Canada the Cruel

Wounds we inflicted on ourselves:

A Calgary judge has issued a ruling that clears the way for a 27-year-old woman to receive medical assistance in dying (MAID) despite her father's attempts through the courts to prevent that from happening.

A publication ban protects the identities of the parties and the medical professionals. CBC News will identify the daughter as M.V. and the father as W.V.

While Justice Colin Feasby acknowledged the "profound grief" that W.V. would suffer with the death of his child, he ruled the loss of M.V.'s autonomy was more important.

"M.V.'s dignity and right to self-determination outweighs the important matters raised by W.V. and the harm that he will suffer in losing M.V.," wrote Feasby in his 34-page written decision issued Monday.

"Though I find that W.V. has raised serious issues, I conclude that M.V.'s autonomy and dignity interests outweigh competing considerations."

 

This young woman with autism would never be allowed to refuse a Covid jab.

We are disgusting as a people for allowing this.

 

 

Because Japan is a serious country and Canada used to be:

Spend two weeks in a foreign country and you’re bound to compare it to home. Whether it’s the stunning architecture of Paris or the warm beaches of the Caribbean, you sigh and say, “How lovely, if only we had this in Canada.” But you know it’s a fantasy: you can’t recreate 200-year-old stone walkups in downtown Toronto, and the water of the Atlantic Ocean will never be 28 C.

Then you go to Japan and the most striking difference isn’t something caused by geography or some other irreproducible factor. It’s the incredible sense of safety you feel in public places. The numbers bear this out: Canada’s homicide rate is 2.25 per 100,000; Japan’s is 0.7.  Our robbery rate is 56 per 100,000 people; in Japan, it’s 1.2. And while crime has risen in Japan since the easing of COVID restrictions, it’s still nowhere near what it is in our country, or much of the West.

What is the impact of this difference? You relax. You go about your day without clutching your purse to your chest or side-eying the nasty-looking dude on the subway. Because there isn’t one to begin with.

My teenage daughter and I travelled up and down the country, and not once did we feel unsafe, whether hunting for a late-night eatery on a deserted street in Osaka, riding the subway at 10:30 p.m. in Tokyo or walking up lonely mountain roads in Hakone. Through seven cities and dozens of train and subway rides, we witnessed only one man with evident mental health issues yelling at passers-by. We saw two homeless people. We were never asked for money, as panhandling is illegal.

What we saw instead was six-year-olds taking the subway to and from school alone. Schoolkids of all ages walking down the backstreets of major cities by themselves. What a change from Canada, where my daughter has on several occasions had to disembark from Toronto streetcars in broad daylight because someone was high and threatening other passengers, and where kids have routine lockdown practice in schools. We have become so accustomed to violence that we teach our kids how to deal with it — instead of demanding that it stop.

So what does Japan do differently? First, it is a big fan of hyper-local community policing. Instead of big police stations covering a large district, Japan’s Koban and chuzaisho system puts nearly 13,000 storefront police offices in busy areas like shopping centres and train stations, staffed 24 hours a day by three to five officers. The officers also patrol the local area on foot or by bicycle, and they don’t just deal with crime. They also assist lost children and collect lost property. Police are seen as helpful, not hostile, and their presence deters criminal activity.