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
The family of an elderly man is speaking out about the terrible hospital conditions that led their father to request euthanasia before he died of natural causes.
The family of Cleo Gratton, an 84-year-old retired diamond driller who died earlier this month in Chelmsford, Ontario, of natural causes after being approved for assisted suicide, is speaking publicly about their appalling experience in the Canadian healthcare system.
According to the CBC, the elderly man “told his family he would rather die than go back to Health Sciences North in Sudbury,” and that a recent stay there found Gratton, who was suffering from heart disease and kidney failure, spending one night in the emergency room and then being transferred to a bed sitting in the hallway on the seventh floor.
“There were no lights, all the bulbs in that hallway had been completely removed,” his daughter, Lynn, told the CBC. “The only light we had was almost like a desk lamp that had been bolted to the wall. Patients are passing by, nurses are going by, no privacy, no compassion, no dignity.” The visit took place in mid-October, after which Gratton decided to apply for “medical aid in dying,” or assisted suicide.
Lynn said that nurses had to use headlamps to inspect her father’s feet, and that the experience was “just one thing after another and it really opened our eyes to what’s going on in our hospitals. My dad said, ‘Push, push, push for change. Make people aware of what’s gong on. Open the discussion, bring it to your MP, your MPP, keep going straight up.”
His family is now honoring his wishes to speak out about his experience. The doctors and nurses, Lynn emphasized, were “amazing,” but she noted that they seem overworked. “Why are they still taking in patients if we have an overcrowding issue and they have no place to put these people?” she said.
Cleo Gratton, who died of natural causes surrounded by his family before he could go through with assisted suicide, is just the most recent of many examples of Canadians opting for assisted suicide because they could not access the care that they actually desired.
In Quebec last year, Norman Meunier, a quadriplegic man, developed bedsores after four days left on an ER stretcher without a good mattress. That experience combined with lack of available homecare pushed him to request, and receive, assisted suicide.
An unnamed woman in her 80s, referred to in a MAID report as “Mrs. B,” received MAID earlier this year after requesting but being denied palliative or hospice care. Instead, with her spouse burning out as the result of her care, a rushed MAID assessment was completed, and she died by lethal injection.
In 2022, 44-year-old Winnipeg woman Sathya Dhara Khovac died by euthanasia after failing to receive the homecare resources she had desperately sought. In her posthumous obituary, she said she could have had more time if she’d had more help.
In 2019, 41-year-old Sean Tagert was euthanized after spending years attempting to find and fund the homecare and resources he needed to stay in the community where his son lived. He did not want to die but felt that he had no other choice.
And, among other stories, at least four Canadian veterans were offered assisted suicide in lieu of the unavailable mental health supports they were requesting.
Stories of Canadians seeking palliative care, mental health resources, homecare, and other medical support finding that the only option available to them is assisted suicide have become routine over the past several years. Euthanasia has become a pressure valve for an overworked and under-funded healthcare system serving an aging population increasingly need of complex care — and if assisted suicide for mental illness is legalize, things will get much, much worse.
armed forces
Canadian veteran says she knows at least 20 service members who were offered euthanasia
From LifeSiteNews
Canadian Armed Forces veteran Kelsi Sheren told members of the House of Commons that he has proof of veterans being offered assisted suicide.
Canada’s liberal euthanasia laws have made the practice so commonplace that a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran has said she knows and has “proof” that no less than 20 of her colleagues were offered unsolicited state-sponsored euthanasia.
Kelsi Sheren, who is a CAF veteran, recently told MPs in the House of Commons veterans affairs committee that “over 20 veterans have confirmed being offered MAID.”
“I have the proof, and I have proof of more,” Sheren told the committee during an October 28 meeting.
Conservative MP Blake Richards asked Sheren if she was willing to provide them with evidence to affirm her allegations.
Sheren noted how the 20 veterans have given written testimonies, or actual audio recordings, of when they were offered what in Canada is known as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
“We also have other individuals who are too afraid to come forward because Veterans Affairs has threatened their benefits,” she told MPs, adding that some other veterans were even offered non-disclosure agreements along with “payouts if they were to take it.”
Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) has told the media its “employees have no role or mandate to recommend or raise (MAid). ”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, this is not the first time reports of CAF veterans saying they were offered MAiD.
Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, it was revealed last year that the federal department in charge of helping Canadian veterans appears to have purposefully prevented the existence of a paper after scandalous reports surfaced alleging that caseworkers had recommended euthanasia to suffering service members.
LifeSiteNews recently published a report noting how a Canadian combat veteran and artillery gunner revealed, while speaking on a podcast with Dr. Jordan Peterson, that the drugs used in MAiD essentially waterboard a person to death. Assisted suicide was legalized by the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016.
A new EPC report has revealed that Canada has euthanized 90,000 people since 2016.
As reported by LifeSiteNews last week, a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill that, if passed, would ban euthanasia for people with mental illness received the full support of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC).
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