The Province of Manitoba has formally apologized to two men who were switched at birth almost 70 years ago.
Edward Ambrose and Richard Beauvais were born in a municipally-run hospital in Arborg, Man., in 1955, where they somehow went home with and were raised by each other’s families — not learning the truth for more than 60 years.
Beauvais — who found out he had Ukrainian and Jewish heritage through a home DNA test — had been raised Métis and faced racism and being sent to a residential day school. Ambrose, on the other hand, grew up unaware of his own Indigenous heritage.
Premier Wab Kinew stated on Thursday in the Manitoba Legislature, with the two men and their families in attendance, apologized and stated the error in 1955 was a failure on the part of the province.
“(The apology is) something that has been owed to them for 68 years — in fact it’s been owed to them their entire lives,” Kinew said.
“Ed and Richard are here today as two people wronged by the Manitoba government and the institutions they should have been able to trust. They were wronged from the very first day each of them arrived here on earth, at a hospital in Arborg.”
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Kinew said both Ambrose and Beauvais were prevented from meeting their birth parents, who died before the discovery was made, and from forming relationships with their families of origin.
“What happened to you cannot be undone but it must be acknowledged and it must be atoned for,” he said.
“While we cannot take back the series of failures that caused your pain, we can perhaps make things a little easier now… on behalf of the Manitoba government, we sincerely apologize for our failure to care for you.”
Ambrose and Beauvais aren’t the only Manitobans who discovered they had been switched at birth years after the fact. In 2015, two men from Garden Hill First Nation learned they had been switched in 1975, as had two other men from Norway House Cree Nation the same year.
