Why would we deny him his right to suicide prevention?
Catherine Ford of the Calgary Herald wants equal rights. So do I.
But here’s the question she didn’t ask in her June 24th column: equal right to what, exactly? Because the right she’s describing the right to a medically assisted death when your pain is psychiatric is not the only right on the table. There’s another one. The right to be fought for. The right to have the system stand between you and the worst moment of your life instead of handing you a form.
That right is called suicide prevention and in Canada right now, it is not equally distributed.
I served in Afghanistan. I came home. I watched what the system did and didn’t do for the people I served with. I have testified before Parliament on veteran suicide, on MAID, and on the gap between what we promise the people who put on a uniform and what we actually deliver. So when Ford writes about choice, I need her to sit with something specific.
A veteran with PTSD who cannot see a way out is not making a free choice. He is making a choice inside a tunnel. His nervous system has been altered by what he witnessed. His access to quality psychiatric care has been inadequate because Veterans Affairs wait times are documented, the underfunding is documented, the failures are documented. The tunnel he is standing in was partly built by institutional neglect.
Ford calls the parliamentary committee’s recommendation to exclude mental illness as a sole criterion “cruelty.” I call it the first responsible thing a committee has done on this file in a decade. Not because people with mental illness don’t suffer. They do. Profoundly, but because “irremediable” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and we have not been honest about what it means.
Irremediable compared to what treatment? The treatment we haven’t provided yet? The therapy that has a two-year waitlist? The psychiatrist who isn’t available in the rural community where this person lives? We are declaring conditions irremediable in a system that has never fully tried to remediate them. That is not a medical standard. That is a budget decision dressed up as compassion.
Ford anchors her argument in autonomy. Fine. Then let’s apply that standard consistently and see where it takes us.
A thirteen-year-old girl is targeted by an algorithm. Instagram surfaces content specifically calibrated to deepen her body dysmorphia. She develops an eating disorder. She wants to harm herself. Her suffering is real. It is documented. By the logic Ford is advancing that mental pain is pain, that psychiatric suffering deserves the same access as physical suffering, that we cannot treat some Canadians as “dependent children incapable of making their own decisions” on what principled basis does that girl not qualify?
I already know the answer Ford would give. She would say that’s not what she meant. That there are safeguards. That minors are different.
But that’s the problem. Once you accept that the state’s role is to facilitate death for those whose psychiatric suffering is deemed irremediable, you need a bright, defensible line about who qualifies. Canada does not have one. Belgium and the Netherlands, which have had this framework longer, do. They’ve used it on minors. They’ve used it on people whose primary diagnosis was depression and social isolation. That is not a slippery slope argument. It is what the data shows actually happened.
Ford writes that forcing some Canadians to live is cruel. I’d ask her to consider the inverse. Is it not cruel to build a system where the answer to “I can’t go on” is “we can help with that” rather than “why not, and what haven’t we tried?”
The veteran with PTSD deserves every resource this country has. He deserves peer support workers who’ve been downrange. He deserves access to treatments including psychedelic-assisted therapy, which has shown significant clinical results for treatment-resistant PTSD and which Canada has been unconscionably slow to make accessible. He deserves a system that exhausts every option before it considers the last one.
What he does not deserve is a country that skips to the end because the beginning and the middle are expensive.
Ford is right that successive Canadian governments have punted this question down the road. But she has misidentified the punt. The failure wasn’t in delaying MAID expansion. The failure was in never building the mental health infrastructure that would make “irremediable” a meaningful word rather than a bureaucratic shortcut.
Equal rights. Yes. I’m for it.
Every Canadian equally deserves a system that fights for their life before it ends it. Every Canadian equally deserves a psychiatric care system funded at the same level as emergency cardiac care. Every Canadian equally deserves to have their crisis treated as a crisis — not a decision.
That is the equal right we are not having the conversation about and until we do, I am not prepared to call a death-first system compassionate.
Kelsi Sheren is a Canadian disabled combat veteran, Author of Do No Harm? and host of The Kelsi Sheren Perspective. She has testified before Parliament on veteran suicide, MAID, and psychedelic therapy.
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