Two Canadian law firms have filed a $1.1-billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of former patients of government-run “Indian hospitals,” which comprised a decades-long segregated health care system now marred by allegations of widespread mistreatment and abuse, CBC News has learned.

The lawsuit focuses on 29 segregated hospitals operated across the country by the federal government between 1945 and the early 1980s. Researchers say thousands of Indigenous patients may have been admitted to the institutions during that four-decade span.

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