Skyrocketing MAID deaths must prompt urgent reassessment - "Usually, governments welcome high adoption rates for new policies. But when that new policy is an exception within the Criminal Code for euthanasia and assisted suicide, which then sees more than 30 percent annual growth in use, no government should be celebrating. And when such rates shoot past Health Canada’s official projections by nearly a decade, any government should be deeply worried... This high rate of growth is more than a statistical curiosity. It should prompt policymakers and all Canadians to reflect seriously on what the data tells us about the practice of euthanasia. For one, the legislation and regulations surrounding MAID aren’t terribly useful because the eligibility definitions are vague... Without more tightly defined criteria, we cannot ensure a consistent application of MAID. This is something Drs. Tang, Gaind, and Lau discuss in a recent scholarly book (see page 278). Vague criteria with multiple interpretations lead to a system where patients can “shop” for assessors and providers willing to euthanize them if at first they receive a rejection. Without an updated system that would inform MAID assessors of previous requests, they may be unaware of the request history. Without a review function where rejected applications can be sent and evaluated, patients may continue “shopping” until they reach their objective. Another built-in problem with the existing criteria for MAID is that it does not require patients to exhaust treatment options. They need only be “informed of” them, “offered consultations,” or “have discussed and given serious consideration” to them. While medical interventions do not require patients to exhaust their options, an intervention meant to cause an early end to a patient’s life is different. It requires a higher standard, particularly considering that patients may have had difficulty getting quality, timely health care already. Consider that the trend in the proportion of MAID requests considered ineligible continues to drop, year over year. In 2019, Health Canada reported 8 percent of requests were found ineligible, dropping to 4.1 percent in 2021, and just 3.5 percent in 2022. This suggests a weakness in euthanasia eligibility criteria. The federal monitoring and reporting system is based on conflicting interests, making enforcement of the system very difficult. The MAID assessors and providers self-report data. So, while those performing MAID do have criminal liability, they are also the ones reporting on whether all eligibility criteria and procedures were followed. Effectively, they oversee their own legal compliance. Sadly, there is no independent verification of compliance reports. As documented by Dr. Jaro Kotalik, a health-care ethicist, in his edited volume on MAID, the monitoring system was never intended to ensure compliance. It merely provides information for a “societal perspective ” according to the government. This is unlike other international approaches, including in the Benelux countries, which were pioneers in introducing euthanasia/assisted suicide. Instead, Canada’s federal monitoring via Health Canada has no review function and no ability to refer compliance issues for investigation... This sort of growth is not, however, “destiny.” California, for instance, legalized assisted suicide also in 2016. Despite its slightly larger population size to Canada, only 3,344 Californians died by assisted suicide from legalization in 2015 through to 2021. By contrast, 31,664 Canadians died by euthanasia or assisted suicide within that same period."
Of course, I still see people pretending that nothing is wrong and that euthanasia just prevents the greater trauma of a messy suicide. Ironically, this is like gun lovers who claim that people who want to commit suicide will find a way regardless, i.e. that people don't respond to incentives (which is contrary to what the research tells us about suicide, e.g. the swtich away from gas ovens lowering suicide rates)
Number of assisted deaths jumped more than 30 per cent in 2022, report says - "A new Health Canada report says the number of medically assisted deaths in 2022 was more than 30 per cent higher than the year prior. Medically assisted deaths constituted 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada last year... The new report comes as the federal government prepares to expand MAID eligibility to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness... Vachon, who said she was "very concerned" about the planned expansion, cited September polling data from Angus Reid in partnership with Cardus. In that poll, 82 per cent of respondents agreed that "MAID eligibility should not be expanded in Canada without improving access to mental health care first."... Downie said the upcoming expansion is "essential" because she thinks excluding people with mental disorders on the basis of their diagnosis is "discriminatory." "To exclude in that way is stigmatizing, it's paternalistic," Downie said. "I don't think there's any justification for the exclusion.""
Apparently it is better to be killed than discriminated against
Our government is irresponsible and people are going to die as a result. : CanadaHousing2 - "It is the sixth leading cause of death, behind:
Malignant neoplasms: 24.7%
Diseases of heart: 17.2%
COVID-19: 5.9%
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 5.5%
Cerebrovascular diseases: 4.2%"
Canada's surge in deaths under MAID outpaces other countries - "The number of Canadians ending their lives through medically assisted death has grown at a speed that outpaces every other nation in the world. As Canada is poised to expand eligibility criteria under medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation, data from all 11 countries where the controversial end-of-life treatment exists shows Canada is the fastest-growing adopter in history, an analysis by the Investigative Journalism Bureau and the Toronto Star has found. Some experts see the rapid growth as a human rights triumph that allows Canadians to make their own choice about when they wish to die with the full support of the state and their doctors. Others fear that failures in the health-care system and social safety net may be contributing to the surge... “We’ve gone in a trajectory that no other country on the planet has gone,” says Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital. “We don't know what the full impact is going to be.” At its current pace of growth, Canada’s percentage of MAID deaths is poised to lead the world as soon as next year — surpassing countries that have had similar laws for decades longer. More Canadians still are expected to pursue medically assisted death due to the federal government’s promise to expand eligibility in March to include Canadians whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder. One in five Canadians are impacted by mental health challenges. The Netherlands — where assisted death has been legal for more than two decades — still has the highest global physician-assisted death rate at 5.1 per cent. Some Canadian provinces already exceed that. Quebec’s MAID mortality rate reached 6.6 per cent in 2022 and British Columbia’s rate was 5.5 per cent... It took 14 years for assisted death cases in the Netherlands to reach four per cent of deaths. And assisted dying rates for Switzerland and Belgium dating back to the early 2000s have never reached four per cent. In Canada, it happened in six years... Canada’s unique legislative approach to assisted dying is largely responsible for the swelling numbers of Canadians seeking a state-sanctioned death, say many experts. U.S. state laws typically require assisted death applicants to be within months of dying from their physical condition. California, which has a similar population to Canada, launched its assisted death legislation in the same year as Canada with very different results. With eligibility in the state limited to terminal patients, assisted deaths in the state have remained below 0.3 per cent — a total of 3,275 since 2016, which is nearly 15 times lower than in Canada. Meanwhile, unlike Dutch and Belgium laws, which require provision of MAID as a last resort option, “Canada does not,” says Kim from the Institutes of Health. “Canadian law is unique. It gives doctors almost free reign on what to do if someone has a diagnosis and they’re miserable with it," he said. "Then you marry it to a very-well organized delivery system — your healthcare system. It gives the medical system and your sociopolitical system an out when you abandon people.”... Kim says the deliberations about the roll-out of MAID in Canada took place largely behind closed doors where physicians and lawyers appointed by the government pushed hard for broad accessibility to assisted death for Canadians. “The aggressive philosophy of implementation, in coordination with advocacy groups rather than wide input from varying perspectives, has been truly astonishing.”... Only 31 per cent of Canadians said they support MAID for mental illness according to a February 2023 poll by the Angus Reid Institute. And 82 per cent of Canadians said access to mental health care should be improved before MAID eligibility is expanded to include mental illnesses... Jeff Kirby, a professor emeritus in the department of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was a member of the federal expert panel tasked by the government in 2021 with drafting safeguards for the expansion of MAID into mental health. While he isn’t opposed to the idea, he stepped down from the panel prior to its final report in May 2022, saying safeguards suggested by experts ought to be legally entrenched rather than simply guidance. He remains fearful that the new rules welcoming mental health patients to seek MAID lack the rigor and protection to prevent tragedy. “I really think that Canada as a whole will have lost if it proceeds to March 2024 with no changes,” he says. “I think we have lost a chance to adequately protect members of vulnerable, disadvantaged social groups in a way that we should have.”"
Canada’s Newest and Deadliest Human Right: Assisted Suicide for All - "What few controls it proposes to retain – such as restricting its use by those suffering solely from mental illness – are likely to be swept aside by human rights complaints given the fact every other limitation has already been removed... this profoundly troubling bill was rushed through the House of Commons late last year while everyone was fixated on other matters and public gatherings largely forbidden. The proposed legislation now sits in the hands of the Senate where, in unusual fashion, hearings were held on the matter before the bill had even been passed by the House, in order to speed its passage... Curiously, the Truchon decision did not issue from the Supreme Court of Canada, or even an appeal court, as is usually the case with law-upending judgements. Rather it came from the Quebec Superior Court – a lower court. It is almost unheard-of for a lower court to direct Parliament in this way. And even more unheard-of for Parliament to meekly comply without at least an appeal to push back. Yet, according to federal Minister of Justice David Lametti, “We decided not to appeal the Truchon… because we agreed that medical assistance in dying should be available as a means to address intolerable suffering outside of the end-of-life context.” The government, in other words, changed its mind about its own legislation after just three years. And in doing so, put Parliament at the mercy of a precocious lower court’s timetable. The current race to meet a February deadline is thus a crisis of the Liberals’ own design. And the promised review of the situation-to-date is nowhere to be seen. “There is so much negative about this law, it’s hard to know where to begin,” says critic Schadenberg. “But my main objection is its same-day death provision.” He points out that a person could choose a MAID option at 9 am and be dead by lunchtime. “It’s a well-established fact that people change their minds about wanting to die from one day to the next,” he says. “With this new law, you don’t get a chance to reconsider.” Schadenberg also worries that Bill C-7’s removal of the requirement that a person’s natural death be reasonably foreseeable will lead to people who are not terminally ill choosing to die by MAID... Some advocates claim that excluding those suffering from mental illness represents another intolerable form of discrimination. Helen Long, CEO of Dying With Dignity Canada, recently argued in the Toronto Star that even this one modest limitation “will continue to deny some Canadians their right to MAID.” The right to kill oneself must presumably be offered to all without limit. Not everyone agrees with Long, however. Krista Carr is executive vice-president of Inclusion Canada, a federation of advocacy groups for people with intellectual disabilities. She worries that those with mental illness will suffer discrimination from MAID for the entirely opposite reason. “Bill C-7 would allow people with disabilities – who are already undervalued in society – to die with medical assistance because they have a disability”... Carr’s fear is that people with disabilities will end up most at risk of being euthanized against their wishes, even those who can get effective medical treatments for their conditions; in a subsequent presentation to the House of Commons Justice Committee, she called the proposed legislation “our worst nightmare.”... The massive expansion in eligibility for MAID promised by Bill C-7 suggests that “slippery slope” concerns raised during previous debates were entirely justified. What was once supposed to be – and presented to Canadians as – a limited right for a few people on the very precipice of death is now about to be widened to include nearly everyone who might wish to end their life for almost any reason... “In every state or country in which the practice has been normalized, it has also, to some degree, become banalized, with eligibility criteria increasingly relaxed.” Ardent MAID advocates continue to dismiss slippery slope arguments as irrelevant... Nazi Germany’s carefully worded euthanasia criteria quickly turned into “the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany” predating the Holocaust by several years... Ample evidence points to the rapid growth in assisted dying rates wherever it has been adopted... Conservative Senator Don Plett has discussed measures that would prevent health care professionals from bringing up the subject of MAID unless prompted by a patient, thus preventing its widespread use as a tool to empty out hospitals and long-term care homes on convenience arguments"
From 2021. Prescient, since exactly what was foreseen happened
Statement from Gabrielle Peters - "If the state offers me the choice to die but not the means to live, who is really making the decision? I think this is where I am supposed to tell you my disability story – including the part where a healthcare professional sat at my beside and urged and then almost insisted I take her up on the consoling prospect of forever rest after my partner announced he was leaving me because I was too much of a burden and I no longer fit into the life he wanted."
CANADA: Medical Assistance In Dying Advocacy Group Calls On Government To Expand Eligibility To “Mature Minors” - "Despite facing pushback, a euthanasia advocacy group in Canada is continuing its efforts to have Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) eligibility expanded for children as young as 12. Since 2021, Dying with Dignity Canada (DWDC), a national charity claiming to be dedicated to “improving the quality of dying,” has been lobbying the Canadian government to “amend the existing age requirement of 18 years of age to extend to persons at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.”... In addition to experts sounding the alarm on the potential implications expanding assisted suicide for minors as young as 12 may have, many online were quick to point out that this extension could blur the lines of other age of consent laws... Others noted that referring to children as “mature minors” had sinister implications on its own"
One cope I've read for why trans mania doesn't erode sexual age of consent is that those pushing children to transition don't benefit from it - as if the medical establishment doesn't gain from "treatment" of minors (not to mention a lifelong income stream). For euthanasia they earn money too (minus the lifelong income stream)
Canadian health care should put patients first by ending faith-based refusals - The Globe and Mail
Just as I predicted, euthanasia (literally ending a life) is now "healthcare", just as happened to abortion
Ontario quadriplegic mother applies for MAID over lack of access to disability supports - "an Ontario quadriplegic mother of three says she has just days left before she can access medical assistance in dying (MAID) yet she is unable to access disability support. “I have 12 days left on my medical assistance in dying application here in the province in Ontario. I’m a quadriplegic single mom raising 2 kids with disabilities,” said Rose Finlay in the video... Finlay suffered a severe spinal cord injury in her teens and has used a wheelchair ever since. She has always been self-sufficient, she said, but finds herself now needing help and falling ill while waiting to access it. “The fact that it takes six to eight months to receive disability support and only 91 days to receive medical assistance in dying based on the fact that I have a permanent disability and decreased quality of life but my quality of life is decreased based on the level of support that I receive,” she said in her TikTok video. Finlay said she was compelled to apply for MAID, not because she wants to die, but because her community is failing her, and she is afraid she is running out of options."
Meme - Troy Lindstrom #Disabilityarts #DisabilityRights @Tefrin: "Why isn't MAID in the statistics? 13200 died from the Medical assistance in dying program in 2022. why are they not counted? It should be 6th. It is important people know how many are choosing assisted suicide."
"In the database, the underlying cause of death is defined as the disease or injury that initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death. As such, MAID deaths are coded to the underlying condition for which MAID was requested."
How to kill people while obfuscating the statistics. Presumably if someone is depressed about getting covid and commits suicide by cop, this is a covid death
National Review on X - "More than 13,000 Canadians were legally euthanized last year, representing 4.1% of all deaths in the country."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "To put this in context: when I did my "different groups, different pathologies" article, annual rates of suicide deaths for Caucasians and homicide deaths for Blacks generally maxed out at ~3%. The Canadian GOVERNMENT is killing people at a 33% higher rate, with suicide and murder rates beyond that not much changed."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again
Vancouver Woman Offered Euthanasia After Seeking Help for Suicidal Thoughts
Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far? - "Compared with disability support, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, seems relatively easy to request... Until recently, most of the public discourse and reporting about MAID has described it in positive and, some would argue, romantic terms. (A 2015 editorial in The Walrus called MAID “the last human right.”)... That rosy perception began to darken when, in 2021, the legislation was expanded to include people whose deaths are not considered reasonably foreseeable—an option now known as Track Two. The development particularly angered many disabled Canadians. The change in legislation made it possible for disabled people to qualify for MAID even if they weren’t terminally ill... Concerns about the legislation aren’t new. Some say it was flawed from the outset and that Canada’s assisted dying laws have always singled out disabled people by listing “disability” as a type of medical condition that could guarantee eligibility. In 2019, before Track Two was legalized, Catalina Devandas-Aguilar, then UN special rapporteur for the rights of persons with disabilities, wrote that she was “extremely concerned about the implementation of the legislation on medical assistance in dying from a disability perspective.” In her report on the country’s compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—which Canada ratified in 2010—she mentioned troubling accounts of people with disabilities who were institutionalized and offered MAID. She recommended the government investigate such claims and “establish adequate safeguards to ensure that persons with disabilities do not request assisted dying simply because there are no community-based alternatives or palliative care.” In February 2021, three UN experts on the rights of seniors and people with disabilities as well as on human rights and extreme poverty wrote a letter to the federal government, urging it not to legalize Track Two. “There is a grave concern,” the letter stated, “that, if assisted dying is made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are close to death, a social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability.” The Canadian government nevertheless stayed its course... For Duff, who is visually impaired, the way we talk about MAID expansions ignores the complexities and years it may take to treat conditions such as mental illness. The language we use around it is also euphemistic: “The title of the act is ‘medical assistance in dying,’” she says. “But these aren’t people who would otherwise be dying. We’re not just assisting them. We’re actually making it happen, which is very different.”... “Canada has become a poster child for how bad MAID can become,” says Heidi Janz, a long-time disability rights activist and playwright... They tell her they don’t want to die yet the government seems to be pushing them to. “But the MAID system makes it all a perfect crime because the MAID regime destroys the evidence,” she says. “It destroys the lives of the people who were here to report their experience of poverty and alienation and stigmatization and devaluation.”... Inclusion Canada, a secular organization that represents people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, has also called on the government to remove Track Two for MAID. Arch Disability Law Centre, another secular organization, has expressed similar concerns about Track Two. In fact, ARPA disagrees with MAID wholesale. As a “foundational principle,” says Schutten, doctors should not be able to end patients’ lives. “When you say, ‘No, there are some situations where a doctor should have a licence to end the life of a patient,’ then it’s very difficult to say, ‘Well, in this situation, you can. In this situation, you can’t.’ Every safeguard becomes arbitrary in a sense.”... The looming expansion of MAID, under Track Two, to include people with mental illnesses has raised red flags for several psychiatrists, who say that allowing people with mental illnesses to die by MAID could rob them of the chance to find treatments that enhance their lives. According to Duff, it could violate the principles of suicide prevention. “One of the tools that we use to help prevent suicide is to eliminate the means”... There’s no consensus among psychiatrists that mental illnesses are irremediable, that they never get better. Maher argues that even patients with serious mental illnesses can improve; they often just need more time to find the right treatments that work for them—and for those treatments to be available to begin with"
Yuan Yi Zhu on Twitter - "Trouton, who now lives in Ontario, says she’s aware that some Canadians have received MAID even when the main cause of their suffering was a socio-economic factor not directly related to their qualifying medical condition. But that doesn’t technically make those cases ineligible. “The suffering and the irremediable disease don’t have to be the same,” says Trouton, citing the law’s language around safeguards: it does not explicitly state the need for suffering to be caused by a medical condition."
"The vice-president of the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers now openly admits people have chosen euthanasia because of poverty, after her organization spent years calling anyone who said this a liar. But she says it's okay because it's not illegal per se."
Chris Selley: Canada is as unprepared to expand access to assisted suicide as it was to fight COVID-19 - "This is precisely the sort of situation people like, well, me assured Canadians would not or at least need not occur: Surely we were perfectly capable as a country of introducing a moderate euthanasia law that would be relatively infrequently used and not abused, we said. How bloody wrong we were. It is not being used infrequently: two per cent of all deaths in Canada in 2019 were medically assisted; 3.3 per cent in British Columbia. And it is being chosen by people in unconscionable situations. Chris Gladders didn’t live in a tent. He lived in a squalid Hamilton, Ont., long-term care home, suffering from Fabry disease, a genetic condition that causes multiple organ failure. “The bedding hadn’t been changed for weeks. There was feces on the bed. There was urine on the bed. There was urine and feces on the floor,” NDP MPP Wayne Gates, who communicated with the family, told CBC. “The room was absolutely disgusting.” Gladders, 35, chose to die with medical assistance last week. Greycliff Manor, where he lived, has had its operating licence revoked — effective June 1... Jean Truchon, Gladu’s co-complainant, opted for an assisted death in April last year sooner than try to survive the pandemic in a long-term care home — and when you look at Quebec’s long-term care homes, it’s tough to argue he made a bad choice."
B.C. man opts for medically assisted death after cancer treatment delayed - "Dan Quayle marked his 52nd birthday on Oct. 7 in Victoria General Hospital waiting to find out when chemotherapy would start for an aggressive form of esophageal cancer. He would die waiting. After 10 weeks in hospital, Quayle, a gregarious grandfather who put on his best silly act for his two grandkids, was in so much pain, unable to eat or walk, he opted for a medically assisted death on Nov. 24. This was despite assurances from doctors that chemotherapy had the potential to prolong his life by a year... “There was never a timeline on that,” said Griffiths, who lives in Victoria. “Their exact words were, ‘We’re backlogged.'” Even as they are still grieving Quayle’s death and planning his celebration of life, the family felt compelled to speak out about his inadequate care, following the stories of two Vancouver Island women who went public with their decisions to seek treatment in the U.S. to avoid delays in B.C... Six months into the B.C. NDP government’s move to send breast cancer and prostate cancer patients to two clinics in Bellingham in Washington State to ease the treatment backlog in B.C., the province’s wait times have actually gotten worse."
This doesn't stop pro-euthanasia people pretending this never happens, or the left from insisting private healthcare must remain effectively banned so governments will improve the public system, or that the BC NDP is really conservative (then again, to the far left, anyone to the right of Stalin is "far right")
