Canada's Bargain-Basement Poison Pill Offering

"While we have been advocates of death by Medical Assistance in situations where there is a terminal diagnosis or death is imminent, we had no idea that Canada's laws leave considerable room for interpretation by activist doctors."

"It's unacceptable -- it took a year to get treatment but it could only take four days to die."

Alicia and Christie Duncan, British Columbia

 

"Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity."

"What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves."

"[Canada] Euthanizing its poor."

Yuan Yi Zhu, researcher, Oxford University

 

"It was an easy fix."

"She just needed to be helped to find a suitable place to live, where there wasn't smoke wafting through the vents."

Dr.Riina Bray, medical director, Environmental Health Clinic, Women's College Hospital, Toronto

In March 2023, Canada will become one of the few nations in the world allowing medical aid in dying, or MAID, for people whose sole underlying condition is depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD or any other mental affliction. Photo by Getty Images

Too many patients stuffed into the Canadian health care system, vexing patients with time-consuming need for close attention, distraction-demanding, prescribed therapies that don't work, exhausting the medical community of patience, so if they're agreeable to suggestion, the solution is at hand -- that wonderful time-saving six-year-old final therapy; MAID -- the ingenious, money-saving, staff-rescuing, hospital bed-freeing answer to the problem -- Medical Assistance in Dying. Dignified, accepted, wholesome and final. 

The Parliamentary Budget Officer cranked up the numbers, and there are millions in savings by simply releasing people from life and getting on with the due care and treatment of others far less troublesome and amenable to recovery, leaving the hospital system, recovered from a transitory, or a treatment-responsive condition. Through the simple enough expedient of using a perfectly legal, patient-accepting device to free up resources and get on with the business of 'healing' those whose conditions are amenable to improvement.

Evidently, Donna Duncan, a nurse in Abbotsford, B.C. wasn't one of those; her condition was exacerbated by having to wait a prolonged period of time for access to treatment for her deteriorating physical and mental condition at age 51, thanks to an unfortunate vehicular accident.Being treated at an Abbotsford clinic for her too-long-ignored mental condition, her daughters Christie and Alicia were informed their mother had agreed to undergo medically assisted death to solve her physical and mental decline. 

 

Unable to stop the scheduled death, they contacted police on an issue of medical malpractise, when nurse practitioners at the clinic approved their mother's request for medically assisted death in the absence of adequately assessing her mental state. Another individual in British Columbia, Alan Nichols was severely mentally ill, and euthanized at Chilliwack General Hospital. A severe psychiatric episode moved his family to admit him to hospital under the Mental Health Act. Little did they imagine they were committing him to death.

His family received a call from the hospital informing them their brother had consented to a doctor-assisted death. "They killed our brother", Wayne Nichols stated flatly. It is being revealed that some people struggling to make scarce financial ends meet have taken to appointments to end their lives as a reflection of their inability to find proper housing or medical care. In Ontario a 51-year-old woman sought and was given MAID when she was unable to secure affordable housing to accommodate her multiple severe chemical sensitivities.

In another instance a disabled woman who applied for medically assisted death on the grounds she was overwhelmed by the cost of food and lodging, had her wish granted. "I have no other reason to want to apply for assisted suicide, other than I simply cannot afford to keep on living", she stated. For each additional patient that seeks euthanization that is approved, a cost-benefit accrues to the Canadian health-care system.

"[The 6,465 medically assisted deaths scheduled for 2021 was poised to save $109.2 million in] end of life costs."
"Expanding access to MAID will result in a net reduction in health-care costs for the provincial governments."

2020 report, Parliamentary Budget Office

In ten months' time a new legal regime will come into law to vastly expand the criteria under which patients can be approved for doctor-assisted death. This will override the current legislation reserved strictly to allow euthanasia only to those whose death is seen to be "reasonably foreseeable". In March of 2023 Bill C-y is set to expand medically assisted dying to Canadians with no terminal diseases and it will include those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness.

"I think there’s going to be lots of uncertainty about how to apply this in March 2023."

"My hope is that psychiatrists will move cautiously and carefully to make sure MAID is not being used as something instead of equitable access to good care."

Dr. Grainne Neilson, past president, Canadian Psychiatric Association, Halifax forensic psychiatrist

 

"We don’t understand the fundamental underlying biology causing most major mental illnesses." 

"We identify them through the clustering of various symptoms. We try to target treatments as best we can. But the reality is, we don’t understand what’s going on, on a fundamental biological level, unlike with the vast majority of these other predicable conditions."    

"There’s no doubt that mental illnesses lead to grievous suffering, as grievous, even more grievous in some cases than other illnesses. It’s the irremediability part that our framework also requires and that scientifically cannot be met. That we cannot do. That’s the problem."

Dr. Sonu Gaind, physician chair, MAID team, chief of psychiatry, Humber River Hospital, Toronto, where he’s chief of psychiatry.