In 1997, Annette, Cécile and Yvonne Dionne told a CTV reporter that their combined pension was $700 a month and that they sometimes could not afford to heat their home in St. Bruno, Que., according to Canadian Geographic. “We need money to continue our life,” Annette said.
The three women were the surviving Dionne quintuplets, born May 28, 1934, in Corbeil, Ont., to Oliva and Elzire Dionne, per The Canadian Encyclopedia. The province took the girls from their parents, fearing private exploitation, and placed them in a specially built hospital under Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe. Oliva Dionne spent nine years trying to regain them.
The public knew the compound as Quintland. It had observation areas, barbed wire and on-staff police, and the sisters lived there until age 9, according to Global News. They were displayed two to three times a week.
About three million people visited between 1934 and 1943, Global News reported, including King George VI and his wife. The Canadian Encyclopedia says visitors watched the girls play behind a one-way screen.
“Quintland was essentially a zoo,” longtime family spokesman Carlo Tarini told Canadian Geographic.
The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the sisters as the country’s biggest tourist attraction and “a $500 million asset to the province.” The page gives no year or method for the figure. Commercial endorsements swelled a trust fund to nearly $1 million, and the three survivors shared its much-depleted final installment in 1979.
Two of the sisters did not live to see that day. Émilie died in August 1954 and Marie in February 1970, per the encyclopedia.
Within weeks of the 1997 interview, CTV’s W-Five hired forensic accountants to investigate the trust fund, Canadian Geographic reported. In March 1998, the Ontario government announced it would pay the three surviving sisters $4 million in compensation for the nine years they spent on display at a tourist theme park, per Global News.
Tarini told Canadian Geographic that the settlement helped.
Annette Dionne died on Dec. 24, 2025, at age 91, after complications from Alzheimer’s disease, according to Global News. She was the last surviving quintuplet and, the Dionne Quints Home Museum said, the last surviving of the family’s 14 children.
Another set of all-girl quintuplets, the Busby family of League City, Texas, was described in 2017 as the first in the U.S.
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