CRESCIA: MAiD... the made-in-Canada solution to end-of-life health costs

In Canada, medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is creating a culture of death. In 2022, more than 13,241 Canadians were legally euthanized up from 10,064 in 2021. (A 31% increase.) Of the 11 countries that offer state-sponsored death, Canada has the highest rate. And although plans to make mental illness part of the program have been suspended until after the election, the numbers show no sign of slowing down. MAiD of course, is a Big Brother euphemism intended to make euthanasia sound compassionate. But it isn't. So how did a civilized country such as Canada lose its civility in allowing death on demand?One has to go back to 2015, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the criminal prohibition of assisted suicide violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Up until then, it was a crime for a physician to assist a person wanting to die. The court’s original decision confined medically assisted suicide to individuals suffering from incurable diseases such as cancer, with no hope to live. After a 2019 ruling by the Quebec Superior Court, which ruled that the law must include competent and consenting adults regardless of whether natural death is inevitable, the Liberal government refused to challenge the ruling.The Trudeau Liberals proposed expanding MAiD by including mental illness. At the time, Minister of Justice David Lametti stated: “The government has heard concerns that the health-care system might not be prepared to handle those complicated cases. Some provinces, territories and those working in the health-care system say that more time is needed.” There's an understatement. Doctors are loathe to abandon their Hippocratic oath and an overwhelming majority of psychiatrists refuse to sign up. “Will we evolve into a culture of death as the preferred option for those who suffer from mental illness or will we choose life?" asked Conservative MP Ed Fast.Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, two University of Toronto bioethicists, Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin, argue that people stuck in “unjust social conditions” such as poverty or poor medical care, should have the right to end their lives. Considering the difficult Canadian economy with its declining living standards, housing crisis, aging population and food insecurity touching seven million of us, death-on-demand may look increasingly enticing to those suffering the most mentally and having the least materially.Take the case of Serena Bains, who believes all the talk about MAiD for psychiatric disorders has “heightened her thoughts of suicide.” The twenty-four-year-old BC native suffers from severe depression, anxiety and borderline personality disorder. Even with her mental suffering she has completed her university degree and is working on an internship. “More accessible health care, more psychiatrists should be available, more forms of therapy,” and she wonders why governments have not invested more in mental health services before making MAiD available. Then there is the example of Rosina Kamis who said it was not because of her physical suffering that she wanted to die but her mental suffering. “I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illness alone.” She was put to death in September 2021 by lethal injection for basically feeling lonely.According to a recent poll fewer than half of Canadians support assisted suicide for those whose sole underlying condition is mental illness. Another another 30% don't know. But once Canadians realize the country’s health-care system can't deliver enough mental health resources to those in desperate need, they might think again about allowing loved ones to die without exhausting alternative therapies.Darren Leung, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms thinks “MAiD doesn't have enough guard rails to protect the mentally ill who are the most vulnerable to take their lives. Instead of providing more resources to those in need, the health-care system is becoming death care."Canada’s Special Joint Committee recommended children should be eligible to receive MAiD without parental consent: children or “mature minors” can choose to die, if there's “reasonably foreseeable” death or they "have a mental disorder as the sole underlying condition.” The lobby group Dying with Dignity told the committee, "It's unfair to allow a 70-year-old with terminal cancer the choice of a peaceful death but deny a 12-year-old who has been given the same prognosis and demonstrates a clear capacity to make the decision as an adult.” But one asks, is a 12-year-old an adult? If a 12-year-old commits murder the courts do not put the 12-year-old in an adult prison. As with gender, the government wants to stifle parental authority.Anyone visiting a hospital will have seen health professionals making their rounds. Now there's a new team visiting patients — MAiD practitioners selling suicide. Associated Press cites a medical ethicist in a London, ON, hospital speaking to a disabled patient, Roger Foley, about euthanasia and that he was costing the healthcare system “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley told AP he never expressed a desire for medically assisted death and decided to record the staff as they kept speaking to him about it. Tim Stainton, Director of UBC’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship called medical assistance dying “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis' program in Germany in the 1930s.”To sum up, the Supreme Court clearly stated: “euthanasia for minors or persons with psychiatric disorders” would not be part of the law. New Health Minister Mark Holland responds: "There has to be an imperative to move towards a condition that recognizes the equivalency between mental and physical suffering.... It's an indication that the systems need to move toward readiness.”Stopping Canada's culture of death will involve punting MAiD back to the Supreme Court to clarify the law and put in place safeguards to protect society's weakest members and or elect a new government as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has committed to stopping MAiD’s expansion. Let’s hope democracy can work for the right for all citizens to live with dignity and put an end to the spread of leftist dystopian culture.Francis Crescia is a Toronto-based writer

CRESCIA: MAiD... the made-in-Canada solution to end-of-life health costs

Related Stories