headlines in the 1990s, and politicians and pundits have shown little empathy for the victims.

The Eugenics Board horror story has largely been buried in Canada’s mainstream national media. Conservative bloggers and columnists in Canada continue to blame the Liberals and CCF for Canada’s barbaric eugenics program. The tar sands, oil royalties, health care budgets, environmental policies, and making sure the province’s interests remain high on the federal agenda top the provincial headlines.

But the questions must be answered: How did a province that claims “strong and free” as its motto deny basic freedoms to so many of its own citizens? Why does the extent of Alberta’s eugenics past and its link to the UFA/Social Credit legacy remain the unacknowledged moral blind spots in Canadian politics?

It’s time to set the record straight.

It is past time, and many people here have probably guessed that.

Jane has quite reasonably been thinking/hoping that people won’t go after her, but ... A straight record can mean crooked bunch. If you care about setting the record straight, spare a thought for her, and buy the book for a library and/or for yourself.

* They say this about us: If a Canadian species were in danger of extinction, the British would come up with matchless essays on the problem, the French would fly Brigitte Bardot to scream up a storm on the ice pack, the Germans would write an encyclopedia, on the problem, the Americans would set up a plan to save the species that cost three trillion dollars and employed one hundred thousand people ... And the Canadians? Oh, we’d be arguing about whether the species and its woes are a federal or a provincial responsibility. That’s part of how big problems get started here, when they do.

New book announcement: The truth about the ruthless Darwinian eugenics campaign in Canada

I am pleased to announce this book by Jane Harris-Zsovan on the Canadian eugenics scandal. I tried to cover it in the 1970s, from Ontario, but couldn't get very far - literally. It took someone like Jane, who went through box loads of archives in her home province of Alberta, to start putting the pieces together.

It is NOT a pretty picture. People here were all too willing to just accept the beliefs of important Darwinists, with disastrous results.

So what happened? Why did so many professionals believe Darwinism and act on it? The Canadian experience was pretty scandalous.

Eugenics? As someone who has late life parents, I can say that having kids is a real smart idea, provided you intend to live a long life and the kids are willing to help you.

Try to imagine what Darwinism meant for a culture like Jane Harris-Zsovan and I grew up in, a culture we can even find today, in Canada. Please stay awake.

I mean a culture where transit drivers quietly put their hand over the fare box if they think you have arrived from out of town to visit a veteran or an elderly mother in hospital. Or, suspecting a similar errand, taxi drivers may return a tip, claiming that they do not have change.

Darwinism means a whole different universe, and not one we like much here, either. It just feels alien to our culture. Makes you wonder, given how long our culture has lasted.

I know, this is NOT the Canada that US hot talk radio hosts rant about.

But it is the real Canada. Trust me, I live here. And we are starting to speak up about what really happened when eugenics and other fancy ideas were tried out here.

Now, I want to exempt at least one person from all this: So far as I can see, Larry Moran of the University of Toronto agrees with me about the "evolutionary psychology" nonsense.

I have never said that evolutionary biology could not be a science, in principle. Of course, it could be. But I have also insisted for years that it needs to divest itself of the rubbish of "evolutionary psychology" - which is usually just popular culture in a lab coat - so much for hope of it being taken seriously by any reasonable person.


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Eugenics in Canada: Forthcoming book by journalist historian

I am pleased to announce that a friend will be writing a book on the Alberta eugenics program in Canada (= why the world will be a better place if the government decides who can and can't have children*). Jane Harris Zsovan's publisher is the excellent Gord Shillingford of J. Gordon Shillingford Publications of Winnipeg, who kindly published my own first book, Faith@Science, a collection of my faith and science writings, in 2001.

I wrote to Jane to say congratulations and,

Yours is a needed book, I think.

Right now, the world is jam packed FULL of false knowledge.

I hope your book on the Alberta eugenics program will help people revisit how false knowledge gets started and how it motors along on the success of its own dissemination - not on its inherent relation to reality - and how much damage it can do.

I faced a very difficult dinner recently with a purveyor of tons of false knowledge. An atheist who makes a big deal out of challenging religion from a tenured position in a religious college - whoop, whoop.

I don't mean to be vulgar, but false knowledge was dropping off him like fleas off a cat who has just been bathed in "De Fleas Flee!" cat soap.

False knowledge is NOT harmless. People differ greatly in social power. When those who have the power are afflicted with false knowledge, those who don't have power must beware. Hence eugenics.

In my experience, lots of false knowledge gets batted from one lazy textbook author to another, so the purveyor of false knowledge thinks that the number of times the nonsense is repeated in his hearing makes it more true.

A life in journalism can cure a person of false knowledge - because, if you choose to cover original sources, you can also uncover the origin of false knowledge - but that cure only works if people want it, and many people do not.

Now, Jane, get busy and write that book! You know the history, and I will help any way I can. And congrats to you and Gord on a very worthwhile project!

*Unnecessarily - but just for the record - let me clarify that government can and should protect children from unfit parents. But unfitness must be based on concrete evidence in the present, not on speculation about the supposed past or future of humanity. Government will always find itself fully occupied in the present and near future, and has - in my view - no brief for policy based on mere speculation.

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