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 LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

It must be said: The media’s relentless glamorization of suicide is repulsive and shameful.

It was once standard press practice to treat suicide as a tragedy. But since assisted suicide and euthanasia are now presented as the final front in the war for total autonomy, “human interest” stories now push the interests of the death lobby and treat suicide as a social good. The message this sends to the suicidal and desperate is clear.

The latest example of this is a December 2 story in Le Journal de Quebec on the assisted suicide of 101-year-old Paulette Fiset-Germain. She died by lethal injection in her room at the Manoir Cap-Santé on December 1. The opening line of the story almost glows with approval:

A centenarian who had lost none of her intellectual capacity is now shining in the sky after choosing medical assistance in dying on Monday.

Fiset-Germain had been living independently and alone only a few weeks ago but suffered two falls and a stroke. Last week, she told the staff and fellow residents that she wanted to die by euthanasia — or what in Canada is called “MAID.”

“I started to have trouble using the walker, I have one hand that I can’t use, the other one that I have trouble with, I can’t see one side anymore,” she said. “I’m at the end. You know when the glass starts to spill, it’s time to do something. In addition, you have trouble 24 hours a day, you don’t sleep. We’re going to close the loop.”

The Journal emphasized that she said this in a “very serene” tone of voice — and made it clear that Fiset-Germain’s family were supportive. “My children accepted my decision because they know me, they know that I am ready for it,” she said. “It started when I broke my hip and couldn’t do anything anymore. My decision doesn’t cause me any stress. I can’t wait. When the doctor agreed, I said, ‘You’re giving me a really nice gift.’”

To be clear: That “gift” is a lethal injection. She chose suicide by doctor — and the media celebrated it. That is nothing short of glamorizing suicide. In fact, the Journal made clear that Fiset-Germain was “grateful for the opportunity (of) medical assistance in dying,” but that she hopes it is expanded. In fact: “The last moments of Mme Fiset-Germain will also be the subject of a documentary.”

So, in addition to the puff pieces about her suicide, we’re going to get death porn propaganda that will be used to push for more suicides, likely (I suspect, although no details are yet available) produced in partnership with the vultures at Dying with Dignity.

“It’s too tight,” the elderly woman explained of Canada’s euthanasia regime, which is so notoriously loose it has been condemned by the United Nations. “We have to expand to relieve many people. There are others who are embarrassed, who are afraid of their children’s reaction. Mine told me, ‘It’s my choice, it’s my body, it’s my life.’” Funny — it seems like whenever someone uses that phrase, somebody is about to get killed.

The Quebec press is not known for its glowing coverage of religious beliefs, but for the suicidal Fiset-Germain, they made an exception. “Since I was little, I believe that when you die you become a star. When you see a shooting star, it’s someone who has left and is looking for a place,” she explained. “I received very good care here and I am very happy to end my days here and die in my bed.”

The article made sure to mention that she will “donate her body to science,” and quoted one of her reminisces of working as a nurse during the war, when she met a badly wounded soldier: “He was 20 years old and had lost both eyes, both arms and both legs. He asked me if he could hear his mother’s voice. I arranged for him to go to his house to hear it. I don’t know what happened to him next, but at that time, you couldn’t ask for medical assistance in dying.”

Her best friend offered her almost-too-enthusiastic support. “It’s a good decision,” her cousin and best friend Louisette Huard said. “After the life she’s had, the physical state she’s in.” I must say that if my best friend thought my suicide was a “good decision,” it would certainly heighten my suicidal ideation, but perhaps that’s just me.

Only the head of Manoir Cap-Santé and another friend were willing to express their grief. “It hurts us, but we respect her decision,” Guylaine Dufresne said. Her friend, Adelyre Goeguen, was blunter: “I didn’t like it right away. It was still a shock, and I don’t accept it at all.”

That, in case you’re wondering, is the correct response to the suicide of a close friend.

Jonathon Van Maren

Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.