I went on Facebook and looked up our old system friend. There he was! My sister and I thought about him often over the years. He looked like he had done ok. Handsome, smiling on his profile picture. I wrote to him right away, asking him if he remembered us. He responded and said of course he remembered us. I called my sister and told her that I had found him.

We spoke back and forth for a while. I said to him “It looks like life has been good to you.” and that’s when it all came out. He had struggled with addictions and still did all of his life. It had been a hard life for him too. I eventually went and saw him face to face. I felt like I had reunited with my long-lost brother. I loved him right away and he loved me like family. We were system brothers and sisters. Us system kids from St-Pat’s were family. We were so young thrown together to survive. We stayed in touch regularly after that. 

I thought to myself ‘I wonder if the other system kids from St-Pat’s lived a hard life too?’ I asked him if he ever saw anyone from St-Pat’s days. He hadn’t. I started looking for names that I remembered. He helped me with names and so did my sister. I started a Facebook group called Mount St-Pat’s kids and we started coming together one at a time. We reunited like little kids, a lifetime later. I was surprised to hear from the other kids, that life had been rough for them too. I asked them if they had ever seen a therapist while in the system, none of them had. That got me thinking, that since so many of us struggled through life, and The Quebec Youth Protection System claims to help abused children, what went wrong with all of us?

I started to talk about starting a class action lawsuit against the system. I immediately started writing to class action lawyers. I still have all the emails dated from September and October 2019. Finally, I found one! He was recommended to me by my lawyer friends. The problem was he was very French, and we were all English. I sent him some information about what we had lived. He was looking at it. I did not want just any lawyer, I spent days looking up his name, his past cases and finally decided he was perfect, regardless of the language barrier. 

Then out of the blue, I saw a W5 interview about a class action lawsuit that was being applied for from a lawyer I had never heard of. They had a lead plaintiff, and they had filed it in court! I was devastated. I looked up the lawyer’s name, but I couldn’t find anything about him on the web. He was a small-time lawyer and had never had big cases before. The other lawyer that I had found said nothing he could do and faded away! 

It’s been 5 years since our case has been in court, and we rarely hear anything from our lawyers about it, the odd, occasional case update is sent to us, we have been left in the dark throughout the whole process. It would have been good if the lawyers would have told us that it will take many years, right from the beginning, but they never said that to any of us plaintiffs. Most of us have no communication with the lead plaintiff. It’s been 5 long years so far. 

We have also been dealing with a reporter who has been using some of the plaintiffs’ stories to write a book of her own. She has even gone as far as to contact plaintiffs telling them that she works for one of the lawyers and it’s ok for them to tell her their story. I will be coming out with that story about her after the lawsuit as well. 

I have a book coming out after the lawsuit has ended called The Class Action Plaintiff, where I get into detail about what the experience has been for myself along with over 100 other plaintiffs. For now, I can’t say too much more… 

My name is Tammy-anne Deslongchamps, I write about my personal stories being raised in the Quebec Youth Protection System and then I spent many years inside the adult prison systems. If you’d like to read more of my story you can go to www.thesystemkid.com.

There you will find the books I’ve written, blogs I’ve done.