On this day in 1927, it was reported that the Edmonton Public School Board passed a motion expressing its support for the sterilization of the "mentally unfit."
The trustees quibbled with the wording of a resolution put forth by the United Farm Women of Alberta, but they voted unanimously in support of the principle.
The story attributes the following declaration to the trustees: "There is a certain amount of it (mental derangement or insanity) in the school system... and there should be some drastic method to cut it down to a minimum."
In 1928, the United Farmers of Alberta government went on to pass the Sexual Sterilization Act, the first eugenic sterilization law in Canada. It was "directed at individuals living in designated state institutions deemed to have undesirable traits," says the Eugenics Archive. The law remained on the books and enforced even after the horrors of the Holocaust and the thorough discrediting of the eugenics movement.
By the time the act was repealed in 1972, a total of 2,832 people had been sterilized with the Alberta Eugenics Board's approval. One of them was Leilani Muir, who successfully sued the Alberta government in 1996 and became a champion for human rights until she died in Devon in 2016.
This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse.