Last year, more than 10,000 Canadians received what is officially known as “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID—a result of a steady relaxation in laws governing euthanasia since 2016. Alexander Raikin examines the chilling results:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that the euthanasia system would not lead anyone to choose to end his or her life due to a lack of social support. But in private, even practitioners say that the support that Canada most efficiently provides to many vulnerable patients now is death. A core reason that Canada’s assisted-dying program has grown so much faster than any other program in the world is that it is the most permissive. Eligibility criteria began loose and are rapidly getting looser. You do not need to be terminally ill, only to have a “grievous and irremediable” condition, a standard that is open to significant differences in interpretation. In March 2023, mental illness alone will qualify as an acceptable medical reason to die. And the Quebec College of Physicians now suggests that parliament expand euthanasia eligibility to minors and even newborns.
The clearest evidence that Canada’s euthanasia regime is failing to protect the vulnerable is the stories of patients themselves. They have spoken in a series of articles published in other outlets over the past year. They speak on social media. Some of them spoke to me for this article, as did the friends and confidants of another who is no longer with us to speak for herself.
The picture that emerges from them is of people who are in desperate circumstances and unable to get help, and are presented with an easy way out: to make it all go away through a medically assisted death.
For the poor and the vulnerable, for those who are “not getting the supports and cares” they need, as Justin Trudeau put it, all that doctors need to do is find some medical pretext to end their lives. Much as the man with a hammer comes to see everything as a nail, again and again Canada’s euthanasia system looks at vulnerable people and sees good candidates for medical death.
As one sixty-five-year-old disabled man told Raikin, “I really don’t want to die. I just can’t afford to live. . . . The only thing that MAID does is to make my suicide socially acceptable.”
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