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“One key point of contention is about people who are as yet undiagnosed and deserving of compensation without knowing it.” A volunteer from a B.C. advocacy group spoke on their behalf.
From a Toronto bank executive earning millions until liver disease wrecked his health, to a young British Columbia mother on social assistance “dying before my children’s eyes on a couch,” victims of Canada’s tainted blood scandal of the 1990s spoke out in court Tuesday, pleading to be further compensated for what they lost to hepatitis C.
They urged three judges to distribute a massive surplus from a compensation fund that was set up for more people than actually applied, rather than return it to the federal government.
“I don’t view it as a surplus,” said one woman from a small town in Manitoba, who was infected during childbirth at age 18 by a tainted blood infusion. She said she thanks God every day she got the contaminated bag of blood and her newborn daughter did not. “It’s money sitting there to compensate us.”
It was an unusual hearing in Toronto, with live links to courtrooms in Vancouver and Quebec and a steady stream of anguished life stories from people who can only be identified by claimant numbers. At issue is the court’s discretionary power to pay out the money, return it to the government, or leave it sitting in the 80-year trust.
The surplus is between $236 and $257 million, according to a judge. The trust of more than $1 billion was created to settle a class action launched in 1998 against the Canadian Red Cross, which then administered blood banks, and the federal government and provinces. It is meant to compensate people infected between 1986 and 1990, when there was a lab test that could have prevented it.