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Ontario’s Liberal government has a rich history of scandal: power plants, Caledonia, eHealth, ORNGE, the list goes on. But there are remedies for all of those. Ontarians can vote the Liberals out. The government bought out Caledonia’s homeowners. Ontario’s economy made back the gas plant money in a trice.

To my mind, the whole lot taken together pales in comparison to what Judith Beaman detailed this week in her report on Motherisk, the disgraced and now-shuttered hair-testing lab at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto that helped Ontario’s children’s aid societies (CAS) take hundreds of kids away from their parents. This is a horror show, well documented in particular by the Toronto Star’s Rachel Mendleson, and yet somehow it still seems to fly below the radar.

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In the history of child apprehension perpetrated by Canadian governments for terrible reasons, 56 isn’t a big number. It’s a big number in the 21st century, though. It’s the number of cases in which Beaman’s team concluded that hair-based evidence of drug and alcohol abuse from the Motherisk lab had a “substantial impact” on the outcome of a case — i.e., where parents lost their kids and quite very well should not have.