OTTAWA | Nearly 90% of compensation claims under the federal thalidomide survivor compensation program are either denied or go unanswered.

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“They’re waiting for us to die,” rants Richard Nantais, a survivor of the infamous pill given to pregnant women to relieve nausea in the 1950s and 1960s.

According to the Department of Health, 255 people have applied to Canada’s Thalidomide Survivor Support Program (CSST) since 2019.

But only 33 were accepted and given financial support. 114 applicants were rejected. The other 108 are still waiting for an answer.

This is the case of M. Nantais who was born in 1958 and has both arms shorter than normal and the fingers of both hands glued together. In his medical records, his malformations are clearly identified as thalidomide-related diseases.

But for the past three years, he’s been stepping up his efforts to benefit from the PCSST. He is repeatedly asked for further documents and analyses.

“I had to quit because my wife said, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’m depressed,'” he says.

And Mr. Nantais is not the only one. The newspaper Many more similar testimonies have been received since the publication on Monday of the report of another thalidomide survivor, Jeanne d’Arc Otis, which was rejected by the PCSST.

Yet it has been 59 years since the government acknowledged its wrongdoing and promised compensation and support to all victims. It was 1963.

It wasn’t until 2014 that he finally put his money where his mouth was. A funding program was launched in 2015 and expanded in 2019.

The judiciary gets involved

But the program is so badly made that the Federal Court of Justice had to intervene in August against the use of an algorithm to sort the beneficiaries.

The PCSST uses the ValiDATE algorithm to determine if applicants can submit their records to a medico-legal committee. If the algorithm judges that a person is an unlikely or unlikely case, the case is simply rejected.

This happened to M.^me Otis.

However, Judge Russel W. Zinn ruled on August 9 that the algorithm should not be used as a means of eliminating people because it is only a tool of probability and therefore cannot replace a medical opinion.

no rush

Since then, the government has been obliged to contact those it rejects so that a panel can judge them. But almost three months later, it’s still not finished.

M^me Otis hasn’t heard from Ottawa. She even contacted the PCSST at the end of August, but nobody saw fit to inform her of the existence of a verdict in her favour. That is The newspaper that he did.

But the Ministry of Health relieved itself of its responsibility.

“The CTSSP is administered by an independent third party, Epiq Canada Class Action Services. Neither Health Canada nor the provinces and territories play a role in evaluating applications,” a Health Canada spokesperson replied protocol.

“Whether they accept us or not, it doesn’t change anything in their lives. But for us it changes a lot of things,” emphasizes Mr. Nantais.