Canada is Killing Itself - the Scourge of MAiD

Canada has been incubating a culture of death for decades. One of the greatest failures of our current civilization is the failure to protect the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society; those being the unborn children in the mother's womb. While this article is not about abortion, I will share some quick facts about abortion in Canada.

There is currently no law restricting abortion in any way in Canada, making Canada one of only two countries in the world with absolutely no restrictions on a mother killing her unborn child. I believe that the only other country with no rules at all about this is Communist China, which spent decades under a one child law. This is shameful. This lack of laws surrounding abortion means that it is available for any reason at any stage of development, right up to partial birth abortions.

Stats about abortion are slow to be compiled, and we have just ended another year of child butchery, so the latest numbers I could find are from 2023, when Canadian women killed 101,553 children, according to the National Right to Life Committee. Keep in mind that while the government allows and even promotes the slaughter of our own children, they keep lamenting our falling birth rates and claim that the only remedy is to open our borders to nearly unchecked levels of immigration.

As of 2022, it is estimated that 4.5 million Canadian babies have been murdered through abortion since 1969, and we have not killed less than 80,000 babies every year in Canada since 1990.

We are calling the wrath of God down on this country, and it is well deserved.

But as I mentioned, this article is not about abortion; this article is about Medical Assistance in Dying, other wise known as MAiD, formerly referred to as euthanasia, or more honestly referred to as murder. I just wanted to note that, had we not rejected the right to life for our innocent children, I doubt that we would now be in a state where the old and infirm are also taking their lives with the help of those whose Hippocratic Oath includes the idiom "First do no harm", and is based on the teachings of a man whose original oath included the words, "I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art." Oh, how far our medical establishment has fallen from it's earliest high moral standing!

I actually started compiling information for this article a number of months ago, but I didn't feel the compulsion to write it at that time. Now, my wife has again been telling me of people that she is connected to that are either pursuing MAiD themselves or who have families that have done so. These are largely people approaching or in middle age. They should be entering some of the most satisfying years of their lives, and they are instead choosing to end their lives because things are a little rough, and they are doing so at a rate that I would have never thought I would be in such near proximity to witness.

Now, before I go on with this article, I want to address the emotional argument for assisted dying. I can personally attest to understand how and why someone would want to allow or help a loved one to end their life in the midst of suffering, especially prolonged suffering. I have a vivid memory of visiting my own father in the personal care home where he spent his last days, and he was having an especially rough time. My dad was bedridden for the last 13 months of his life after having spent the previous three years gradually, but quickly, losing his mobility and developing other issues. His legs were always hurting him and he required help to move them into different positions, but even doing so with minimal movement and extreme gentleness, it always caused him excruciating pain. 

On this particular day, I was having my lunch break with him and he looked at me and told me that he wished that he was dead rather than lying in that bed watching his body decay and feeling constant pain. I can admit that, hearing his voice and seeing the strain on his face, there was a part of me that actually considered smothering him with his pillow and walking out of that room. My love for my father caused me to see how one would want to end the suffering of their loved one, but my love for God and His morality would not allow me to take my father's life, even though he would have been grateful for that, at least until the final moments when he would have likely regretted the moral failing of me, his son, and I would have carried that failure and that grief with me for the rest of my life. 

So I get the emotional argument. After all, this is how society always finds itself on the wrong side of morality; we succumb to arguments of an emotional nature because nobody wants to be seen as uncaring. Well, I don't care. I have chosen to live according to the morality of the Creator of the universe and all that is in it, including every human being. I cannot abide the expansion of the death cult that is the Canadian medical system without speaking out against it. We are supposed to be offering health care, not death on demand.

The absolutely morally and ethically corrupt Justin Trudeau Liberal government enacted MAiD in 2016, and since then, 60,300 people have died under the MAiD program up to the end of 2023. The justification for this was that the unelected judges of the Supreme Court of Canada determined that, somehow, section 7 of the Constitution Act of 1982 is contravened by sections 14 and 241 of the Criminal Code, ruling that sections 14 and 241 were unconstitutional restrictions, and the unelected judges ordered the elected government to change the laws surrounding assisted suicide. This information was gleaned from the court documentation [a] of the case that lead to the decision. 

For clarification, here is the above mentioned section of the Constitution Act of 1982:

    Section 7:   Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be                           deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

And here are the relevant sections of the criminal code that were deemed to be contrary to the Act:

    Section 14: No person is entitled to consent to have death inflicted on them, and such consent does                           not affect the criminal responsibility of any person who inflicts death on the person who                        gave consent.

 

   Section 241: (1) Everyone is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of                         not more than 14 years who, whether suicide ensues or not,
                       (a) counsels a person to die by suicide or abets a person in dying by suicide; or
                       (b) aids a person to die by suicide.

I am not a lawyer and I recognize that I am simplifying things somewhat; my point is that our elected governments seem to have forgotten that unelected judges do not make law. The government is given the duty to draft law according to the will of the people, this is why elections are so important; it is the judge's job to enforce the laws as they are written according to the word and the spirit of the law.

In the case of the above mentioned court proceedings, the argument was made that the right to life, liberty and security of the person apparently includes the right to end that life. The right to life does not include the right to death; these are two separate states of being and one cannot exist in the same sphere as the other at the same time, so how can one argue that the right to life is synonymous with the right to death when they are completely opposite from each other?

From a completely secular viewpoint wherein life is only encapsulated in the physical body that we indwell here on this earth, I can understand that position; but Canada was founded upon, and the Constitution is written with Christian fundamentals in mind, regardless of whether or not you agree with those fundamentals yourself. The very first line of script of the Constitution Act of 1982 says, "Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:". That preamble makes it clear that everything that follows is to be interpreted through the lens of Christian ethics and values. This is why sections 14 and 241 exist in the Criminal Code in the first place. It is God's design that human life is precious, that no person is to take their own life, and anybody who participates in the taking of an innocent life is guilty of murder. That's what the Bible says and that is what the Constitution and laws uphold; or at least they did so originally. I would argue that the changes that were made to the Criminal Code in order to make compassionate murder legal are themselves unconstitutional. They are definitely unethical and immoral. But what else can we expect from a government that was the most corrupt in Canadian history, led by a man who has abandoned his own christian upbringing.

But I want to examine some weaknesses in the policies and practices that surround the entire MAiD apparatus. It seems to me that the rules were written in such a way that it is easy to dance around them, though proponents of MAiD argue that the opposite is actually the case; that the policies are too restrictive.

My first issue is that MAiD is supposed to be entirely voluntary. I understand that a doctor may need to present this as an option for someone who is suffering (though "suffering" is entirely subjective), but I wonder how much any given doctor may work to persuade their patients to pursue this option. This may be based upon an ideological position that sees no inherent value in human life, a position that unfortunately seems to be becoming more prevalent in our health care providers, or it could be offered and even pushed for selfish reasons. It seems to make sense that a person that is dealing with issues that would make them eligible for MAiD is going to need more care and attention. The doctor may be feeling the burden of an unmanageable work load and sees the option of taking a few of his most needy patients off his hands as a viable one. This can easily be an unfair statement for me to make, but considering how many Canadians do not have a family doctor right now, is it really unrealistic to consider this possibility?

There is also the sinister possibility that the government pursued this end rather than fight against the courts to protect the lives of Canadians because they saw the looming health care costs of millions of Boomers in the near future and viewed this as a way to potentially lower those costs exponentially. After all, it is much cheaper to kill your citizens than it is to care for them, potentially for decades. Again, I admit that this is a very cynical way of looking at things, but governments are supposed to balance budgets, and even though shiny pony Justin was completely incapable of making sense of a balance sheet, he still knew that his out of control spending was getting to be a problem. Something had to give, and he had too many ideological causes to fund and too many friends to enrich; people were just going to have to die. I say that all tongue-in-cheek, but really, am I far off the mark?

In my research for this article, I looked at the first to the fifth annual reports on MAiD. If you want to look at them yourself, I have the links to these reports at the bottom of this article. The reports are supposed to be neutral, but there is some language in there that seems to be designed to sway the reader to further "compassion" in light of some of the findings.

For example, in the Fifth Annual Report, I found a section reporting on people who had requested MAiD who ended up dying from another cause instead. The reasons for this range from a withdrawal of the request to the process taking too long for various reasons. For your information, below is a copy of the related chart from the report:

Following is the language associated with the above chart that I found may have been designed to sway the positions of those who were reading the report: "Individuals who died before they had selected a date for receiving MAID had the longest median time between request and death (32 days). All other groups had a median time of less than 24 days between request and death, for the following reasons: the referral was made too late; no assessor or provider was readily available; assessments were not completed; the person was eligible but died before the scheduled MAID provision; the person lost capacity before the waiver of final consent was completed; or operational issues. These findings bring into focus how even modest delays can interfere with a person's ability to receive MAID."(emphasis added). We are to be concerned that doctors aren't able to kill people faster; this is a real tragedy!

Another thing that I found in the reports centred around the reasons for the request and how they are presented in the paperwork. I see loopholes that can easily be navigated simply by a desperate person being willing to state that the loophole condition is the reason for seeking MAiD. I will be quoting from the fifth report a fair bit in the next section.

"3.1 Most common serious and incurable illnesses

"Cancer was the most common medical condition among people who received MAID under Track 1; neurological and "other" conditions were the most frequently cited among people who received MAID under Track 2.

"In order to be eligible for MAID (both Tracks 1 and 2), a person must have a "grievous and irremediable medical condition". This criterion is met only when assessors are of the opinion that:

1. the person has a serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability;
2. the person is in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability; and
3. the illness, disease, or disability or that state of decline causes the person enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to the person and cannot be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable."(emphasis added)
   

"In 2023, the most common means that were offered and discussed were pharmacological, followed by health care services, including palliative care and disability support services."

 

Not quoting here; the above deemed 'unacceptable conditions' that could relieve a person's suffering could be affected by the costs associated with the drugs that are pushed by the medical establishment. We have socialized healthcare, but if you are unfortunate enough to get cancer, there are myriad medications which the system does not cover. There are likely other illnesses that will put people in the same situation. If you have some other illness, the treatment plan for which involves a lot of travel over distances to a larger health centre along with all of the associated costs that must be borne by the patient, then that treatment can become financially unfeasible. If a patient can't see themselves being able to afford the drugs, treatments or travel, they may see death as the only viable option.

There is another problem with the system as it is designed. There is room in the application process for an assessor to "pad" the request to ensure acceptance; I wonder if there is a safeguard against this? Keep in mind, those who are practitioners and assessors of MAiD are also advocates; what is to stop them from accepting those who should not be accepted through a sleight of hand, as it were, in the application and assessment process?

Here I am quoting from the report again: "For this reason, practitioners may – and often do – select more than one medical condition, and do not rank them in order of most significant impact on the individual's health. The broad categories provided to practitioners for MAID reporting purposes are cancer, neurological conditions, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular conditions, organ failure and "other" conditions (practitioners can select more than one)." 

 

"The conditions that are provided for the "other" conditions category include: diabetes, frailty, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain and mental disorders, but practitioners sometimes listed other conditions such as joint bone and muscle issues, hearing and visual issues and various internal diseases in the write-in fields. Note that within the broad categories, practitioners can select multiple specific conditions, and they do not have to be listed in order of their impact on the patient."

 

So, for example, the reason that the patient is actually seeking MAiD might be because they are lonely and depressed, which isn't currently an accepted condition, or maybe even that their eyesight or hearing are diminishing, but the doctor helps them by also listing that they had a heart attack at one point, which is enough to push them over the threshold to be accepted into the program.

 

Here I am quoting again: "For those who received MAID under Track 1, cancer was the most frequently cited medical condition (n=9,435), followed by "other" conditions (n=3,918), then cardiovascular conditions, such as congestive heart failure, atrial fibrillation or vasculopathy (n=2,416). For Track 2, the most frequently indicated medical condition were neurological conditions (n=349) and "other" conditions (n=343)."

 

This system is rife with options for abuse! "Other conditions" ranks too high in the report as the reasons given, but what are the "other conditions"? 

 

But that's still not all; here I am again quoting from the report:

 

"Chronic pain

Similar to frailty, chronic pain is recognized as a potentially debilitating illness. The World Health Organization now recognizes chronic pain as a disease, rather than only an outcome of something else. Chronic pain is generally understood as pain lasting three months or longer and may result from an underlying disease or treatment (i.e., cancer treatment, rheumatoid arthritis) or have no identifiable cause (i.e., fibromyalgia). Individuals with chronic pain:

• May experience fluctuations in pain severity.
• Often encounter challenges related to the availability and accessibility of treatment such as long wait times, limited access to services in rural and remote areas and financial barriers to accessing certain services, such as psychological support and physiotherapy.
• Often have a co-morbid psychiatric condition, such as major depressive disorder.

These factors can create challenges in the context of a MAID eligibility assessment.

Table 3.2b provides a breakdown of MAID cases where chronic pain was reported by age, sex and track. As shown in the table, chronic pain was reported in 767 Track 1 MAID cases and 166 Track 2 MAID cases, for a total of 933 cases. Chronic pain was the sole medical condition in 23 of these cases. In the absence of additional information, it is unclear what the cause of the individual's pain was, and how it would contribute to an assessment of whether they were in Track 1 or Track 2. Consistent with research on chronic pain in Canada, chronic pain was more commonly reported among women than men in the context of MAID. It was most commonly reported among women aged 85 years or older who received MAID under Track 1. Among MAID recipients reported as having chronic pain, the other most commonly reported medical conditions were cancer, cardiovascular conditions, and respiratory diseases."

By these criteria, I would be eligible for MAiD! I suffer from chronic pain as a result of having to deal with sciatica. It affects my sleep and my mobility. It has affected my work on more than one occasion, but I am nowhere near incapacitated enough to ever consider MAiD, but there is every possibility that, given the right doctor and assessor, I could qualify to end my life based on these issues. I am very close to two other people that I can think of off the top of my head who have actually been offered MAiD very recently, and neither has ever even considered ending their life due to their difficulties.

Now I want to show you a chart that shows the requests for MAiD when considered against the incomes of those who are requesting it.

 

I will be honest, I thought that the lower income people would have an even higher rate of MAiD deaths over higher income people, but this chart still shows that the lowest income margin had the most requests - this means that the poorest people feel the worst about their prospects for a good life given their health status. This is a judgment on the quality of care that we receive in our public system. The system is supposed to care for the most needy, but apparently, the most needy are feeling left behind. The following paragraph from the report hurt my heart, if I am totally honest.

"The findings suggest, at a high level, that people who receive MAID do not disproportionately come from lower-income or disadvantaged communities. Track 1 recipients lived in less or similarly marginalized neighbourhoods, by all three measures, compared to the reference group (Figure 4.5b). Track 2 recipients followed a similar pattern, living in less marginalized neighbourhoods than the reference group on the measures of "economic dependency" and "situational vulnerability". However, on the measure of "residential instability" as defined by Statistics Canada, there are higher percentages of Track 2 recipients than Track 1 recipients and the reference category. While this does not speak to the situation of the MAID recipients themselves, it means that Track 2 recipients are more likely to live in neighbourhoods with more renters, more apartment buildings, more people living alone, more people that moved recently, and fewer people that are married or common-law."(emphasis added)

For clarification, Track 1 recipients refers to people whose death is imminent, while Track 2 recipients are those whose death is not considered imminent. Track 2 people have a very good chance of living for years at the time that they submit their application, but they view their own suffering as being too much for them to handle, so they are seeking MAiD as an alternative to renting for the rest of their lives, living alone, or feeling lonely in a new place as potential examples from the report. I understand that this translation of the report takes license with what they are saying, but the report is pointing out that the more disaffected people of society are more likely to seek MAiD, which makes one wonder if this is not a eugenics program of sorts to rid society of the less desirables.

The MAiD program is just another example of what has been typical in all the Liberal-presented legislation that has been brought forward in the last ten years. It is rushed and is packed with language and loopholes that are designed to reduce the limitations of the legislation. What are supposed to be guide rails to prevent abuse actually turn out to be gates to exceptions. The Liberal government has mastered the art of vague wording in their bills that allow for abuse and the undermining of Canadian society as a whole.

But I can't hold the government entirely to blame for these lapses. Just like with abortion, there just is not an appetite among the citizenry of Canada to do better for our country and our people. I would love for the Conservative Party to say that they will repeal the revisions to the Criminal Code that allow for MAiD to exist, or that they will bring forward common sense limitations to abortion at the very least, but the people of Canada have lost our recognition of the sanctity of human life and we have become accustomed to having the ability and even the legal right to end the lives of those who are the most vulnerable.

As I said earlier, we are calling the wrath of God down on this country, and it is well deserved.

 

[a]  https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14637/index.do

First report -  https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2019.html

Second Report -  https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2020.html

Third Report -  https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2021.html

Fourth Report - https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2022.html

Fifth Report -  https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2023.html