David Krayden: It’s Time to Stop Canada’s Euthanasia Program Dead in its Tracks

Canada has become the assisted suicide capital of the world. John Moore/Getty Images

Commentary

It goes by the almost innocuous name of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID): it’s MAID in Canada.

The federal government does not want to call MAID a euthanasia program because of the negative connotation that word has to murderous, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany. It may be a voluntary euthanasia program, unlike the coercive program unleashed by the Nazis on their oppressed society, but “euthanasia” should still induce a chill in our spines and nausea in our stomachs.

And so it should continue to be, as the federal government continues to assiduously escalate its program and include many more “eligible” groups who will be able to receive the blessing of the state to commit suicide.

The next such group will be the mentally ill. People in this category were supposed to be added this March but due to pushback and remonstrances from many informed physicians—who continue to demonstrate their opposition—the program was put on hold for a year, supposedly for some kind of sober second thought from somewhere but certainly not the Senate of Canada, where this assessment has historically been said to abide.

So the March 2024 deadline for expanding MAID to the mentally ill is fast approaching—like the Christmas season—and psychiatrists are divided over whether this is advisable.

“There is no consensus on this issue,” Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, told the National Post. “I firmly think we’re not ready for further expansion.”

As the Post reports, both sides of the debate are accusing the other of rushing to conclusions, adopting bad science, and embracing disputed reports. The disagreement has prompted seven of 17 chairpersons of psychiatry to ask federal Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani to halt the timeline and re-assess the desire to facilitate the taking of more Canadian lives.

It is troubling, to say the least, that those who desire to include the mentally ill in their euthanasia quagmire see no irony in having people who are not in complete possession of their faculties making a decision about ending their lives. The primary question needs to be asked: are they capable of doing that?

There is serious concern that the definition of mentally ill will encompass drug addicts and, potentially, alcoholics as well.

Look at the expanding definition of mental illness and you will discover that it now includes drug addicts. If drug addicts, why not alcoholics? If alcoholics, why not self-abusers?

Are they coming for you next?

When you include people with undesirable characteristics in your euthanasia program, it automatically becomes a eugenics program. That is precisely why the regime of Adolf Hitler murdered an estimated 250,000 individuals: because they had incurable diseases, were mentally ill, were physically deformed or, yes, were chronic alcoholics.

The one eerily positive thing you can say about the MAID program is that it has been deliriously successful. The death rates keep climbing year by year.

Canada has become the assisted suicide capital of the world, with morbidity accelerating every year the program has been in operation. In 2022, the most recent year with figures available, over 13,200 people used MAID to kill themselves. That was up from just over 10,000 the year before.

People are literally dying to come to Canada—or at least dying when they get here.

There has been one attempt to at least keep MAID in its current form.

Conservative MP Ed Fast sponsored a private member’s bill to exclude mental illness from MAID, but the legislation went down to defeat by 167 to 150 votes last month.

A parliamentary committee composed of both MPs and senators is continuing to assess whether there is sufficient “degree of preparedness” to expand MAID in the coming spring.

But the program needs to be relegated to the ash bin of history. It is an odious and very dangerous program because, just as the eligibility requirements keep changing, the potential for flagrant abuse is always present. How can we be assured that suicide will always be voluntary when MAID is increasingly becoming a numbers game?

There is a smell of death about Canada. The current federal government ceaselessly celebrates the fact that this country has no abortion law. It hasn’t had one since the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s last such legislation in 1988, and no successive government has demonstrated either the will or the legislative skill to get one passed by both the House of Commons and the Senate. Brian Mulroney was the last prime minister to attempt to enact a new law. His successors have not even bothered to try.

So here we stand in divine judgment: a nation with unrestricted abortion on demand until the birth of the child and a growing euthanasia law that is increasingly mirroring the dark shadows of Nazi Germany.

It is not just an unenviable position but an untenable one as well.

As Scripture urges us, “Choose life.”

And we should do so at every opportunity.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.