Canada’s Euthanasia Law is a Bridge Too Far

By James Stansbury, AM THINKER

Whatever happened to medical ethics in Justin Trudeau’s Canada?  An article from December 7^th in Genocide News reported that “[t]he passage of Bill C-7 in Canada has greatly expanded the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law, which was passed in 2021 at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “pandemic.”  “It used to be that just terminally ill adults qualified to legally take their own lives with the help of another, but now poor people and even children are moving into the crosshairs of Canada’s budding euthanasia industry.”

The above article included comments from Alex Schadenberg, executive director and international chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.  He believes “…euthanasia will be expanded in Canada to include “severely ill” infants, an idea floated by the Quebec College of Physicians.  Unlike adults, infants cannot opt to commit suicide. They have no way to consent in the same way as adults with full cognitive functionality, meaning it is more homicide at that point than suicide.”  Whatever the motivation, it appears that Canada’s assisted suicide program is now basically without limits.

The UK Daily Mail in two companion articles reports that the motivation for expanding eligibility for MAiD appears to be at least partially a result of the financial policies and rising costs driving the failure of Canada’s “free” healthcare system.   Wait times for critical care procedures often take over six months and sometimes several years due to a shortage of doctors caused by MAiD’s mandated price controls.  And when everyone gets free medical care, resources are abused so long wait times and inadequate care must follow.  As a result, the number of people in pain and frustrated by the long delays in getting treatment is rising leading many patients to give up and opt for suicide instead.

In 2021, only 486 people died using California’s assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year.  MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives.

MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death. (snip)

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Professor Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as ‘probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ programme in Germany in the 1930s’.

The onward march of euthanasia — reportedly approved recently even for both diabetes and homelessness in Canada — poses myriad other dilemmas for the rest of society.

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