Canada is the euthanasia centre of the world. This is due to the legislation passed in 2016 by the Liberal government that permits physicians to kill patients by lethal injection under certain circumstances. The legislation is called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) so as to deliberately mislead the public into believing it is a compassionate and respectable piece of legislation. It is not. It is a terrible law for both the health care profession and vulnerable people requiring medical care, not death.
The MAiD legislation is based on the ideology of eugenics, which is used to solve human problems caused by the lack of medical treatment, hospital beds, and social services for the disabled. It’s a cost saving solution for the purpose of eliminating troublesome people.
Canada’s MAiD regime has become an example to the world of “slippery slope” legislation. This euthanasia policy is nothing less than bureaucratization/ institutionalization by the state to provide death by suicide and a useful tool for medical authorities to rid themselves of “problem” patients. It assists provincial governments to reduce the cost of providing medical services for the needy.
In short, MAiD, which was initially promoted as a last resort in exceptional circumstances, has now become “treatment” for the convenience of the authorities.
Canada’s Journey to Death
Canada’s journey to death began by the blunders of the “progressive”, woke judges on the Supreme Court of Canada. In 2015, in R. v. Carter, they decided that it was lawful for physicians to kill their patients under certain circumstances. This decision calmly overturned centuries of law that had been put in place to protect vulnerable patients. The court, in reaching its conclusion, did so because of its enthusiastic support for a “progressive” law on euthanasia.
It wasn’t that long ago, in 1993 to be exact, that the Supreme Court of Canada, in Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General), upheld the Criminal Code prohibiting assisted suicide, declaring it constitutional. The same Supreme Court, composed of different judges except for Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin who took part in Rodriguez and in Carter v. Canada, declared the law prohibiting the killing was unconstitutional. Thus began the MAiD regime of assisted suicide. The presumptuous judges in Carter v. Canada had assured us in their decision that the “slippery slope” of increased assisted suicide deaths that was occurring in the Netherlands and Belgium could be prevented in Canada by precautions included in Canadian legislation. Their naivety was astounding. The rate of assisted suicide in Canada after just seven years, has now exceeded the rate of assisted suicide in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Liberal Government could have challenged this Woke Legislation
The first MAiD regime in 2016 provided fixed limits on its availability. Unfortunately, such limits have proven to be a pipedream. These limits were swept aside by a lower court judge in Quebec, in September 2019. The judge, Christine Baudouin, in
Truchon v. Canada (Attorney General), held that the requirement that assisted suicide in the 2016 MAiD legislation could only occur when natural death was “reasonably foreseeable”, — was unconstitutional.
The Liberal government could have applied the Notwithstanding Clause (section 33) in the Charter to overturn this frightening decision of the court. Instead, Justin Trudeau enthusiastically followed the court’s direction, and made amendments to the Criminal Code to give legislative form to the Truchon decision. The Trudeau Liberals, in a shocking display of ineptness and progressiveness, introduced a change to the MAiD regime which removed the requirement that a person’s natural death must be reasonably foreseeable, and also extended MAiD availability for those suffering from mental illness. The implementation of the latter provision in the MAiD regime was delayed until March 2024 because of public pressure.
Euthanasia was no longer a last resort, but had become a normalized and “accepted” alternative “treatment” to end-of-life care. Examples of the wide application of the MAiD legislation keep piling up. A veteran requiring a wheelchair was offered MAiD instead, a woman experiencing depression was offered MAiD, a disabled person requiring social services to support him was offered MAiD, an individual unable to pay his rent was offered MAiD. On and on it goes.
Judicial Corruption or Collusion?
How could one decision of a single judge in a lower court in Quebec result in the liberalizing of MAiD? The judge in Truchon, Christine Baudouin, was at the time a relatively junior judge of the Quebec Superior Court, having been appointed in May 2017. Yet, less than a year later in 2018, she was appointed the judge of record for the ground-breaking Truchon litigation.
Could that case assignment have had something to do with Baudouin’s pro-euthanasia beliefs? Her pro-euthanasia views were no secret. She agreed with her father, now retired Quebec Court of Appeal judge Jean-Louis Baudouin, a long-time proponent of state sanctioned euthanasia who had published books and other publications in support of it. Christine Baudouin permitted her father’s publication and book as evidence in the case.
This fact was referred to by National Post columnist Barbara Kay in a column dated March 18, 2023.
The lawyer for Jean Truchon, the challenger of the legislation (the latter admitted in an email to a friend, he didn’t really want to die, he only wanted greater assistance to live with dignity, but couldn’t get it) relied on the pro-euthanasia publications of Jean-Louis Beaudoin in the case.
Judge Christine Baudouin did not recuse herself in such circumstances, compromising the decision. The Quebec and Canada Attorneys General would likely have won the case if it had been appealed.
The public was betrayed by the appointment of this judge to this case because of her public, strongly held personal views in support of euthanasia, and by allowing her father’s books and publications to be introduced as evidence.
The Truchon case required a careful review of the MAiD legislation, but instead of doing so, Judge Baudouin carried out a public lynching of the legislation, leaving it limp and lifeless, hanging in the Criminal Code, unable to provide protection for vulnerable persons. She allowed the legislation to hasten deaths on the highway of death, by removing safeguards. One wonders, therefore, why Christine Baudouin who was an inexperienced and junior judge was so quickly elevated to the Quebec Court of Appeal by the Trudeau government the following year in November, 2020.
The Slippery Slope of Industrialized Death
Despite the Supreme Court of Canada’s cavalier dismissal of the dangers of the “slippery slope” posed by legalized euthanasia, this is exactly what is happening in Canada. We have moved from a so-called restrictive MAiD regime (2016) to a more progressive and liberal MAiD regime (2021). The statistics exposing the frequency of MAiD are glaring evidence of this degeneracy.
Statistics on MAiD
Health Canada’s own statistics confirm an alarming and disturbing trend. According to its most recent annual MAiD report from July 2022, MAiD accounted for 3.3% of deaths in Canada in 2021. The two highest provinces were Quebec with MAiD deaths at 4.7% of deaths, and British Columbia where MAiD accounted for 4.8% of deaths.
Health Canada confirmed that the number of cases of MAiD in 2021 represents a growth rate of 32.4% over 2020 with all provinces continuing to experience a steady year over year growth.
These numbers continue to rise. In 2022, according to the Institut de la statistique du Québec, MAiD represented 6.1% of deaths for 2022. Quebec’s MAiD death count is expected to reach 7%, twice the number for Ontario, and 4.5 times Switzerland’s rate. In British Columbia, the B.C. Ministry of Health reported that MAiD deaths accounted for 5.5% of deaths in 2022— As of June 30, 2023, MAiD deaths represented 6.2% of B.C. deaths.
The Journey of Death
Under the guise of being humane and compassionate, MAiD is nothing else but the bureaucratization/institutionalization of state sanctioned death. What was once promoted as being something to use only as a last resort in exceptional dire medical circumstances, has now become a frequent “treatment” used in situations that are less than dire and frequently for reasons other than medical.
Humanize NOT Institutionalize Death
Death and Life are defining moments for each of us. How well we die is every bit as important as how we have lived our lives.
Bureaucracy, with its rules and rigid structures, by its very nature dehumanizes the human person and thereby obscures the essential truth that there is a singular dignity to the human person—that each one of us has a dignity inherent in our humanity that demands respect that makes authentic human interaction, community and flourishing possible. It is a dignity that requires that each individual be treated as an end in himself or herself, and never in an instrumental fashion, as a means to an end.
The elderly, those who find themselves in circumstances of serious illness and close to death, as well as those suffering from physical and mental disabilities, are increasingly becoming marginalized and are most vulnerable to the illusion that MAiD will solve their “problem.” This becomes all the more acute in a society that views the worth of human beings in material and utilitarian terms.
The hard reality is that MAiD does not provide a real solution for those faced with dying or life’s hardships. Instead, MAiD denies those most in need of compassion and companionship the opportunity to live well in the face of death. MAiD, by dehumanizing death, makes victims of us all, just not those it kills.
It does not have to be this way. We need to make assisted suicide illegal, repeal the legislation and also commit the necessary resources to help the vulnerable through Palliative Care or with effective social/mental health services.
Why isn’t palliative care a right for patients under the Criminal Code, paid for by provincial health insurance, as is provided for MAiD? Something is seriously wrong in Canada.