Euthanasia surges in leftist Canada

FPI / August 16, 2021

Analysis by Joe Schaeffer

Here’s a statistic that has flown under the radar amid the greater chaos of 2021:

Nearly 7,600 Canadians chose to die via MAiD (medical assistance in dying) in 2020, an increase of 35 percent over the previous year, the latest numbers released by Health Canada show.

The above excerpt comes from a July 16 article posted by Canadian news site The Catholic Register. The publication also writes:

At 7,595 deaths in 2020 — up from 5,660 in 2019 — that means about 2.5 percent of all deaths in Canada were people who chose an assisted death. These numbers were found in Health Canada’s second annual report on assisted suicide, which was released June 30.

Based on personal accounts of what is going on in Canadian hospitals, that number becomes even more distressing. The Culture of Death is thriving in the Great White North.

Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, has spearheaded the fight against the ongoing expansion of assisted suicide in Canada. He penned a startling piece posted at pro-life website LifeNews.com on Aug. 12 describing one possible factor behind the rise:

I was a shocked when I received a call from the wife of a former pro-life leader who was approved for euthanasia.

Euthanasia became legal in Canada in June 2016 and in March 2021 Canada’s federal government expanded the euthanasia law when it passed Bill C-7.

The man that I am referring to was a pro-life activist in the 1990s.

His wife told me that he was nearing death and being cared for in Catholic hospice facility, but that he had asked to die by lethal injection and he had been approved. Since he was being cared for in a Catholic facility and they would not participate in the act, they were planning to transfer him to a secular hospice.

The man’s wife was able to prevent her husband’s state-sanctioned killing, but Schadenberg added more details on how a dying pro-life activist ended up in such a situation in the first place:

After his natural death, I received a call from his wife thanking me for helping her save her husband from euthanasia.

She told me that she found out, after his death, that the day before her husband asked to be killed by euthanasia, that a nurse at the facility, spoke to her husband for several hours in the middle of the night and convinced him to ask for (MAiD). She told his wife, after his death, that MAiD was his right and she spent several hours assuring him that euthanasia was an option for him. He had not brought up the idea of death by lethal injection before that conversion.

As Schadenberg points out, for a medical professional to push assisted suicide on a suffering, frail patient is unconscionable:

When thinking about the ethics concerning what the nurse had done, clearly she did not simply inform him of his legal options but she convinced him, while he was partially sedated, to accept death by lethal injection an act that he would never even have considered when he was in his normal state of mind.

The nurse not only acted inappropriately but she proved how a human person can be influenced at a vulnerable time of their life.

And yet such actions are apparently not out of the norm north of our border.

The July Catholic Reporter article revealed that the progressive province of British Columbia has become a hotbed of euthanasia:

The numbers were highest in British Columbia where four percent of all deaths were attributable to euthanasia. B.C. is the only province where MAiD clinics openly operate, with one clinic in each of Vancouver and Victoria. In Quebec, 3.1 percent of all deaths came via MAiD while the lowest percentage of deaths by euthanasia is in Newfoundland at 0.9 percent.

British Columbia publication The B.C Catholic notes sadly that its province is becoming the North American Amsterdam when it comes to assisted suicide:

B.C.’s 2020 death-by-MAiD rate is approaching that of the euthanasia-pioneering “Benelux” countries – Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, where euthanasia is approaching 5 percent of all deaths. B.C. also recorded the highest Canadian rate in 2019, 3.3 percent, when the national average was two percent.

And it offered up another personal account of a medical staffers trying to talk a patient into taking their life:

In one case, a Surrey man told The B.C. Catholic that his sick and elderly mother-in-law had been subjected to unwanted and unwarranted pressure to accept being killed through MAiD. After he and his wife complained to the Fraser Health Authority, the MAiD-approval order was dropped.

A full reading of the sordid tale can found here. It follows the same allegations of undue pressure on a highly vulnerable patient that Schadenberg laid out:

The family’s battle with Fraser Health began in late May while Joan was a patient in the cancer and palliative-care wards at Surrey Memorial Hospital. Alain told The B.C. Catholic that, unbeknownst to him and his wife, an oncologist visited his heavily medicated mother-in-law while she was alone and then initiated a discussion about MAiD.

In a separate interview, Pamela added that when her mother asked about treatment options, the doctor said there were none for her late-stage cancer, but opened up discussion about MAiD. Alain said Joan would never have asked about MAiD and would never have agreed to it. Nevertheless, he said the doctor insisted that Joan had agreed to it.

Denial? The health center involved would only give a frighteningly bland bureaucratic response:

Fraser Health refused to comment on any aspect of this story. Dixon Tam, a public-affairs consultant with the authority, said only that “we discuss a range of care options with all of our patients.”

Expect this under-reported tragedy to only continue to worsen in coming years. There are more than 6.8 million Canadians over the age of 65, according to a 2020 report. That is 18% of the nation’s population.

And the euthanasia zealots are waiting for them, and millions of others as well.

From The Catholic Register’s July article:

There are fears the numbers will only rise in the future as earlier this year Canada liberalized its MAiD laws (Bill C-7) with there no longer being the stipulation that a natural death must be reasonably foreseeable to be eligible for an assisted death. And in two years time, the procedure will be open to those suffering from mental illness.

The Slippery Slope is rolling directly to our North. Given all that has happened in the health sphere in the past year and a half, is there any reason to believe that it won't soon be spilling over to the American Colossus below sooner rather than later?

Free Press International