Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
While Canada's parliament debated the expansion of the euthanasia law in 2020 to remove the requirement that a person be terminally ill, the Parliamentary Budget Officer projected that Canada's provinces would save at least $149 million per year if the expansion bill (Bill C-7) passed. An examination of the data reveals that this cost saving estimate was very conservative.
The Labour party won a majority government in the July 2024 election giving Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a long-time supporter of assisted suicide, the responsibility of financially saving the National Health Service (NHS).
Orr explains:
Labour's watershed budget exposed an existential challenge that threatens to drain our collective coffers. For the first time, the National Health Service's (NHS) annual budget has surpassed an eye-watering £200 billion. Taxpayers must pour ever-increasing resources to this bottomless void to prevent its total collapse.
The Chief Secretary's admission that "everyone recognises that the system is broken" rings hollow against the £20 billion emergency infusion for operational costs—a lifeline offered without any corresponding demands for enhanced efficiency, reduced waiting times, or structural reform. The arithmetic is unforgiving: Even substantial tax increases cannot satiate this growing appetite.
Starmer encouraged Labour MP Kim Leadbeater to sponsor a private members bill to legalize assisted suicide.
Orr writes:
Since this sobering fiscal reality check, parliamentarians are now racing to pass legislation that would enable physicians to facilitate their patients' deaths through assisted suicide. Although initially restricted to those with terminal diagnoses of six months or less, the experiences of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada serve as stark warnings: As surely as night follows day, such "safeguards" will disintegrate on contact with the messy reality of physical suffering and psychological discomfort to encompass an ever-widening circle of patients.
The economic calculus underlying assisted suicide advocacy has always haunted it. Consider the chilling prediction of Jacques Attali, former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, that euthanasia would become "one of the essential instruments of our future societies" once humans persist beyond their productive years, or Baroness Warnock's nakedly utilitarian arguments that those who burden their families or the state ought to be "allowed" to die.
What makes the assisted suicide debate in Britain even more telling is the lack of alternative policies that are being considered concerning the NHS economic woes.
Orr warns that economic pressures will lead to more assisted suicide:
What begins as a right will shade rapidly and imperceptibly into an obligation, not least because the raw economic pressures are impossible to ignore. While inpatient hospice care costs £3,000 to £4,000 weekly, the administration of a cocktail of poisons or treatment in a portable gas chamber will cost a negligible fraction of that. One does not need to be an expert in public policy to recognize that such stark cost differentials will shape future policy decisions.
Orr urges the Labour government to protect society's vulnerable:
Whatever noble intentions Kim Leadbeater and her supporters may harbor, public policy must be evaluated by a concrete evaluation of its likely consequences. If this government truly aspires to progressive ideals of protecting society's most vulnerable, it must resist the temptation to sacrifice human dignity on the altar of fiscal expediency.
Articles on this topic:
- Balancing Canada's Healthcare Budget with Euthanasia (Link)
- Is the assisted suicide debate about healthcare savings? (Link).
- Canada's Healthcare Savings Attributed to Euthanasia (Link).
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