The Quiet Violence of Neglect

Canada’s assisted-death regime has reached a point most people assumed was dystopian fiction and it’s doing so with bureaucratic calm. A woman in Saskatchewan, Jolene Van Alstine, suffering from a rare but treatable parathyroid disease, has applied for MAiD not because she is dying, but because she can’t access the surgery that would let her live.

Read that again. Not terminal. Not untreatable. Just abandoned by a system that has the audacity to call itself “universal.”

Her assisted death is scheduled for January 7, 2026.

And the country shrugs. Van Alstine described spending years curled on a couch, nauseated, in agony, isolated, and pushed past endurance. The disease is brutal, but treatable a surgery here, a specialist there. The kind of medical intervention that in a functional system wouldn’t even make the news.

But in Saskatchewan? There are no endocrinologists accepting new patients. Without one, she can’t get referred. Without a referral, she can’t get surgery. Without surgery, she loses her life either slowly through suffering, or quickly through state-sanctioned death.

If you’ve ever lived through pain that warps time…
If you’ve ever had your mind hijacked by trauma…
If you’ve ever stared down suffering with no end in sight…

You know how thin the line can get between endurance and surrender.

And that’s why this story hits differently: it reveals how fragile people become when the system meant to protect them becomes an accomplice in their despair.

Canada frames MAiD as empowerment. As compassion. As choice.

But choice is only real when the alternatives are viable.
If your options are slow agony or assisted death, that’s not autonomy it’s coercion with a friendly tone.

Disability advocates, chronic-pain patients, the elderly, and low-income Canadians have been sounding the alarm for years: MAiD is expanding faster than support systems can catch up. Every expansion widens the chasm between the rhetoric of compassion and the lived experience of those who actually need help.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission itself warned that MAiD is being accessed because people cannot get the services required to live with dignity. And dignity matters. Anyone who has lived on the edge knows this: humans don’t just need survival, we need a reason to keep surviving.

When the healthcare system withholds that, death can look like mercy. This is the part polite society doesn’t want to confront.

Canada’s healthcare system is collapsing. Not strained. Not overburdened. Collapsing.

We have a growing list of citizens choosing death because medicine has become a lottery →
• a quadriplegic woman who applied for MAiD because she couldn’t secure basic home-care support
• veterans offered MAiD instead of trauma treatment
• homeless Canadians considering MAiD because they can’t survive winter

And now a woman denied a simple, lifesaving surgery.

At some point, we have to call this what it is: a nation outsourcing its failures to death. I’ve sat with veterans who couldn’t find themselves inside their own minds after war. I’ve watched people suffer silently because bureaucracy didn’t move fast enough to keep up with their pain.

I’ve coached clients who were one dropped ball, one missed appointment, one shut door away from losing the will to fight.

The lesson is the same every time. People don’t break because they’re weak. People break because they’re left alone with their suffering.

Van Alstine wasn’t offered community.
She wasn’t offered care.
She was offered an exit.

And she took it.

Not because she wanted to die but because Canada didn’t give her any path to live.

We need to stop pretending this is compassionate. Compassion is presence. Compassion is support. Compassion is a surgeon who actually exists, a referral that actually happens, a system that catches someone before they fall into the dark.

If MAiD is going to exist, it must be the last, quiet, grave option not the discounted aisle Canada sends you to when the cost of real care is too high.

A society reveals its soul by how it treats the people who can’t fight for themselves.
Right now, Canada is revealing something hollow.

People will debate the ethics of assisted dying forever. Fine. Debate it. But this is the wrong battleground. The real question is this →

What does it say about a country when death is easier to access than medical care?

Until Canada answers that honestly, we’re going to see more names on the calendar scheduled deaths, stamped and approved — for people who didn’t want to die. They just wanted someone to give them a chance to live.

Canada has failed every single citizen, and not a single person seems to care.

KELSI SHEREN

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SOURCE: https://righttolife.org.uk/news/canadian-woman-getting-assisted-death-because-she-cant-get-surgery

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From the Fraser Institute

By Steven Globerman, Joel Emes and Austin Thompson

According to our new study, in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data), typical homes on the market were unaffordable for families earning the local median income in every major Canadian city

The dream of homeownership is alive, but not well. Nearly nine in ten young Canadians (aged 18-29) aspire to own a home—but share a similar worry about the current state of housing in Canada.

Of course, those worries are justified. According to our new study, in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data), typical homes on the market were unaffordable for families earning the local median income in every major Canadian city. It’s not just Vancouver and Toronto—housing affordability has eroded nationwide.

Aspiring homeowners face two distinct challenges—saving enough for a downpayment and keeping up with mortgage payments. Both have become harder in recent years.

For example, in 2014, across 36 of Canada’s largest cities, a 20 per cent downpayment for a typical home—detached house, townhouse, condo—cost the equivalent of 14.1 months (on average) of after-tax income for families earning the median income. By 2023, that figure had grown to 22.0 months—a 56 per cent increase. During the same period for those same families, a mortgage payment for a typical home increased (as a share of after-tax incomes) from 29.9 per cent to 56.6 per cent.

No major city has been spared. Between 2014 and 2023, the price of a typical home rose faster than the growth of median after-tax family income in 32 out of 36 of Canada’s largest cities. And in all 36 cities, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home grew (again, as a share of median after-tax family income), reflecting rising house prices and higher mortgage rates.

While the housing affordability crisis is national in scope, the challenge differs between cities.

In 2023, a median-income-earning family in Fredericton, the most affordable large city for homeownership in Canada, had save the equivalent of 10.6 months of after-tax income ($56,240) for a 20 per cent downpayment on a typical home—and the monthly mortgage payment ($1,445) required 27.2 per cent of that family’s after-tax income. Meanwhile, a median-income-earning family in Vancouver, Canada’s least affordable city, had to spend the equivalent of 43.7 months of after-tax income ($235,520) for a 20 per cent downpayment on a typical home with a monthly mortgage ($6,052) that required 112.3 per cent of its after-tax income—a financial impossibility unless the family could rely on support from family or friends.

The financial barriers to homeownership are clearly greater in Vancouver. But, crucially, neither city is truly “affordable.” In Fredericton and Vancouver, as in every other major Canadian city, buying a typical home with the median income produces a debt burden beyond what’s advisable. Recent house price declines in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto have provided some relief, but homeownership remains far beyond the reach of many families—and a sharp slowdown in homebuilding threatens to limit further gains in affordability.

For families priced out of homeownership, renting doesn’t offer much relief, as rent affordability has also declined in nearly every city. In 2014, rental rates for the median-priced rental unit required 19.8 per cent of median after-tax family income, on average across major cities. By 2023, that figure had risen to 23.5 per cent. And in the least affordable cities for renters, Toronto and Vancouver, a median-priced rental required more than 30 per cent of median after-tax family income. That’s a heavy burden for Canada’s renters who typically earn less than homeowners. It’s also an added financial barrier to homeownership— many Canadian families rent for years before buying their first home, and higher rents make it harder to save for a downpayment.

In light of these realities, Canadians should ask—why have house prices and rental rates outpaced income growth?

Poor public policy has played a key role. Local regulations, lengthy municipal approval processes, and costly taxes and fees all combine to hinder housing development. And the federal government allowed a historic surge in immigration that greatly outpaced new home construction. It’s simple supply and demand—when more people chase a limited (and restricted) supply of homes, prices rise. Meanwhile, after-tax incomes aren’t keeping pace, as government policies that discourage investment and economic growth also discourage wage growth.

Canadians still want to own homes, but a decade of deteriorating affordability has made that a distant prospect for many families. Reversing the trend will require accelerated homebuilding, better-paced immigration and policies that grow wages while limiting tax bills for Canadians—changes governments routinely promise but rarely deliver.

Steven Globerman

Senior Fellow and Addington Chair in Measurement, Fraser Institute

Joel Emes

Senior Economist, Fraser Institute

Austin Thompson

Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute