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It was not an accidental campaign dreamed up by a few “nasty” people, Kinsman says, but rather something that came from the highest echelons of power. Careers were destroyed. Some men killed themselves.

But there’s a chance now for redress, he said.

“It’s really important for the Canadian state to take responsibility for what it did, to say that it was wrong and to apologize to all the people who were affected by this campaign.”

Because surveillance was costly and time-consuming, the government hired Robert Frank Wake — the chair of Carleton University’s psychology department at the time — to come up with an easier method for determining a person’s sexual orientation.

You shouldn’t be able to hide bad things that happened in the past and forget about them because that just sets a precedent for being able to do terrible things now and have this expectation that later on, if it comes out, no one will care anymore.

What he devised came to be known as the “fruit machine.” There wasn’t an actual machine, though, just a collection of psychological tests, including one designed to detect how a subject’s pupil responds to images of naked or semi-naked men and women.

It never worked, and the project was eventually abandoned. But its existence was emblematic of the discrimination gays and lesbians faced.

Now, more than half a century later, some Carleton students want the school to acknowledge its role in this dark chapter of Canada’s history and issue a public apology for what Wake did. The students also want the university to erect a small monument on the campus so people will learn about and discuss what happened back then.

“You shouldn’t be able to hide bad things that happened in the past and forget about them because that just sets a precedent for being able to do terrible things now and have this expectation that later on, if it comes out, no one will care anymore,” said Skyler Gubbels, a fourth-year criminology student.