Death At A Time of Despair

"Decades of studies have confirmed two facts about end-of-life care in Canada. It consumes a vast amount of resources; many people will consume more 'health care' in the last years before death than in the entireity of their lives before that. And most Canadians do not want to spend large parts of that last year in hospital."

"Palliative care, hospice care and home care are what is needed and what is desired. Yet these remain chronically underfunded and delayed while the option for a quick and cheap death is full speed ahead."

Fa.Raymond De Souza, Columnist, National Post

 

"[Under Bill C-7, a mental illness will] not be considered an illness, disease or disability [for the purpose of the assisted-dying law]."

"A provision that applies only to persons with mental illness, without appropriate justification, in discriminatory in nature because it is arbitrary."

"A provision that applies to all persons with mental illness, without appropriate justification, is unconstitutional because it is overbroad."

"Explicitly stating that mental illness is not an illness, disease or disability is inaccurate, stigmatizing, arbitrary and discriminatory."

Canadian Psychiatric Association brief

 

Up to the present in the four years that medically assisted death has been available in Canada, a small number of Canadians with severe irremediable mental health disorders have asked for and received assisted deaths, legally. With Bill C-7, some changes have been made whereby the government now proposes to expressly exclude people suffering from mental illness at the very time it is expanding the law with amendments to make it easier for people with physical failings to apply for assisted death. 

Many doctors are completely averse to the very idea of helping people to end their lives, rather than offering compassionate end-of-life care tailored to the individual. In the first four years of the program, the core measure of suitability for assisted death was an immediately foreseeable death occurring while the individual was suffering from an incurable disease or illness. Now that provision is to be removed. The number of witnesses has been reduced, a requirement that the individual requesting assisted death repeat that request immediately prior to lethal injection has also been erased.

It is easier to die in Canada if you are chronically and irremediably in pain, than if you are a mass murderer being punished for horrific crimes. Canada is fastidious about the death penalty; it simply does not exist in Canada as a civilized democracy; the state does not kill to avenge killing. But it will and does aid people who are suffering from a medical/health calamity to end their lives. This Liberal government led by Prime Minister Trudeau has truly enriched the Canadian experience.

Under this government of progressive democratic liberalism ground-breaking legislation has been passed to enrich the lives of the nation; such as the legalization of drugs, assisted death, and massive, colossal government debt. The three D's that define the government of Justin Trudeau. Included in that group should be gender dysphoria, where it is illegal for parents, doctors, advisers to attempt to change a child's mind when he/she expresses a wish to be regarded as a member of the gender they were not born to.

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Ironically when MAID (medical assistance in dying) was introduced in 2016, the government was quick to assure Canadians that legislation was geared to "safeguard" against abuse; no one would be under pressure to request a lethal injection to end their lives, that the existence of alternatives would be advised to a requester, and offered instead of assisted death where appropriate. That reassurance has degenerated to the point that it now will be possible for lethal injection to be administered the very day it has been requested.

In a country whose medical system is under such strain that it takes months to see a medical specialist upon referral, and months to have available some types of diagnostic imaging, months to a year to have surgeries scheduled, but dying can be readily accomplished. This at a time when surveys regularly show that most people would choose palliative care for  end-of-life situations, not peremptory death. But palliative care is poorly funded and opportunities are rare.

And now the issue of excluding psychiatric patients whose suffering is intense and incurable is deemed a disservice to society, and an offence against human dignity. But the near-death provision under the legislation has been scrapped, widening the opportunity pool for assisted death, while excluding those people with mental illness. Psychiatrists are incensed at the exclusion of those whose weal they are engaged in, considering the amendment a "flagrant violation of Section 15 of the charter"; discriminatory to a class of Canadians.

Canada's Minister of Justice, David Lametti, informed the House of Commons "that the trajectory of mental illness is more difficult to predict than that of most physical illnesses, that spontaneous improvement is possible and that a desire to die and an impaired perception of one's circumstances are symptoms, themselves, of some mental illnesses." At opposite ends of the spectrum, there is push-back from health-impaired Canadians and their physicians that the disabled would welcome death. 

"All the doctor seemed to see, though, was a disabled woman alone, sick, tired and probably tired of living" commented a woman who when she was in her twenties with pneumonia, wheelchair-bound, her attending doctor suggested she might consider euthanasia, rather than wait for recovery. She rejected his suggestion, recovered, and is now an advocate for the disabled who fear euthanasia being forced upon them.They call the program MAD.

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