Canada the Cruel

Have we reached peak Roman Empire?

Because I feel like we have:

On 31 January, 2024, Wade was running out of time. He had tried everything to persuade his 28-year-old daughter, Marge, that she could get better. But Marge had been scheduled to die by assisted suicide at 2 p.m. the next day at the family’s home in Alberta, Canada. He was horrified. Marge was autistic, vulnerable, and had no diagnosed physical illness. Her autism made her different from her peers — and lonely, no doubt — but Wade knew this was no reason to terminate a young life.

He had to do something. So he went to the courts. The legal claim he filed on that frigid winter day would put Wade on a quest no father should have to face: saving his daughter’s life from a Canadian health system that at times appears more committed to delivering death than protecting health. By taking legal action, he managed to delay Marge’s death for a while. But he is set to lose the battle.

Wade and Marge aren’t the real names of this story’s subjects. The case is under a Canadian publication ban issued by a provincial court in Alberta, leaving Marge’s family reluctant to speak on the record. Yet with the pro-euthanasia Liberals re-elected to power in Canada and assisted-suicide legislation swiftly clearing obstacles in Britain and New York state, among other jurisdictions, their story must be told: for it highlights the slippery-slope expansion of the categories of patients deemed eligible for suicide-by-doctor, once the practice is legalised.

After the January notice came the details. The last physician to assess her for assisted suicide, a family doctor practicing with the Alberta Health Services (AHS), took fewer than 24 hours to review and approve her application. And although the neurologist treating her for fatigue and pain assessed her as “normal”, another family doctor, unknown to her parents, declared her to be terminally ill. The clinic at which this family doctor practices referred UnHerd’s request for comment to AHS, which told UnHerd that “as this is before the courts, we are unable to provide comment”. 

“She tells us that she’s getting [Medically Assistance in Dying], and of course we freak out”, Wade tells me. “I was new to MAiD. I didn’t know anything about it.” He describes his daughter, Marge, as an intelligent young woman. He loves her, and he was saving money for her to be independent, to move her from the family home to her own apartment. She was healthy, but convinced she was sick.

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Canada’s publicly provided health care system actually requires rationing in order to contain costs. Because services are offered at no monetary price, demand exceeds the available supply of doctors, equipment, and facilities. If the different provinces (which operate most health care services) wanted to meet the full demand, each would have to raise taxes significantly to fund services. To keep expenditures down (managing the imbalance from public provision) and thus taxes as well, the system relies on rationing through wait times rather than prices.

The rationing keeps many patients away from care facilities or encourages them to avoid dealing with minor but nevertheless problematic ailments. These costs are not visible in taxes paid for health care, but they are true costs that matter to people.

All this may sound like an economist forcing everything into the “econ box,” but the point has also been acknowledged by key architects of public health care systems themselves. Claude Castonguay, who served as Quebec’s Minister of Health during the expansion of publicly provided care, conceded as much in his self-laudatory autobiography. The reality, he explains, is that eliminating rationing would imply significantly higher costs—costs that politicians are generally unwilling to justify through the necessary tax increases. Multiple government reports also take this as an inseparable feature of public provision—even though they do not say it as candidly as I am saying it here.

To illustrate the magnitude of rationing (and the trend), one can examine the evolution of the median number of weeks between referral by a general practitioner and receipt of treatment from 1993 to 2024. In most provinces (except one), the median wait time in 1993 was less than 12 weeks. Today, all provinces are close or exceed 30 weeks. In two provinces, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the median wait times exceed 69 weeks. For some procedures, such as neurosurgery, the wait time (for all provinces) exceeds 46 weeks.

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The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia was classified as a “priority client” for federal grants after it announced the discovery of 215 potential children’s graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, newly released records show.

Blacklock's Reporter says before the 2021 announcement, federal documents reveal that the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, with a population of 1,500, had twice been denied funding by the Department of Heritage, including a request to support the development of a local museum.

In one internal memo, officials wrote, “This project is not recommended for funding,” citing that proposals to develop programming, compile research on Confederation, and share best practices among Secwepemc communities were unsuccessful.

Following the publicized finding of graves, the First Nation secured more than $12.1 million in federal funding, including grants for a new museum.

A Department of Heritage manager even reached out directly to offer personal support for future funding applications, providing her contact information to assist with subsidies.

Despite the allocation of millions for excavation, forensic testing, and DNA analysis, no remains have been recovered from the Kamloops site to date.