Three things from one of the more shocking WTH podcasts we’ve done:
More than two dozen people are being euthanized in Canada every single day.
It’s not just the terminally ill who are being offered death on demand. It’s people with hearing loss, credit card debt, and other non-life threatening conditions.
We worried about death panels in America. In Canada, aid and support organizations are offering suicide when they can’t provide services. And even nurse practitioners are permitted to administer assisted suicide.
There is a real debate to be had around death with dignity, and there are reasonable — even persuasive — arguments on both sides. Canada’s euthanasia program is not about death with dignity in many instances; it’s about facilitating, nay, encouraging suicide.
In 2021, 3.3 percent of all deaths in Canada occurred under MAiD, Medical Assistance in Dying. Sounds low until you realize this is more than 10,000 people a year. Some have terminal illnesses; some have psychiatric and physical ailments that have rendered life a living hell. Others are… deaf. Poor. In terrible debt. Have PTSD from service in Afghanistan. Waiting for so long for Canada’s broken national health system that their treatable illnesses become intolerable.
Want a psychiatrist? You could wait months, or years. Want to die? That can happen in 24-48 hours. Worried about a family member going through a bad patch and considering assisted suicide? Want to counsel them against it? Lean on the ghouls facilitators to explain the patient isn’t of sound mind? Family members are barred by law from having a say. It goes on and on and on.
Between 2020 and 2021, the assisted suicide rate went up by 32.4 percent in Canada. 32.4 percent. Canada’s organ harvesting business is now more productive than Communist China’s. Are Canadians up in arms? Not so’s you’d know it. The Canadian press is for the most part pro-death. Canada’s left-wing liberal Trudeau government is too. And now the government wants to expand access to MAiD to minors and people with purely psychological ailments.
This is a more aggressive euthanasia program than in the United States and Europe, with fewer safeguards, and fewer qualifications required to administer it. Indeed, this is, per our guest, a more aggressive euthanasia program than the one mooted by Nazi leaders in 1933. Utterly, completely, shocking.
Our guest this week was Alexander Raikin. A Canadian journalist, he has written about this issue for National Review, New Atlantis, and other publications.
HIGHLIGHTS
What the hell is going on in Canada?
AR: 3.3% [of deaths being assisted suicide] sounds low until you realize that that's over 10,000 cases of euthanasia just in 2021. So more than 27 Canadians each day in 2021 died by the hands of their physicians or nurses. This is quite frankly the world's largest euthanasia program. It's the world's fastest growing euthanasia program. You literally have to go back to a system of non-voluntary euthanasia to see the rapid growth that we've seen in Canada.
How did this happen?
AR: Let's start from the beginning. Euthanasia was considered to be a criminal offense. In the early 1990s, there was a Supreme Court case called Rodriguez's versus British Columbia, where the Supreme Court of Canada in a split decision five to four, they ruled that euthanasia assisted suicide should continue to be criminalized. They argued that safeguards would not be possible, that the government has a duty.
That was in the early 1990s. Afterwards, you had one of the most successful public relations campaigns that arguably has ever existed in a western democratic country. You had a very well-funded lobby group called Dying with Dignity in Canada, and there are actually parallels to this happening in the United States right now. A very well-funded group funded by multi-hundred millionaires.
Even NGOs, so the Canadian equivalent of the AARP, not an entirely original naming — but the Canadian equivalent is the CARP — was bought out by a man named Moses Znaimer, who is a multimedia mogul in Canada. He bought it out, he replaced the board and he fired the longstanding executive vice president of the CARP because she said that she believed that the CARP should have no position on MAID. And he replaced her with the former head of Dying with Dignity in Canada
And after assisted suicide, people’s organs are being harvested?
AR: Before someone is formally approved for MAiD, in between first and second assessment, they are already being prompted for organ donations. Ontario Trillion Gifts of Life Network is calling potential [donors]. They've been launching a survey for people with mental health illnesses because people who have only psychiatric conditions are going to soon qualify for it.
So anyone can choose to die?
AR: Somebody with depression and diabetes has already qualified. So hearing loss. Hearing loss. There's been already multiple cases of people qualifying for euthanasia because of hearing loss. Also, in those cases, those people had depression, but they qualified right now because of the hearing loss.
This is different than assisted suicide in the U.S. then?
AR: Under the Oregon model, which is implemented in 10 states and the District of Columbia, you need to have a terminal illness and prognosis of less than six months left to live in order to qualify. That said, people in the United States have already been qualifying from psychiatric illnesses, specifically anorexia. So despite the chief legal advocacy officer for Compassion Choices, which is the leading pro assisted suicide lobby here in the United States, the chief legal advocacy officer officer’s saying that no one with anorexia should qualify under the Oregon model.
He wrote this in a letter to the editor to the Colorado Sun. We've already had at least four cases of exactly that where people with anorexia have already qualified and died through assisted suicide in the US. So, that's the first part. The problems that we see in Canada also exist in the United States, though Canada is just much further ahead than the US is.
Does the Canadian government have a conflict of interest here? After all, this is a country with nationalized health care, and the infirm are a burden on the system.
AR: It's what people with disabilities been saying very vocally for years and the government isn't listening to them. Over 140 disability groups signed a collective letter before the most recent expansion of MAiD, which happened in 2021 under Bill C7, which said that their very lives are at risk precisely because of what you're talking about. Canada's healthcare system is in a very bad shape. Don't listen to me about this. You can listen to the head of the Canadian Medical Association who issued a warning that [the Canadian] Healthcare system is undergoing "a collapse," and she said this last summer.
Canada's Minister of Health said that Canada's healthcare system is undergoing a sickness. Canada's healthcare system is not doing well, and the people who take up the disproportionate amount of resources are people who have chronic disabilities or chronic illnesses. Those individuals, in their disability groups are saying that MAiD is exactly that. It's a conflict of interest. It's a way of providing an alternative to medical services. In fact, many disability groups have now entered a state where outside of their windows, when you enter their buildings, like to access supports and cares, they have signs now that say, "Your life is worth living. Your life is important. We will not offer you MAiD as a substitute for a lack of resources."
The reason why disability groups and disability advocates have to put up the signs is because of the dozens and dozens of cases of well-reported cases, not just by me, but dozens of cases where people are being offered an alternative to services pre-MAiD. That includes Canadian veterans, fought in Afghanistan, who suffer PTSD fighting for their country. They come back and instead of receiving the PTSD care that they're asking for from veteran services, and we've had four or five cases of those, they're instead being offered MAiD.
Aren’t Canadian doctors and nurses appalled by this?
AR: The vast majority of Canadian clinicians wanted nothing to do with the system. If you look at the number of clinicians who are involved with this, who actually are part of the assessment and provide ... I'm using the term assessment and providing, because that's the term that they use. The actual number has been pretty much stable from the beginning, where it's around 1200 clinicians every year since we've had annualized reporting. So, around 1200 are part of the system. They're willing to do it; they do it. The vast majority do not, and that number hasn't risen over time.
And family members have no say in this death on demand?
AR: Oh, reporting is completely accurate. This is the exact same story. I've heard this three separate times. Family members find out that their loved one, who they believe do not have the capacity to consent to any medical decision, let alone euthanasia, they find out that their loved one is going to receive MAiD in 48 hours. In each case, the family members send urgent, desperate messages to the hospital or the clinicians who are part of that MAiD team. They try to send them their psychiatric history. They try to send them other information over why their family member does not have the capacity to consent to this.
In each of those cases, their frequently desperate messages are not listened to. They go to the police; they ask the police to put a stop to it. The police investigate. They look at the MAiD paperwork. They see that it's signed by a physician or a nurse practitioner, and again, any physician, any nurse practitioner, in Canada can be part of MAiD. There's no requirement for any specialized screening. There's no requirement for any knowledge base, essentially, for the majority of cases.
They reach out to the police. The police say there's nothing to do. The MAiD happens in 48 hours. After the MAiD is performed, and each of those cases, the family members are still reeling from the deaths of their loved ones. They try to understand why it is that their loved ones were euthanized. They reach out to the hospital and request medical information over why that decision was made. According to provincial law, in each of those cases, in theory, they should be able to access it. In each of those cases, they were denied access, and they were denied access for the same reason, which is because, quote, they were not acting in the interest of the patient, who is now deceased.
The Nazis had a euthanasia program for the disabled and infirm, Aktion T4…
AR: The comparison is not necessarily to the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, which started on September 1st, 1939, as wartime measures act where the Nazi regime started euthanizing. They essentially gave a carte blanche to any physician to euthanize their patients. The more worthwhile comparison, I believe, is to September ... excuse me ... the Fall of 1933, because that's when you have the Nazi Party coming in
[A bill proposed to legalize] euthanasia. In many ways, the safeguards were more meticulous than the safeguards that we have in Canada. In the proposed Nazi bill, only people with terminal illnesses could qualify. You needed to have three physicians as opposed to two, and two of those physicians needed to be part of an expert panel. You couldn't just doctor-shop under the proposed Nazi bill. The patient needed to express to request it. A physician couldn't just approach and ask someone if they're interested and then proceed from there
Despite this, despite the safeguards being much larger ... to be fair, this is still Nazi Germany, so there was an additional safeguard that, quote, no lives with value to the state will be destroyed. Despite those additional safeguards and a much more limited euthanasia program, that bill in 1933 was killed. There is something ... this is not an exaggeration; this is not hyperbole ... that the Canadian public are literally more accepting of euthanasia than the German public in 1933.
How did this happen in Canada?
AR: When we ask why is this, how did Canada get to the way that it is, I argued in an article in the National Review that this isn't really what Canadians wanted. Canadians, like Americans, largely support assisted suicide and euthanasia in a very limited scope. They support it for people with terminal illnesses, who've tried everything, who have been through psychiatric assessments, and there's nothing left to do. There are good arguments over why there still are problems with that system, and we can discuss that, but that's largely what the public supports.
Let me be clear. There is outrage, and I talked about the more than 140 disability groups. They were in uproar. I think the reason why there isn't more vocal outrage is how these expansions happen. So 2016 was the first law, the most recent expansion, which removed at all the idea that MAiD should even be tethered to being close to end of life was in 2021, and that [happened] under COVID. Also, the Canadian media landscape has been extremely biased in favor of MAiD.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Canada’s Ministry of Death (National Review, February 2 2023), Alexander Raikin
No Other Options (The New Atlantis, Winter 2023), Alexander Raikin
Canada moves one step closer to euthanizing CHILDREN (Daily Mail, February 24 2023)
MAID eligibility should expand to minors, patients with mental illness, report recommends (Globe and Mail, February 15 2023)
Canada seeks to delay assisted dying for people with mental illness (BBC, February 2 2023)
Opinion: Before expanding assisted suicide again, the Supreme Court should weigh in (National Post, February 7 2023)
How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death (Global News, October 8 2022)
Third annual report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2021 (Gov of Canada, July 2022)
Canada Leads World in Organ Donations from Euthanasia (VOA, January 22 2023)
RCMP called to investigate multiple cases of veterans being offered medically assisted death (CBA News, November 25 2022)
Canadian man says hospital staff ‘pressured’ him to euthanize his wife (Catholic News Agency, February 7 2023)
After years of waiting, this woman says Canada's delay to expand MAID is 'beyond hurtful' (CBC, February 19 2023)
Is Choosing Death Too Easy in Canada? (NYT, September 18 2022)
Disturbing: Experts troubled by Canada’s euthanasia laws (AP News, Aug 11 2022)
America, be very afraid: Canada is euthanizing 10,000 a year (Daily Mail, December 6 2022)
‘MAID’ in Canada: What’s behind the Euthanasia scandal? (WSJ, December 30 2022)
Fewer than half of Canadians support assisted death for mental disorders: poll (National Post, July 20 2022)
Americans' Strong Support for Euthanasia Persists (Gallup News, May 31 2018)
The assisted-dying movement gathers momentum in America (The Economist, April 26 2018)
Physician-assisted death in Oregon is no longer limited to just state residents (NPR, March 30 2022)
How Assisted Suicide Euthanized Roe v. Wade (National Review, June 24 2022)