WINNIPEG - Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew formally apologized at the provincial legislature Thursday to two men who were switched at birth in a hospital almost 70 years ago.
Kinew called it a terrible wrong that cannot be undone but must be acknowledged and atoned for.
“Ed and Richard are here today as two people wronged by the Manitoba government and the institutions they should have been able to trust,” Kinew said as Edward Ambrose and Richard Beauvais sat nearby.
“They were wronged from the very first day each of them arrived here on earth.”
The premier said the men were denied connection to their families, and their parents were denied their children.
The two men were born in a municipally run hospital in Arborg, Man., in 1955 and were sent home with each other's parents.
They were children who became men, who were married and had children of their own, for decades unaware of each other or the puzzle piece that inextricably linked them.
Kinew said their family connections would eerily and unknowingly cross paths.
He said one day at grade school, young Edward once asked a girl from a few towns over to be on his baseball team, not knowing she was his biological sister.
And he said a teenage Richard would end up fishing at a British Columbia shore where his biological sister would also go to cast a rod, and once went to a bar where she worked.
“We apologize to your children and grandchildren for depriving them for so many years of their rightful inheritance, culture, identity and perhaps most of all, family,” Kinew said.
“For these things we are sorry.
“We hope these words will help you to reconcile the person you were for the most extended periods of your life with the person that you were at birth.”
Ambrose was raised in a Ukrainian family and grew up in Rembrandt, a farming community south of Arborg. Hs mother and father died by the time he was 12. Ambrose was shuffled between relatives, then placed with a foster family who adopted him.
Beauvais has said his father died young and his mother struggled to raise him and his siblings in Saint Laurent, a historically Metis community on the shores of Lake Manitoba. He was sent to a residential day school, was picked on for being Indigenous and was taken from his family and placed in foster homes.
Eventually he became a commercial fisherman and moved to B.C.
The truth that the two had been sent home with the wrong families was only discovered a few years ago through at-home ancestry kits. It upended both men's lives as they tried to navigate the past and what it meant for their futures.
Ambrose has said it is still difficult to deal with the reality of what happened, but said reconnecting with his biological family and exploring his Indigenous identity has helped him cope.
Last month, Ambrose officially received his Metis citizenship.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 21, 2024.
