MONTREAL — Family members of patients allegedly brainwashed decades ago at a Montreal psychiatric hospital are afraid they’re running out of time to get compensation because the federal government and McGill University have filed motions to dismiss their lawsuit. Glenn Landry’s mother, Catherine Elizabeth Harter, was among the hundreds of people to receive experimental treatments under the MK-ULTRA program, funded by the Canadian government and the CIA between the 1940s and 1960s at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, which was affiliated with McGill University. Landry was born after his mother’s 1959 stay in the hospital, and had to be raised by a foster family because she couldn’t care for him.
While he says early traumas she experienced prior to seeking treatment undoubtedly played a role in her mental health issues, he believes the shock treatments and drug therapy she received during her months-long stay under the care of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and his colleagues robbed him of a relationship with her. “She was no longer the person that she would have been, because there was no way that I could ever ask her about any kind of memories,” he said of his mother, who he saw about once a year until her death in the 1980s.
“She spent time with me because I was her son, but there was nothing about herself as a person that I can glean. It was not there.” Landry is one of about 60 families participating in a lawsuit against the Canadian government, the McGill .