Manitoba news — the province has paid $250,000 each to settle with the two men switched at birth in a Manitoba hospital in 1955, closing one of the most painful chapters in the province’s history.
Provincial financial disclosures released this week show the payments were made in the 2025-26 fiscal year to Richard Beauvais and Edward “Eddy” Ambrose, the two men who discovered as adults that they had been sent home with the wrong families from a hospital in Arborg, about 115 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
The pair were born on June 28, 1955. The mix-up went undetected for decades until Ambrose’s sister took a 23andMe DNA test that unravelled everything. What followed was a story that captured national attention: Beauvais had been raised Métis near Lake Manitoba, enduring the Sixties Scoop and residential schools, while Ambrose grew up Ukrainian on a farm in Rembrandt — each living a life that was never meant to be his.
Premier Wab Kinew formally apologized to the two men in the Manitoba legislature on March 21, 2024. Now, with the settlement paid, their lawyer Bill Gange says both men are “grateful… for the resolution of their claims.”
The switched-at-birth settlement ends a 70-year wait
Justice Minister Matt Wiebe called the switch a “miscarriage of justice” and said he hopes the settlement “brings some closure” for Beauvais and Ambrose.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. It is a significant number — and yet, how do you put a price on 70 years of a stolen identity? On a childhood spent in residential schools by a boy who should have been raised on a Ukrainian farm? The money closes the legal file. Whether it closes the wound is another question entirely.
Manitoba has at least done what many institutions never do: admit the failure, apologize on the record, and pay. For Beauvais and Ambrose, the hope now is that the rest of their lives are finally, fully their own.
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