Allan Memorial Institute

In January 1973, staff of the CIA's Technical Services Division destroyed the records of MKULTRA, the agency's program of research into drugs and techniques for controlling human behavior. They were acting on the verbal order of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the program, and Gottlieb was carrying out a verbal order from the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms. Helms later confirmed giving that order. Some of what was lost concerned a psychiatric hospital in a Montréal mansion.

Ravenscrag

Sir Hugh Allan, founder of the Allan Line shipping company, built Ravenscrag between 1861 and 1863 on the slope of Mount Royal at the top of rue McTavish. From the square tower he could watch his transatlantic ships in the port. The City of Montréal's heritage record notes that the land had held an unfinished house from the McTavish estate, said to be haunted, which was torn down shortly before building began.

In 1940, the widow of Allan's son Sir Montagu Allan left the house to the Royal Victoria Hospital. It became the Allan Memorial Institute, the hospital's psychiatric department, and its first director was Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. Over his career, Cameron was president of the Canadian, American, and World psychiatric associations. He died in 1967.

Depatterning

Cameron's treatment had two stages. In the first, which he called depatterning, the aim was to erase the patient's existing thoughts. The judge who authorized the current class action summarized it as immobilizing patients, rendering them intellectually helpless, and preventing them from using their defenses. The lawsuit describes the means as electroshock, sensory isolation, and large doses of sedatives and barbiturates. In the second, patients heard recorded messages on a loop, first a negative statement such as "you are selfish" and then a positive one such as "you are lovable." The lawsuit says the messages were repeated 250,000 to 500,000 times.

A scientific paper by Cameron, cited in the 2025 judgment, listed what the treatment could produce: disorientation in time and space, major memory loss, loss of a second language, inability to walk without help, and incontinence.

Subproject 68

From 1957, the CIA paid for part of Cameron's work through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation it used as a front, under the file name MKULTRA Subproject 68. CBC reports the sum as $60,000 US between January 1957 and September 1960. Other accounts, including a 2023 paper in History of Psychiatry, give $69,000. The Canadian government also funded Cameron, and The Canadian Encyclopedia puts that funding at about half a million Canadian dollars between 1950 and about 1965.

Whether Cameron knew where the money came from is disputed. In the mid-1980s, the institute's directors said there was no evidence he knew the CIA was paying, and the same 2023 paper argues that he may never have known.

What survived

In March 1977, a CIA officer answering a Freedom of Information request found seven boxes of MKULTRA material in the agency's Retired Records Center, filed under financial accounts. On August 3, 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner told a joint Senate hearing that the cache had first been estimated at 5,000 pages and might be closer to 8,000. Later accounts usually describe some 20,000 documents.

Compensation

Nine of Cameron's former patients sued the United States. In 1988, the US government settled for $750,000 without accepting liability. WBUR reported that one plaintiff had been disqualified by then, leaving eight to share the money, while CBC has described all nine as compensated.

Canada created the Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan by Order in Council on November 16, 1992. It offered an ex gratia payment of 100,000 Canadian dollars to former patients who could show "full or substantial depatterning," and it closed on January 31, 1994. Seventy-seven former patients were paid. More than 250 were turned down because they had no medical records, applied too late, or were judged not to have been damaged enough.

The class action

Former patients and relatives filed for a class action in Quebec Superior Court in January 2019. The United States was dropped as a defendant on grounds of state immunity: the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled on October 2, 2023, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal on May 30, 2024.

On July 31, 2025, Justice Dominique Poulin authorized the class, with Julie Tanny and Lana Ponting as representatives. Tanny was 5 when her father was admitted to the institute. Ponting was a teenager in Cameron's care. The class covers everyone given depatterning at the Allan between 1948 and 1964, with their families, heirs, and dependents. The defendants are the Attorney General of Canada, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University. The judge allowed compensatory damages but not punitive damages under the Quebec Charter, because the acts predate it. The McGill University Health Centre has said Cameron acted independently and was not legally an employee of the Royal Victoria Hospital.

The Royal Victoria Hospital asked for leave to appeal, and the request was refused on November 13, 2025. The plaintiffs filed their application to institute proceedings on January 19, 2026. Their lawyer, Jeff Orenstein, has said that many records from the period were destroyed, some intentionally and some under the institutions' own retention rules.

The grounds

Since 2022, a group of Kanien'kehá:ka elders known as the Mohawk Mothers has been in court over the former Royal Victoria Hospital grounds, alleging that Indigenous patients are buried there in unmarked graves. On January 16, 2025, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear their appeal over oversight of the construction work. In 2023, McGill reported that no human remains had been found in the areas searched. The Mothers say a report combining ground-penetrating radar, remains-detection dogs, and a soil probe supports the presence of remains near the Allan Memorial Institute. No remains have been confirmed, and the Mothers' allegation has not been disproved.

The house now

The property is now part of the redevelopment of the former Royal Victoria Hospital run by the Société québécoise des infrastructures for McGill's New Vic project, which aims to open on the southeast part of the grounds in 2028. The McGill University Health Centre still runs outpatient psychiatry in the building. In 2020, CBC reported that Cameron's portrait still hung in the institute's halls among the other past directors, with his name removed.

The house is an outpatient psychiatric clinic, so there are no tours and nothing inside is open to visitors. The front and tower are visible from the sidewalk on avenue des Pins Ouest, looking up the drive from the gate at the top of rue McTavish.

Patients come and go through that gate. It's best practice to frame photographs so that nobody arriving or leaving can be identified.

Work on McGill's New Vic project continues around the former Royal Victoria Hospital, and in June 2026 the gate carried construction-site access signs.