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FIRST READING: Canada is getting real comfortable with killing its disabled

Ontario hospital staff appear to pressure a patient to opt for euthanasia in new secretly recorded audio

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Only months after Ottawa greenlit one of the world’s most liberal euthanasia regimes, a series of controversial state-sanctioned deaths have attracted growing international criticism that the Canadian health system now seems to be actively killing its disabled patients.   

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This week, a feature by the Associated Press quoted secretly recorded audio from a London, Ont. hospital that appeared to show a medical ethicist raising the subject of euthanasia with a disabled patient, Roger Foley, after reminding him that he was costing the system “north of $1,500 a day.”

Foley told the AP that he had never previously expressed a desire for medically assisted death, and began recording the staff after they kept mentioning it to see if he had “an interest.”

The AP story also quoted Tim Stainton, director of UBC’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, who called medical assistance in dying “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

Canada first legalized euthanasia in 2016. The Supreme Court of Canada struck down a prior ban on assisted suicide, and gave Parliament a time limit to enshrine medical assistance in dying (MAID) into law.

The initial legislation was very careful to extend MAID only to Canadians with terminal illnesses whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” But another constitutional challenge – this one out of the Quebec Superior Court – compelled the federal government earlier this year to widen MAID eligibility to sick Canadians who weren’t necessarily on death’s door. Next year, the legislation will be expanded still further to include Canadians with mental illness.  

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MAID has seen a dramatic upswing in recent years. In 2020, nearly 7,600 Canadians ended their lives via euthanasia, a 17 per cent increase over the year prior. In disproportionately elderly regions like Vancouver Island, MAID is now the cause of 7.5 per cent of all deaths.

Within the numbers are a small but growing number of high-profile cases in which Canadians with treatable illnesses appear to have instead been prescribed death by lethal injection.

There was “Sophia,” a 51-year-old Toronto woman with severe chemical sensitivities who took MAID after she was unable to find an affordable home free of the smell of smoke or chemical cleaners. “Denise,” a 31-year-old Toronto woman, similarly pursued euthanasia as a result of what she called “abject poverty” preventing her from securing appropriate accommodation for a variety of chronic conditions.

Alan Nichols, a severely depressed B.C. man, was administered MAID shortly after being taken to the hospital by his family for a psychiatric episode. “They killed our brother,” Nichols’ brother Wayne told the National Post.

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Alan Nichols in green in his hospital room just before his death, with his brother, Gary, beside him.
Alan Nichols in green in his hospital room just before his death, with his brother, Gary, beside him. Photo by Courtesy the Nichols family

Gwen (not her real name), a patient in the Lower Mainland who has struggled for years to secure proper care for chronic pain, warned last month that MAID could very quickly become a means to remove patients like her from the system.

It’s eugenics, because they don’t want us to be properly supported and be OK. And if we don’t have family to take care of us, it’s ‘Please just go and die,’” she told The Tyee.

And this is all happening within the context of a worsening health case crisis in which basic primary care is denied to millions of Canadians, and wait times are among the longest in the developed world.

Canada has now become an international poster child for how quickly the legalization of euthanasia can go off the rails.

“Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?” read an April story in the U.K.’s The Spectator. “Your new law will provide, not prevent, suicide for some psychiatric patients,” read a detailed analysis of the Canadian bill by Mark Komrad, a psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Last year, a report by a team of United Nations special rapporteurs warned that Canada’s liberalization of euthanasia posed dire threats to its elderly and inform populations. “There is a grave concern that, if assisted dying is made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment … a social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability.”

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The report also warned of a “two-tiered system in which some would get suicide prevention and others suicide assistance.” 

During his recent visit to Canada to apologize for the historical crime of Indian Residential Schools, Pope Francis seemed to warn that Canada’s wholesale embrace of medical dying could be a new historical wrong in the making.

We need to learn how to listen to the pain … of patients who, in place of affection, are administered death,” he told a crowd in Lac Ste. Anne.

These sentiments are coming to be reflected in polls of Canadians themselves.

While a clear majority of Canadians have long supported assisted death for the terminally ill, they’re much less comfortable with policies to euthanize minors or the mentally ill. In a July poll, only 45 per cent of respondents supported MAID for adults whose only underlying condition was a serious mental illness.

IN OTHER NEWS

We now know that the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act as a response to Freedom Convoy was done despite the fact that absolutely nobody in law enforcement was asking for it. And now, cabinet documents released as part of ongoing litigation by the Canadian Constitutions Foundation also show that the Act was invoked despite internal intelligence showing that the Ottawa Police were on the verge of a breakthrough in clearing anti-mandate blockaders on their own. It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that every non-Ottawa Freedom Convoy blockade – including a particularly intransigent one at a border crossing in Coutts, Alta. – had been successfully dispersed by the time of the Act’s invocation.

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This is Ontario Premier Doug Ford sputtering after swallowing a bee during a live news conference on Friday. “Holy Christ, I just swallowed a bee,” the premier declared.
This is Ontario Premier Doug Ford sputtering after swallowing a bee during a live news conference on Friday. “Holy Christ, I just swallowed a bee,” the premier declared. Photo by Government of Ontario livestream

The Canadian Dairy Commission – the cartel-like body that fixes the prices for milk and cheese across Canada – received rare federal approval this year for two price hikes (one for 8.4 per cent, and another a few months later for a further 2.5 per cent). This means that even in our current climate of runaway grocery inflation, dairy prices are now set to surge faster than almost anything else. The CDC’s justification for the price hike was that production costs have exploded in recent months. But according to internal CDC documents obtained by the Toronto Star, the precise opposite is true: Dairy farmers pushed for a price hike despite the fact that their costs had gone down. More specifically, the documents showed that the average cost to produce 100 litres of milk was $84.57 in 2021, down from $85.42 in 2020.

You may have heard that much of Downtown Toronto experienced a sudden power outage on Thursday, plunging a significant chunk of Canadian corporate and financial headquarters into darkness. Twitter user braino_drano captured the above video documenting the cause: some barge operator hauling a crane forgot to check for overhead transmission wires.
You may have heard that much of Downtown Toronto experienced a sudden power outage on Thursday, plunging a significant chunk of Canadian corporate and financial headquarters into darkness. Twitter user braino_drano captured the above video documenting the cause: some barge operator hauling a crane forgot to check for overhead transmission wires. Photo by Twitter/braino_drano

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