Satire site The Babylon Bee recently ran the headline, ‘Canadian Healthcare System Introduces Punch Card Where On Your 10th Visit You Get Free Suicide.’ Sadly, the joke isn’t too far off from reality.
Earlier this year, I posted a meme on Facebook that brutally skewered Canada’s euthanasia regime. It showed an American doctor telling a patient his stitches would cost $58,000; a British doctor that the waitlist for stitches was 38 months; and a Canadian doctor solicitously inquiring: “Have you considered killing yourself?” (Another variation of the same meme has the doctor bluntly stating: “Kill yourself”—that’s because in Canada, we have the waitlistand the suicide.)
Facebook pulled the image and restricted my account. It violated their rules on the promotion of suicide. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), however, operates freely on Facebook despite the fact that facilitating suicide is their entire job.
I’ve noted before in this space that Canada’s euthanasia regime has turned us into an international cautionary tale—a country where we can, as it turns out, have the worst of all worlds. We can have a woke government that talks constantly about helping the poor, but implements euthanasia policies that victimize them (leading to headlines in the international press such as: “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?”) The steady conveyer belt of horror stories as disabled, sick, and desperate Canadians seek lethal injections—often the only “treatment” they’re eligible for in our broken system—makes the old Mitchell and Webb sketch seem plausible:
Consider that in the midst of all of this, the Trudeau government is—for the moment—still hellbent on expanding assisted suicide to the mentally ill in March, despite desperate calls to halt these plans from the psychiatric community, Canadian medical schools, suicide prevention experts, the disability community, and virtually everyone but the suicide enthusiasts at Dying with Dignity. It actually boggles the mind—the prime minister’s own mother has written several memoirs describing her own struggled with mental illness which would, come March, make her eligible to die under the regime her son has introduced.
As Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) system continues to alleviate the pain of patients and the financial strain on the nation’s healthcare system, a recent innovation is expected to further improve results: Parliament just announced a punch card that allows patients to receive a free suicide after 10 doctor visits.
‘From a small-scale maple syrup overdose to a full-blown moose attack, you receive a punch on your card every time you are admitted for an injury or sickness.’ The Canadian Healthcare website published a blog this week outlining the new program.
‘Filling out your punch card is mandatory, for data tracking purposes. No one sick person can be allowed to drain more than their share of the taxpayer’s dollars!’
Trudeau praised the new initiative, positioning it as a way to better engage citizens and prevent any one citizen from becoming a burden on the system. ‘Canadians are team players,’ said Trudeau. ‘It’s important for every citizen to make sure he’s not wasting taxpayer money to sustain a life that’s not worth living. And now with this punch card, they know that with each hospital visit they’re one step closer to the end!’
For anyone offended by this, I would remind them that Canadians right across the country have been pro-actively offered assisted suicide by doctors—including military veterans suffering from PTSD. Cancer patients have been told that treatment that might save their lives is not available—but assisted suicide is. A disabled man in a hospital in London recorded an ethicist telling him that he should consider assisted suicide because his care was costing the system so much money. One Canadian doctor told me that his colleagues feel obligated to present “MAiD” as an option—and that increasingly, sick and vulnerable Canadians will feel obligated to take it.
More from The Bee:
Critics have contended that the new approach preys on disabled and impoverished Canadians who may see assisted suicide as their only option, but the criticism has already been quieted since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of anyone who spoke out against his regime’s policies in the comments section of the healthcare website’s blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere. At publishing time, the burden on Canada’s healthcare system was further alleviated when Parliament announced that the policy would retroactively apply to people who had already been admitted for 10 prior hospital visits.
That sort of thing provokes what they call a “painful chuckle.” The truth is that, as Ross Douthat noted in the New York Times, Canada has already entered a truly dystopian period—when over 4% of recorded deaths are Canadians being lethally injected by doctors, we’re all the way down the slope and there’s a huge pile of corpses at the bottom. I really wish that article was more satirical than it is.
Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.
He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.
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The Biden administration signaled its support for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) new pandemic treaty expected to be finalized at its World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, the final week of May.
Pamela Hamamoto, the State Department official representing the United States at the meeting, stated that “America is committed to signing the treaty that will ‘build a stronger global health structure,’” wrote John Tierney, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor, in the City Journal.
Adoption of a legally binding pact governing how countries around the world are to respond to future outbreaks like the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been the goal of WHO-directed negotiations since 2021. The WHO, a United Nations-sponsored organization, came under sharp criticism for its handling of the coronavirus.
On May 8, attorneys general from 22 states sent President Biden a letter saying they oppose the accords which will turn the WHO into the “world’s governor of public health.” The letter says giving the WHO such authority violates the U.S. Constitution, and could lead to censorship of dissenting opinions, undermine Constitutional freedoms, and give the WHO power to declare any “emergency” besides health including climate change, gun violence, and immigration.
Missteps on COVID-19
In a post on Twitter (now X) on January 14, 2020, the WHO stated: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”
Two weeks later, on January 30, 2020, WHO’s Emergency Committee issued a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), stating, “The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation of China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the front lines of this outbreak, with transparency and, it is to be hoped, success.”
The WHO’s initial investigation into the origins of COVID-19 concluded it was improbable that the virus resulted from experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, though it later acknowledged that it could have come from a lab leak at Wuhan. The WHO’s investigation, which was thwarted by Chinese officials, ultimately reached no conclusion. President Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO, a decision reversed by President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.
More Smoke and Mirrors
Further undermining the WHO’s credibility in setting policies on managing a future pandemic, the group decided to include Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, in its initial investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance prominently featured in an investigation by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic into the government’s funding and lack of oversight of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, for which EcoHealth received grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health.
In an interim report released on May 1, 2024, the subcommittee said there is “significant evidence that Daszak violated the terms of the NIH grant awarded to EcoHealth. Given Dr. Daszak’s apparent contempt for the American people and disregard for legal reporting requirements, the Select Subcommittee recommends the formal debarment of and a criminal investigation into EcoHealth and its President.”
After the release of the report, U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) told the Washington Examiner, “The World Health Organization covered up the Chinese Communist Party’s role in developing and spreading COVID-19 and has since failed to hold them accountable for the global pandemic that killed millions, upended our daily lives, and destroyed thousands of small businesses.”
Public Fed Up
The WHO’s shaky record on COVID, including its close ties to China and Peter Daszak, have taken a toll on the public’s willingness to accept its leadership in any future pandemics.
A poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for the Center for Security Policy, released on April 17, found that 54.6 percent of likely voters oppose tying the United States to a WHO pandemic treaty, and just 29.0 percent favor such a move.
Agreements Bypass Congress
While providing few details, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus said, “The pandemic agreement can bring all the experience, all the challenges we have faced and all the solutions into one. That agreement could help us prepare for the future in a better way.”
The “treaty” the Biden administration is eager to sign will likely be an executive agreement, like the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which was not presented to the U.S. Senate for ratification but contained “commitments” President Barack Obama pledged to honor.
Also in the works in Geneva are amendments to International Health Regulations, which Congress would not approve or disapprove.COVID
WHO’s Power Grab
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WS), sent a letter to President Biden signed by all 49 Republican senators, expressing their concern about the powers that could be handed to WHO, on May 2.
“Some of the over 300 proposals for amendments made by member states would substantially increase the WHO’s emergency powers and constitute intolerable infringements upon U.S. sovereignty,” the letter states.
Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), who has attended UN-sponsored conferences around the world for over 30 years, says the WHO is a destructive force.
“WHO’s performance during COVID-19 was a lethal combination of incompetence and dishonesty,” said Rucker. “The organization failed to protect public health and went to extraordinary lengths to cover up China’s role in fostering gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Ratification of any WHO pandemic treaty would be nothing short of a travesty.”
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.
The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.
Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.
The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.
“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”
It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.
The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.
In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.
Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.
No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”
With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
