Trudeau is all show with no substance. To him it’s a matter of getting on with his agenda, while making a show that everything is above board and respectable.
This is exactly the problem with the Parliamentary Committee reviewing the expansion of the law on physician assisted suicide. This legislation is misleadingly called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to cover up the ugly fact that the legislation permits physicians to legally kill their patients by lethal injection.
The joint House of Commons – Senate Committee on MAiD, dominated by Liberal MPs who always do as directed, and Trudeau appointed Senators who usually do the same, made a grand show of reviewing the MAiD legislation. They had no intention of following the evidence presented to them. They had already determined the outcome of their review.
The committee was supposedly established to study the MAiD legislation to determine whether to expand it to include the mentally ill, who are not able to give consent, and mature minors. The committee heard nearly 150 witnesses over six months. Not surprisingly, however, it recommended expanding MAiD legislation: 1) to accept that advance requests be recognized, should the patient in future have dementia, 2) to include those with mental illness as the sole condition to be eligible, and 3) to include mature minors. A dissenting report by the Conservative MPs on the committee opposed this further expansion, especially for young people. Currently, there is a Private Member’s Bill by Conservative MP Ed Fast to prevent MAiD being available for the mentally ill.
A public letter, signed by 44 witnesses, was released on March 7, 2023 complaining of the bias of the committee. The letter was written by experts who had testified before the committee.
In their scathing letter, which was sent to the government, to medical officials, and to the committee itself, the witnesses stated that, during their testimony, they were routinely talked over, ignored, argued with, and at times openly disparaged by those committee members who were in favour of amplifying and expanding the ideology of MAiD. The letter further stated that the committee’s report “misconstrued, misrepresented, minimized and completely ignored key evidence necessary to protect Canadians from MAiD legislation”.
One of the signatories is Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. He supports access to MAiD in some circumstances, but he stated in an interview that the committee process was flawed and “that expanding MAiD would go way beyond people seeking death with dignity, to people seeking death to avoid having had a life that society hasn’t let them live with dignity”.
The federal government has not yet committed itself to the committee’s recommendations, but it is clear that the intent of the committee was to support the government’s intention to expand the legislation.
Canada already has the most permissive law on euthanasia in the world. This legislation has been applied to kill individuals who are frail because of age, the disabled, and those in financial difficulties. Under MAiD, Canada, in practice, has created a deep, dark hole in which to toss the bodies of the aged, disabled, homeless, and others whose lives are regarded to be without meaning or value. The Parliamentary Committee’s recommendations will only deepen and widen the hole of despair by which we are disposing of our vulnerable people.