MAiD
Canada’s euthanasia regime is not health care, but a death machine for the unwanted
From LifeSiteNews
After ten years of assisted suicide, Canada has become synonymous with grim stories of death by lethal injection, with the regime’s net growing ever wider.
When Justin Trudeau took power in 2015, he announced that Canada was back and that his election was a harbinger of “sunny ways” and a new era for the country.
It was a new era, alright, but the ways turned out not to be sunny. In his ten years in office, over 60,000 Canadians were euthanized under the regime that his government brought in, and overnight, Canada became an international cautionary tale.
International headlines highlighted the grim story of Canada, where people were getting lethal injections because they were disabled; because they couldn’t get cancer treatment; because they were veterans with PTSD. As the U.K.’s Spectator asked in a chilling 2022 headline: “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?”
READ: New Conservative bill would ban expansion of euthanasia to Canadians suffering mental illness
Indeed, in the United Kingdom – where Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s dystopian assisted suicide bill passed last week – Canada was seen as so objectively horrifying that euthanasia advocates insisted that comparisons to their Commonwealth neighbor constituted fearmongering. Leadbeater, in fact, stated that her bill is “worlds apart” from Canada’s euthanasia regime. Anyone advocating for euthanasia must now reckon with Canada, which highlights how short and slick the slope really is.
Earlier this month, the New York state legislature also passed a bill legalizing assisted suicide; assisted suicide laws are also being considered in Maryland and Illinois. On June 14, the New York Times published a powerful op-ed by Ross Douthat titled “Why the Euthanasia Slope Is Slippery.” As is now standard in the international press, Canada’s euthanasia regime came up.
“A few days before the vote, my colleague Katie Engelhart published a report on the expansive laws allowing ‘medical assistance in dying’ in Canada,” Douthat wrote, “which were widened in 2021 to allow assisted suicide for people without a terminal illness, detailing how they worked in the specific case of Paula Ritchie, a chronically ill Canadian euthanized at her own request.”
“Many people who support assisted suicide in terminal cases have qualms about the Canadian system,” Douthat continued. “So it’s worth thinking about what makes a terminal-illness-only approach to euthanasia unstable, and why the logic of what New York is doing points in a Canadian direction even if the journey may not be immediate or direct.”
Notice, here, that a columnist can refer to the “Canadian direction” with the assumption that everybody recognizes, without question, that this a particularly bad direction to be heading in. Even euthanasia advocates, while privately admiring the scale and efficiency of the Canadian killing fields, feel it necessary to distance themselves from Canada publicly.
Douthat noted that the Canadian example reveals why the slippery slope is inevitable; that people have essentially come to expect that doctors “always need to offer something,” and that when no further care or treatment is possible, that assisted suicide should be available. This logic “assumes that the dying have entered a unique zone where the normal promises of medicine can no longer be kept, a state of exception where it makes sense to license doctors to deliver death as a cure.” But Douthat observes:
The problem is that a situation where the doctor tells you that there’s nothing more to be done for you is not really exceptional at all. Every day, all kinds of people are told that their suffering has no medical solution: people with crippling injuries, people with congenital conditions and people … with an array of health problems whose etiology science does not even understand.
READ: Cardinal Dolan denounces New York assisted suicide bill as ‘cheapening of human life’
The logic of assisted suicide means that inevitably, eligibility will expand to all kinds of suffering.
“Suffering is general and not limited, the dying are not really a category unto themselves, and the case for a lethal solution will creep beyond the bounds you set,” Douthat concluded. “In the end, you can have a consensus that suicide is intrinsically wrong, that suffering should be endured to whatever end and that doctors shouldn’t kill you. Or you can have an opening to death that will be narrow only at the start – and in the end, a wide gate through which many, many people will be herded.”
How do we know? Well, Douthat writes, “The Canadian experience shows this clearly.” After ten years of sunny ways, “Canada” has become synonymous with grim stories of death by lethal injection.
From LifeSiteNews
Premier Danielle Smith is following through on a promise to address growing concerns with Canada’s euthanasia regime.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has sent a mandate letter to Justice Minister Mickey Amery directing him to draft and introduce new legislation on euthanasia to ensure better oversight of so-called “medical aid in dying,” or “MAiD” and to prohibit it for those suffering solely from mental illness.
In December of last year, Smith’s United Conservative government indicated that they would seek to address growing concerns with Canada’s euthanasia regime. Mainstream media outlets attacked the move, with the CBC actually reporting that: “Some are concerned new limitations could impact already vulnerable Albertans.”
Premier Smith has now followed through on that promise. The September 25 mandate letter, which lays out directives on a wide range of issues, calls for the justice minister to take steps to protect vulnerable Albertans suffering from mental illness:
As lead, work with relevant ministries to introduce legislation to provide greater oversight and appropriate safeguards for medical assistance in dying and prohibit medical assistance in dying where a person seeks this procedure based solely on a mental illness.
In an email to the CBC, Amery stated that while euthanasia law is under federal jurisdiction, healthcare falls under provincial jurisdiction. The CBC falsely claimed that mental illness “has never been an approved sole eligibility factor for MAID, though the government has considered permitting it.” In fact, the Trudeau government passed Bill C-7, which legalized MAID for those struggling with mental illness, in 2021.
That eligibility expansion has been delayed twice—in 2023 and 2024—and is now slated to come into effect in 2027. Despite those delays, Bill C-7 is still law. MP Tamara Jansen and MP Andrew Lawton are currently championing Bill C-218, the “Right to Recover Act,” which would reverse this and make it illegal to offer or perpetrate euthanasia on someone struggling solely with mental illness.
The CBC’s coverage of this move was predictably repulsive. In addition to their disinformation on euthanasia for mental illness, they reported that “Smith’s letter directing new provincial legislation on MAID comes almost a year after the government surveyed just under 20,000 Albertans on whether they think the province should step in. Nearly half of those surveyed disagreed with putting in more guardrails on MAID decisions.”
“Nearly half” is an unbelievably deceitful way of reporting on those results. In fact, 62% were in favor of legislation for a dedicated agency monitoring euthanasia processes; 55% were in favor of a MAID dispute mechanism allowing families or eligible others to challenge decisions to protect vulnerable people, such as those with disabilities or mental health struggles; and 67% supported restricting euthanasia to those with physical illnesses rather than mental illnesses. The CBC did not report on a single one of those numbers.
Provincial legislation to protect people with mental illnesses is badly needed, although I pray that by the time Justice Minister Amery gets around to drafting it, the Right to Recover Act will be passed in Parliament, and provincial action will be unnecessary. In the meantime, it is increasingly clear that much of Canada’s mainstream press coverage of this issue actively threatens the lives of the suicidal and those struggling with mental illnesses. If their dishonesty and attempts and manufacturing consent were not so routine, they would be breathtaking.
Health
Canadians diagnosed with cancer in ER struggle to receive treatment as Liberals keep pushing MAiD
From LifeSiteNews
A study reveals Ontario emergency rooms struggle to manage cancer diagnoses, leaving patients without adequate follow-up care, while euthanasia remains readily available.
Research has found that Canadians diagnosed with cancer in the emergency room are often sent home without treatment; however, euthanasia remains readily available.
According to a study published September 8 by the National Library of Medicine, Ontario emergency room doctors are struggling to serve patients diagnosed with cancer while Liberals continue to push Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
“It’s kind of a little bit shocking to me that given how many people cancer affects and how devastating a diagnosis it can be to receive, that we haven’t figured this out better,” one doctor told researchers.
The study found that limited primary care access, specialist shortages, and long wait times have pushed patients to seek care from the emergency room. As a result, emergency doctors are giving out cancer diagnoses but are unable to provide sufficient follow up care. “We don’t often have enough information to know further what that means, in terms of prognosis, in terms of the type of treatments that they’re going to get,” another doctor revealed. “Then, to also add on the burden and say, ‘I also don’t know when you’re going to be seen’ is just a gut punch for them.”
According to the study, poor communication between EDs, primary care, and specialists often results in “lost” patients who are either delayed or prevented from receiving the proper care. Doctors called for standardized referral pathways, patient navigators, and better support to ensure timely follow-up.
The study discovered that the lack of timely care has resulted in “higher stages of diagnosis and increased mortality.”
At the same time, Liberals are focusing on expanding MAiD rather than addressing the medical staff shortage crises. In February 2024 after pushback from pro-life, medical, and mental health groups as well as most of Canada’s provinces, the federal government delayed the mental illness expansion until 2027. Liberals are also working to expand MAiD to children.
The most recent reports show that MAiD is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.
Asked why MAiD was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.
According to Health Canada, in 2022, 13,241 Canadians died by MAiD lethal injections. This accounts for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country for that year, a 31.2 percent increase from 2021.
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