Canadian Lawyer

w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m O C T O B E R 2 0 1 8 29 unlike most lawsuits against the government that affect one or two ministries, this involved at least 200 departments and agencies, including about 20 core departments whose legal teams participated. They were led by DoJ senior general coun- sel Christine Mohr and Pless. That emotional June day, St-Louis approved a truly unique settlement for thousands of public servants, as well as mem- bers of the CAF and RCMP who were discriminated against, persecuted or fired between 1955 and 1996 due to their real or perceived sexual orientation. Compensation for most class members will be between $5,000 and $50,000. The final settle- ment amount will be determined by how many make claims; lawyers estimate perhaps 1,000 victims are still alive. Former Supreme Court of Canada justice Marie Deschamps will adju- dicate exceptional harm claims that could result in awards of up to $125,000 per person. Beyond individual compensation, the settlement provides money for education and reconcilia- tion, including a monument in Ottawa and museum exhibits, as well as individual apologies and amendments to employ- ment records to reflect that victims were unjustly fired. Class members will also receive the Pride Citation, an honour to reflect their service to Canada. Class counsel will be paid $15 million directly by the gov- ernment and are obliged to assist claimants through the claims process at no charge. The claims period begins in late October. The personal toll of the purge M any factors and players over the decades paved the path toward the class actions, which were launched in the fall of 2016. These included groups and individuals who fought for redress, particularly from the military, usually with little success. Their aim was not primarily financial compensation but an official apology for and recognition of the discrimination they faced while serving their country. Until the early 1990s, few Canadians had any inkling their government was systematically discriminating against homo- sexuals, who were defined by the government's security apparatus as suffering from a "character weakness" that could open them to blackmail by "enemy" agents. A 1992 article by Canadian Press reporter Dean Beeby, based on the release of explosive govern- ment documents, showed the RCMP had in 1959 "launched a massive hunt for male homosexuals" in Ottawa. The "hunt" forced many government employees to live a double life for fear of being sanctioned, fired, transferred or denied opportunities. They, and often their families, were surveilled and ques- tioned by the RCMP in efforts to get names of other suspected homosexuals. Few would ever discuss what happened to them publicly. A few brave individuals who had been investigated by the Special Inves- tigations Unit of the Military Police and then forced out — under Canadian Forces Administrative Order 19-20 – Homosexuality – Sexual Abnormality investigation, Medical Examination and Disposal — tried on their own to get redress, apologies or answers, but to no avail. The first to openly challenge her expulsion from the forces for being a lesbian was Barbara Thornborrow. In May 1977, she'd been investigated by the SIU and was given an ultimatum to admit she was gay and be released or agree to see a psychiatrist. She refused and went public with her story, includ- ing showing up on Parliament Hill dur- ing hearings on the Human Rights Act. Shortly after that, Thornborrow was let go as "not advantageously employable," the official notation used frequently on military discharge papers in these cases. A group of lesbians in the navy in L ooking for a scientific way to determine gay from straight in its efforts to weed out poten- tial security risks, the Canadian government in the early 1960s commissioned Frank Robert Wake, a psychologist at Ottawa's Carleton Univer- sity, to create the so-called "fruit machine." The project, "which involved psychiatrists, psychologists, the RCMP, the DND, and the Department of National Health and Welfare for a period of four years, never did work, and the Defence Research Board eventually cut its fund- ing in 1967," write Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile in their book The Canadian War on Queers. In one of the fruit machine's tests, subjects were seated in a dentist-like chair and shown pictures of sexy pin-ups designed to "arouse desire" while cameras took pictures of their pupils to see if they dilated. Another used a word association test using a list of words with a hidden homosexual meaning. They included: queen, gay, bagpipe, whole, camp, cruise, drag, dike (dyke), fruit, punk, queer, tea room, etc. But the contraption was never able to establish a dis- cernible difference between the biological responses of heterosexuals and LGBT people. "The project suffered from major technical problems as well as from difficulties in getting an adequate number of research subjects, which included 'normal' as well as homosexual men and women," write Kinsman and Gentile. The Canadian War Museum has a machine called an Electropsychometer on display that it says was used in the investigations to detect gays in the civil service. Online, it comes up as the "fruit machine," but Kinsman and Gentile say it's not Wake's contraption. While the fruit machine project was a failure, the RCMP continued to collect dossiers on suspected homosexuals, reportedly having the names of 9,000 people on file at one point. The investigations continued until the 1990s, when Brian Mulroney's government called for an end to the practice. — Gail Cohen The 'fruit machine'

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