And yet stories describing just this — a system that does encourage the vulnerable to seek medical death — are coming fast and hard lately. A number of recent news articles have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country’s euthanasia system. In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada — at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.
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As this article will show, in internal meetings, those close to the system have long talked openly about red flags that many people are choosing euthanasia because they’re not getting the “supports and cares” they need. The physicians in charge of the process not only know that this is happening, but they have discussed it in seminars, collected evidence, and then kept it quiet in public.
The safeguards promised by Trudeau and others to prevent vulnerable people from heading down the road to euthanasia turn out to be vague, pro forma, and easy to get around by doctor-shopping. And interviews with patients and their loved ones show that some of them, perhaps many, are making it to the end.
One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.
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In fact, the evidence of abuse is there if advocates want to find it. The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care. These are people who do have some sort of medical condition but in many cases are using them to check a box in the approval process, when the relief they are mainly seeking is from other forms of suffering. And the system is doing much more to help them down the path toward death than to protect them as the public was promised.
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Justin Trudeau made a clear promise to the public: that nobody would receive MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares that you actually need.” But the CAMAP recordings plainly suggest that exactly this is happening, that euthanasia workers know it, and that they are acting with no urgency to stop it.
During the Q&A, no one in the seminar doubts that the stories are true. Nobody suggests strengthening the safeguards, alerting the public, or halting the system while the problem is worked out. Less than a decade into Canada’s experiment in medicalized death, with over 31,500 people dead, the speakers feebly propose to start collecting data.
The presenters clearly understand that what they are describing is a terrible moral problem. “Our silence is our complicity,” Gibb-Carsley writes on her last slide in a large font. But Gibb-Carsley and Kevin Reel do not present euthanasia driven by poverty as a problem for MAID. Actually, they suggest, it presents an opportunity to highlight the real problem: the inadequacy of the welfare state.
It’s as if the situation offers a silver lining. Reel excitedly talks about the problem as an “extraordinary lever” to lobby for improved welfare. Gibb-Carsley’s slideshow concludes, “trust in the evolution of this field of practice,” meaning the practice of euthanasia. “Your Assessments provide a rare opportunity to hear from the typically disenfranchised patients about their experiences.” The subtext of this sunny euphemism is that giving a voice to the voiceless will, for many, ultimately mean killing them.
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According to an internal study of MAID assessments, presented to CAMAP in 2022, of 54 patients who were not terminally ill, two-thirds had concurrent mental illness. A fifth of the patients had difficulty finding “appropriate” treatment. And, most disturbingly, over a third of patients were “not offered appropriate / available treatments.”
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From Rosina, Les, Mary, Nancy, Greg, Lucy, and so many others across Canada, what we hear are the cries of people in despair asking for help. Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.