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My colleagues at Cardus have done a signal service in telling Canadians what the government does not want us to know, namely that euthanasia is far more widespread in the country than we think.
The study, entitled “From Exceptional to Routine: The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada,” was released this past week. The shift from exceptional to routine refers to the practice of euthanasia, which has exploded from 1,018 deaths nationally in 2016 to 13,241 in 2022, the last year for which data are available.
And Canada itself has become exceptional. We have the fastest-growing euthanasia program in the world. We are global leaders in state-sanctioned and administered lethal injections for the sick, the weak, the diminished, the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled.
When the Trudeau government decided to put Canada at the forefront of this grisly business, it adopted the term “medical assistance in dying.” The acronym “MAiD” has been widely adopted, as if this were just a bit of housekeeping, getting the hospital room cleaned out for the next patient.
The ship has sailed on the nomenclature, but there remains value in objecting.
There is nothing “medical” in MAiD; the healing art of medicine is not being engaged. A service is demanded and provided, in a manner more mercenary than medicinal. The doctor becomes a service dispenser alone, more a mechanical operator than a professional. Death by robot is on the horizon; DIY “suicide pods” have already been developed abroad.
MAiD flatly violates the ancient Hippocratic oath — I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor offer any such counsel — for the dwindling number who care about that. That is the reason that physicians — especially anesthesiologists — are barred by their code of ethics from taking part in executions. Administering lethal injections is not medicine.
There is no “assistance.” The lethal injectors enter not to assist the patients to do anything, but rather to stop doing altogether. They are accomplices, not assistants.
And there is not, in many cases, anyone “dying.” The initial MAiD requirement for imminent death was abandoned in 2021. Euthanasia has now become death-by-choice, pure and simple.
So call it MAiD, as it seems we must. But I prefer a more accurate, alternative meaning: “mechanistic accomplices in death.”
MAiD dressed up in a different uniform is just as grisly. Cardus gives us the key facts which are otherwise whispered, if spoken at all: MAiD is now the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada. As Cardus fellow and study author Alexander Raikin writes, “Only deaths from cancer, heart disease, COVID-19 and accidents exceed the number of deaths from euthanasia in Canada.”
The original promise that MAiD would be, in the rulings of courts, a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions” has been deserted. In 2016, Jody Wilson-Raybould, then the minister of justice and attorney general, said, “We do not wish to promote premature death as a solution to all medical suffering.”
Canadians who are startled to find doctors proposing MAiD to them know well that premature death has become precisely that solution.
What we are told is wildly inaccurate. The Cardus report explains:
“In May of 2022 … Health Canada predicted that by 2033, MAiD deaths would stabilize at four per cent of total deaths, a figure that was double its first public prediction of a ‘steady state’ in MAiD barely four years prior. Yet, Health Canada’s estimate was proven to be inaccurate even before the end of 2022. Health Canada’s fourth annual report on MAiD, released in October 2023, revealed that Canada surpassed the four per cent mark in 2022 — in effect, 11 years ahead of schedule.”
Canada’s health authorities do not care to know what is actually going on. Or worse, they are hiding it. Again, the Cardus report:
“Some provinces’ death records do not record MAiD as a cause of death, instead recording the underlying condition that led to the MAiD request and subsequent death. Further, Health Canada reports on the number of MAiD deaths, but Statistics Canada does not consider MAiD a cause of death. These inconsistencies in reporting have an impact on research about MAiD and about causes of death more generally.”
MAiD had been promised as a last resort in truly difficult cases. In practice, it has become routine. If asked for, it is provided. In 2019, eight per cent of MAiD requests were deemed ineligible. By 2022, it was down to 3.5 per cent. It is even possible for MAiD requests to be assessed and granted in a single day.
In the course of a single decade, under one federal government, Canada’s medical regime has been utterly transformed, masked by misleading acronyms, false predictions and hidden data. Canadians ought to know the truth.
Our broken health-care system has found something that it is good at — providing death to the sick and suffering.
National Post
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