Canada the Cruel

But think about how much money we're saving!:

Canada reached a new high in the number of assisted suicides last year, registering a 34% increase in people opting to end their lives under the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws in just one year, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday, June 7th. Anti-euthanasia activists blame the “heavy promotion” of assisted suicide for this steep incline.

While Ottawa is expected to publish the official statistics for 2022 next month, based on already available state-level data, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition assessed that MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) cases rose from just over 10,000 in 2021 to around 13,500 in the next year, a 34% increase nationwide. 

On the state level, Quebec saw the greatest hike during the period, where assisted suicide cases went up by 51%—meaning that with 7% of all deaths, MAID is now the third most prevalent cause of death in the province after cancer and heart disease—followed by Alberta with 41%, and Ontario with 27%.

(Sidebar: this Quebec.)

The reason assisted suicide rates skyrocketed in recent years is because the “heavy promotion of MAID within [the Canadian] medical system normalized lethal injections,” Alex Schadenberg, the director of the leading international anti-euthanasia advocacy group argued. He added:

Every major healthcare institution has a MAiD team which will literally approach everyone who may qualify for MAiD and ask them if they want to die.

Canada’s controversial MAID program, adopted in 2016, quickly made headlines for putting outstandingly loose criteria in front of those who wished to end their lives. Under the law, patients don’t need to have a terminal illness to qualify (only an “irremediable medical condition,” which can be any disease or disability that “cannot be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable”) and MAID can be administered not only by physicians but also nurse practitioners after evaluation by just two of them.

What initially was meant to help seriously ill patients who have long lost all hope of recovering quickly has turned into a slippery slope and “ballooned into a government program offering death as an escape from loneliness, depression, or even poverty and homelessness,” says Paul Coleman’s commentary on the topic. Indeed, leftist parties in Ottawa are currently pushing for extending the program to minors (even without parental consent), while over a quarter of Canadians support the idea of offering euthanasia to the poor and the homeless too.

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“The (Canadian) law itself says this doesn’t have to be last resort … and I think that’s a very disturbing societal norm,” Scott Kim, a senior bioethics investigator at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said in testimony to parliamentarians in the United Kingdom.

Kim called Canada an example of the world’s “most radically medicalized system of providing assisted dying.” The “most sobering” reality of Canadian euthanasia, said the doctor, is that it pairs “very open eligibility” with a “very aggressive medical delivery system.”

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The comments were made at a Tuesday hearing of the U.K. parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee.

Doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia are both illegal under U.K. law, with penalties of up to 14 years in prison for practitioners.

But amid mounting public pressure for Great Britain to legalize some form of doctor-assisted death, since December a panel of MPs have been leading an official inquiry to gather “real-world evidence” as to how assisted suicide regimes have functioned abroad.

“The government has stated it is for parliament to decide on the issue so our purpose is to inform parliament in any debate,” committee chair Steve Brine said at the inquiry’s outset.

On Tuesday, Canada’s system was also criticized by Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto bioethicist who has emerged as a perennial critic of the current state of the Canadian assisted dying regime.

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“I would say that Canada is a warning sign for countries that legalize medical assistance in dying,” he told the committee.

Lemmens has often stated that he was initially a support of assisted suicide, but has now seen it adopted as a form of “harm reduction,” with the Canadian medical system embracing the notion of offering MAID “when people don’t have adequate access to social support and care.”

 

The whole point was to remove human chaff but I thought that one knew that.