Four men switched at birth by accident, not a crime say RCMP

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No crime was committed when four Manitoba men were switched at birth in the 1970s at a northern hospital for status Indians, the RCMP said Thursday.

Manitoba RCMP major crime services completed its year-long investigation about a week ago into the blunders at the Norway House Indian Hospital in 1975 that caused four men to to discover in middle age they had grown up in the wrong families.

“After reviewing medical records and conducting interviews with family members and hospital employees, there is no evidence a criminal offence was committed in relation to these incidents,” the RCMP concluded in their statement Thursday.

A separate federal health probe into the same births also concluded the switches were probably accidental, very likely because newborns weren’t tagged with wrist and ankle bands in the delivery rooms that could have identified them in federal hospitals for status Indians in the 1970s.

Until 1980, newborns in the federal hospitals, which included Norway House, weren’t given wrist bands with their family names and dates of birth, even though such bands had been a standard practice in other Canadian hospitals for decades.

“Health Canada regrets the suffering that these incidents have caused. We want to thank the men and their families for participating in the review process,” said a federal statement released Thursday when the federal review was posted online, within hours of the RCMP findings.

Health Canada hired two health-care experts to determine how the switches happened and to prevent them from happening again.

Dr. David Creery, a pediatric intensive care physician, and Maura Davies, the former CEO of the Saskatoon Health Region, concluded the absence of wrist bands was a major factor in all four cases.

The federal report was completed in May, and a public version with private information redacted is dated Aug. 8. The report was only published Thursday, during an evacuation of Island Lake, where at least two of the four men have ties.

Health Canada did not offer an explanation for the delay, saying in a statement it “continues to offer support to the individuals and their families”.

“While no further cases are suspected, Health Canada will continue to provide maternal DNA testing to any concerned individuals born at the Norway House Hospital before 1980, which is when identification bands were implemented for newborns,” the federal statement said.

In late 2015, DNA tests confirmed Island Lake-area residents Norman Barkman and Luke Monias from the Garden Hill First Nation had been switched shortly after being born on June 19, 1975, at the Norway House Indian Hospital.

Shortly after, more DNA testing showed two additional men had also been switched and sent home with the wrong parents. Leon Swanson and David Tait Jr. were switched in February, 1975 at the same hospital.

The federal government still operates two federal hospitals in Manitoba, the one in Norway House and another in the Interlake town of Hodgson, next to Peguis First Nation.

There have been no additional cases surfacing as a result of the DNA testing that Health Canada offered, the lead RCMP investigator said.

“I know for absolute certainty they would have advised me if there had been,” Staff Sgt. Jared Hall said Thursday.

“At the end of the day we were able to give a definitive answer to the question whether there was any criminality involved. And there was not,” he said.

None of the four men switched at birth has released statements.

Former Manitoba aboriginal affairs minister Eric Robinson, who routinely spoke for the men and their families since the switching came to light, said the findings didn’t surprise him.

“Both the reports don’t say a hell of a lot and they weren’t expected to,” said Robinson, who called the findings “a slap on the wrist,” for the way the Norway House hospital used to be run.

Federal hospitals had a reputation among First Nations as “second rate,” and the cases under investigation had repercussions for the men, their real parents, the parents who raised them and their children, Robinson said. “Their identities were stolen.

“The point is that . . switching . . . was a common practice, ‘as long as the baby was brown and looked like a stick of baloney with veins.’ That’s how it was explained to me,” Robinson said. “That’s what made me vocalize that there should be a broader investigation and I’ve said it should include all federally-funded hospitals.”

Hall, the RCMP investigator who did the interviews, said he was emotionally moved by the year-long criminal probe.

“It’s sad, for the gentlemen and for their families, both the biological families and the families that raised the gentlemen. It’s a really sad set of events. Even for the people I’ve spoken to from the hospital,” Hall said.

“It’s not something they wanted, I just know for all involved it was a sad, unfortunate incident.”

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca