The last time we checked on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Suicide (MAID) program, a Calgary judge had issued a ruling clearing the way for a 27-year-old woman to volunteer for life-ending procedures despite her father’s attempts through the courts to prevent that from happening.
Truly, Canada is a progressive utopia…or is it?
We have been sounding the alarm for quite some time about the disturbing direction Canadian medical advice has been heading for quite some time. For example, a Canadian Forces veteran was seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury when he was casually offered MAID.
Jacobin Magazine, a publication for socialists that reports having a circulation of 75,000, finds the promotion of euthanasia over welfare disturbing,
Disability and other advocates have been warning us for years that MAiD puts people at risk. They warned that the risk of people choosing death — because it’s easier than fighting to survive in a system that impoverishes people, and disproportionately does so to those who are disabled — is real. Underinvestment in medical care will push people up to and beyond the brink, which means some will choose to die instead of “burden” their loved ones or society at large. They were right.Canada now has one of the highest assisted-death rates in the world. As the Guardian reported in February, 4.1 percent of deaths in the country were physician-assisted — and the number is growing, up 30 percent between 2021 and 2022. In a survey of just over 13,100 people who opted for MAiD, a significant majority — 96.5 percent — chose to end their lives in the face of terminal illness or imminent death, Leyland Cecco, author of the report, noted. But 463 chose it in the face of “a chronic condition.”A libertarian ethos partially underwrote the fact that not many people blinked when MAiD was initially rolled out. Taking a more expansive view of rights, many of those not swayed by rote libertarianism were convinced that concerns over bodily autonomy and compassion were reason enough to adopt MAiD. However, in the absence of a robust welfare state, and in the face of structural poverty and discrimination, particularly toward disabled people, there is no world in which the MAiD program can be understood to be “progressive.”Indeed, last year, [Canadian journalist] Jeremy Appel argued that MAiD was “beginning to look like a dystopian end run around the cost of providing social welfare.”
In addition to Legal Insurrection, Twitchy contributor Amy Curtis has warned about this program.
This writer has written about Canada’s MAID program for a little while, each time warning people that this program would be abused by the government, applied as a cost-saving measure against the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. As the numbers of MAID ‘patients’ (victims would be a better word) rise, at least one Canadian PM praises it as ‘enhanced freedom’.
Apparently, Jacobin Magazine’s contributors are on a journey of discovery about the realities of Canada’s MAID program.
Perhaps Jacobin Magazine contributors will expand their information sources in the future, as there have been warnings for quite some time this was the trajectory MAID was taking.
Despite the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly promised that no one would receive MAID “because [they’re] not getting the supports and cares that [they] actually need,” many are wondering if this is in fact true. Concern has been raised by those on the right and the left. Headlines from mainstream newspapers include the following: “Are Canadians being driven to assisted suicide by poverty or healthcare crisis?”, “‘Disturbing’: Experts troubled by Canada’s euthanasia laws,” and “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?”The debate ramped up when journalist Alexander Raikin published a piece in the more conservative-leaning journal The New Atlantis providing evidence that euthanasia providers are aware that such cases are more common than many think. Among Raikin’s sources for such a claim were a set of virtual training seminars produced by the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, or CAMAP. These seminars advised providers on how to deal with the moral distress of providing MAID to patients who are driven to euthanasia because of poverty or inadequate social supports—in other words, patients who feel they have “no other options.”Raikin chronicled a few such cases in depth. The subjects said things like “I cannot afford to live . . . what do I do? . . . MAID is the only choice I can see for a way out” and “the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.”
I will conclude this piece with one of my favorite and often-used lines.
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