The Health Impacts of Seniors' Loneliness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

In the past, The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) was a strong promoter of Canada's euthanasia law and expansions of that law, but a new CARP initiative tackling Seniors Loneliness is worthwhile. In a recent update on Seniors' Loneliness CARP states:

Social isolation is a serious issue when it comes to seniors and a signal of a dysfunctional society. It’s estimated that almost 30% of Canadian seniors live alone – and without strong community connections, many of these seniors suffer silently from loneliness and depression.

Loneliness can impact physical and mental well-being. Isolation can lead to depression, which in turn can further exacerbate health issues. For example, depression in older adults is tied to a higher risk of cardiac diseases. At the same time, depression reduces an older person’s ability to recover from illness.

Depression is not a typical part of aging. Yet it is estimated that 20% of older adults experience symptoms – like persistent sadness, loss of interest in activities, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness and even suicidal thoughts – and rates increase up to 40% for those in hospitals and long-term care homes.

These numbers are a warning sign of a public health crisis hiding in plain sight. The World Health Organization recently named loneliness a global health priority, urging countries to take action. And the science is clear: chronic isolation is more harmful than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

While CARP is promoting their initiative to counter Senior's Loneliness, I want to reiterate my support for the Compassionate Community Care charity that also focuses on reducing Seniors' Loneliness.

While CARP has strongly promoted euthanasia (MAiD) in the past, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition recognizes how loneliness can lead to requests euthanasia. Many people who are living with difficult health conditions also feel lonely, feel hopeless and begin to believe that they have no further reason to live. 

Instead of offering these people death, they should be offered support from a caring community who reasures them that they are important and that they still have a reason to live.

Contact the Compassionate Community Care charity (CCC) to join the Visitor Training program or become trained to provide advocacy for your family members or people who you know. CCC also provides a calling service for contacting lonely seniors who simply need someone to talk to or someone to listen.

Canada's Ministry of Death

The following article has written by Alexander Raikin been reprinted without edits. This article: Canada's Ministry of Death was published by National Review online and will be published in the National Review print edition on February 20, 2023.

Raikin also wrote the article: No Other Options: An exposé on euthanasia in Canada, that was published in the New Atlantis on December 16, 2022.

By Alexander Raikin

It was supposed to be easy. If journalists asked the Honourable David Lametti, Canada’s minister of justice, a difficult question about euthanasia, he simply needed to read his talking points for February 24, 2020. A senior civil servant from his department prepared the lines; the prime minister’s staffers approved them. All that was left was to kill the messenger.

Publicly, Lametti said that the rate of change in public attitudes toward euthanasia had surprised even him. Barely five years earlier, prosecutors had called euthanasia “culpable homicide.” Now the government of Canada calls it “MAiD” — Medical Assistance in Dying, or, in other words, killing as medical treatment. Lametti, standing with other cabinet ministers, was to announce a further expansion of MAiD that, as Bill C-7, would come partially into effect in 2021. This March, the two-year sunset clause in that bill expires and the list of acceptable reasons for MAiD will be expanded once again, this time to mental suffering unaccompanied by physical ailment.

I filed a freedom-of-information request to find out what Lametti knew when he introduced the bill. While Lametti, like other cabinet ministers, was told to stress that there is “a consensus” among the public behind the plan, his own notes belie the point.

Some questions were never meant to be answered. Question 43 in the memo: Why did the government of Canada not appeal a lower-court decision in Truchon v. Canada, which, contrary to the government’s earlier promises, will expand euthanasia to people with essentially any chronic illness or disability? The answer, in its tautological beauty, is that “the Government of Canada announced in October 2019 that it would not appeal.” Want to know — Question 37 — how many euthanasia deaths there have been so far? The answer is that there has been “a consistent and gradual increase” as the practice of euthanasia “gains greater comfort and acceptance by Canadians.” No need to worry about any numbers — more is better anyhow.

But the most notable question was the one that was never asked at the press conference. It clearly was more important, as it was on the second page of the talking points. It was the Canadian equivalent of a jeremiad, accusing the government of forsaking some of the most important documents of civil liberties that a card-carrying member of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party could believe in. “Q6: Advocates for persons with disabilities are saying that this Bill violates the equality rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Liberal Party of Canada’s Disability Equality Statement. Does this Bill put the lives of persons with disabilities at risk as advocates claim?”

The prepared answer was another nonanswer. The government would address “stigma and bias”; it would bring about “a culture change to ensure that the important contributions made to Canada by persons with disabilities are recognized and valued on the [same] basis as those of other Canadians.” What the government would not do is slow down a program that offers suicide-prevention services to most people but assisted suicide and euthanasia only to the disabled, terminally ill or not.

Behind the scenes, even on the day of the cabinet minister’s press conference, bureaucrats from the central agencies who had worked on the memo worried about the toll of the government’s policies. One email talked about how “from a comms perspective, I wonder if it might seem like the increase [in MAiD deaths] is buried if it isn’t there and others will report on it rather than the Govt.” The increase wasn’t included in the accompanying media deck, and the media didn’t report on it, not really.

Since Trudeau was elected in 2015, his government has single-handedly created the largest, most permissive euthanasia program in the world. “You can kinda yell till you’re blue in the face that there are problems, but people aren’t listening,” John Maher, a psychiatrist in Ontario specializing in treatment-resistant mental illnesses, told me. When MAiD was first implemented, in 2016, a CBC article claimed that 90 percent of requests for assisted deaths were being refused in Toronto. But by 2021, only 4 percent of requests were deemed ineligible nationwide. “There isn’t a slippery slope,” said Timothy Stainton, a professor of social work at the University of British Columbia. “This is Mount Everest in a snowstorm.”

The daily death toll is staggering, even more so because it is unreported. Every day in Canada, in 2021, more than 27 people died by the hands of their physicians or nurses. It’s double the suicide rate, and there isn’t any sign of its stopping or slowing down. The world’s “euthanasia capital” is no longer Brussels or Amsterdam. It is now Ottawa. Canada euthanizes more people than any other country in the world — and its death toll is growing at a faster rate than that of any other voluntary system of euthanasia anywhere. (So much for Lametti’s description of “gradual increases.”)

To put this in context: When the number of Dutch deaths from euthanasia doubled in six years, a Dutch official in charge of reviewing euthanasia deaths warned that the Dutch model of euthanasia should be avoided. But after Canada’s legalization, the number increased tenfold in six years. At any rate, it will be impossible for any similar Canadian watchdog to warn about Canada. That is because no such watchdogs exist: Unlike in the Netherlands or Belgium, Canada has no mandated review process for potential stories of abuse.

That people with disabilities would be at a unique risk of an early death by MAiD is not an accident, as Lametti’s office knew. In fact, it was predicted well in advance. Before Bill C-7 passed, over 140 disability groups claimed that Trudeau’s plan “put their very lives at risk.” A petition of Indigenous doctors and politicians demanded that it “not be forced on our peoples.” Three United Nations human-rights experts, including the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, decried the legislation as riddled with “ableist assumptions about the inherent . . . ‘worth’ of the life of a person with a disability.” “Under no circumstance should the law provide that it could be a well-reasoned decision for a person with a disabling condition who is not dying to terminate their life with the support of the state,” they wrote. Lametti’s response was to talk about stigma.

How did Canadian institutions become so bullish on euthanasia in the face of such opposition? It’s an important question. A simple answer is that Canada’s descent into death-on-demand is because of its supreme court or its culture. But both explanations seem weak.

It is, of course, fair to say that the court has played an outsized role in creating a “right to die.” In 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter v. Canada, unanimously overturned nearly a century and a half of common law to strike down the federal prohibition on “physician-assisted death,” declaring it contrary to the “life, liberty, and security of the person” as guaranteed in Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the exact same section of the Charter had been used two decades prior to keep medically assisted suicide illegal in the split supreme-court ruling in Rodriguez v. British Columbia that “human life should not be depreciated by allowing life to be taken,” especially by a physician. Why did an already activist court change its mind? Jocelyn Downie, a law professor who was part of the legal team that argued in the Supreme Court for euthanasia to be decriminalized, told me that she is nonetheless “surprised” at the “massive change” that Canadian society — and the courts — had to accept. It couldn’t have happened any sooner.

The court wasn’t responding to any change in law; it was responding to a perceived change in the mood around assisted suicide — conducting a vibe test for euthanasia. “Despite the Court’s decision in Rodriguez, the debate over physician-assisted dying continued,” the court said, arguing the need for it to revisit its earlier ruling, citing failed parliamentary bills in Canada, “recent reports” by Canadian academics, and a changing “legislative landscape” in other jurisdictions such as Colombia and Luxembourg. But this change in mood, as shown by the examples the court cited (which included no polls or surveys), was not the result of some bottom-up change in society.

The culture argument is lackluster too. Earlier attempts to force Canadians to accept euthanasia or assisted suicide as a form of medical treatment failed rather decisively. As late as 2010, a three-quarters majority of the House of Commons wanted to keep physician-assisted death a criminal offense. No major national party supported legalizing euthanasia, which explains why half a dozen bills to introduce euthanasia between 1991 and 2010 failed to pass.

Canadians outside the legislature were unconvinced, too. It’s one thing to support the idea of assisted suicide in the abstract and another to put it into practice. A national 2010 poll by Environics found that if you asked Canadians whether the government should focus on legalizing euthanasia, improving end-of-life care, or both, the response was overwhelmingly (71 percent) for improving end-of-life care. Only 19 percent said euthanasia and 5 percent said both. Two-thirds of Canadians expressed concerns that the elderly would feel pressured to die because of financial concerns, a fear that is already coming true. Although “MAiD providers,” physicians or nurses who perform euthanasia, have long argued that no one is requesting MAiD because of poverty or lack of medical care, I wrote for the New Atlantis that the situation is common enough that the leading organization of MAiD providers held multiple seminars on it. “It is rare for assessors to have patients who have unmet needs, but it does happen. Usually these unmet needs are around loneliness and poverty,” admitted Ellen Wiebe, one of the most prolific “MAiD providers” in Canada.

If it wasn’t the courts and it wasn’t the culture, the answer must lie elsewhere. To understand how we really got here, to promoting the assisted deaths of the most vulnerable people in society and calling it progress, it is necessary to look past Lametti’s talk about a supposed “consensus” and see a multimillion-dollar PR campaign to persuade the public and elites to stop worrying and love MAiD.

The signs of its success are visible to the naked eye, often in the quick marginalization of dissenters. Yves Robert, the secretary of the Quebec College of Physicians and a previous supporter of assisted dying, warned in 2017 that euthanasia in Canada was turning into “death à la carte.” The warnings were almost self-evident, because of “the paradoxical discourse [by the media and Parliament] that calls for safeguards to avoid abuse, while asking the doctor to act as if there was no abuse.” “Let us take the time to properly reflect before going further,” Robert urged. “There’s no urgency to die.” But five years later there apparently is.

Now the same Quebec College of Physicians has sent another representative — not Yves Robert — to clamor for Parliament to expand euthanasia still further, this time to minors and even babies less than a year old. Just don’t call it “infanticide,” please. (Inclusion Canada, a leading disability-rights group, said in a response that “this isn’t MAiD, it’s murder.”)

The same push is evident in other medical groups. The Canadian Psychiatric Association, under the presidency of Sonu Gaind in 2015–16, explored the potential impacts of suicide contagion through the legalization of euthanasia. Yet the following leadership squashed any further “evidence-based study” of contagion risks — and then issued a public statement on behalf of the organization saying that it would be “discrimination” if patients who applied for MAiD because of a psychiatric condition were treated any differently from those with a physical illness. But what the leadership believes is not what the group’s members believe. Ontario psychiatrists, according to an internal survey conducted by the Ontario Medical Association Section on Psychiatry, opposed by a nearly three-to-one margin (63 percent to 23 percent) the proposition that “patients with [only] a psychiatric illness . . . should have available the same options regarding MAiD as available to all patients,” without issues of irremediability in mental illness having been examined.

The impact of this pseudo-consensus is evident in news reports: People are getting desensitized. A completely routine caption from a local newspaper last year was “Randy Obenauer, 74, cries as he tries to clean his own catheter.” When Randy’s friend tried to get him help, local health authorities asked him whether Randy was interested in MAiD instead. But the story didn’t go viral. No one was reprimanded for asking such a callous question. Disability groups added another name to their growing “List of Cases of Concern,” and otherwise life went on.

The national media prefer to report, for instance, on how an Ontario police officer donated his lungs from a euthanasia performed at home, a world first, or how a couple married for 73 years could die together through MAiD at home even though only one of them had a terminal illness. The moral nuances were not discussed; the bias was not new. When it came time for the 2015 election, shortly after the Carter decision, the only person with visible disabilities who was chosen by the journalist moderators to ask a question in the election debate between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau assumed that a right to die was owed to disabled persons and asked the candidates how their platforms would grant it. This “showed the media complicity” and “the political complicity” in pushing assisted suicide, remarked a matter-of-fact Amy Hasbrouck, the director of Toujours Vivant–Not Dead Yet, a grass-roots disability advocacy group against euthanasia.

International media are not much better. Justin Trudeau’s government is frequently described without any mention of his policy on euthanasia. Until 2021 — years into Canada’s headfirst descent into euthanasia — virtually no major media mentioned MAiD when discussing Trudeau. Instead, the media were seized by “Trudeaumania.” Trudeau was on the cover of Rolling Stone, Attitude (“an international LGBT magazine”), GQ (don’t ask), and even Sky Delta (“Delta Airlines’ popular in-flight magazine”). Just months before Lametti’s press conference, the Atlantic described Trudeau’s government as “the most successful progressive government in the world.”

In every interview that I did with disability advocates or physicians skeptical of euthanasia-on-demand, I asked why they thought euthanasia in Canada had become such an industry. The answer was always the same: “Dying with Dignity Canada,” said one insider who wished not to be named, referring to the largest pro-euthanasia lobbying group, founded in 1980. “I mean, they haven’t come up in all of this, but they’re a very, very powerful, well-funded lobby.”

It was, indeed, Dying with Dignity Canada (DWDC) that created and marketed the public and lobbying campaign for euthanasia, largely through stories of individuals demanding to die. It was highly effective. Whenever parliamentary committees would debate safeguards for MAiD, the organization would arrange for a chosen cadre of individuals to testify in front of the committee; they only needed one activist to balance out the concerns of disability groups, despite the latter’s near-unanimity in opposition to MAiD. Moreover, DWDC could spend millions on promoting a single story online and in the media. There were many groups opposing MAiD, but there was only one national group in support of it. And they were always on script.

Disability advocacy groups couldn’t compete with the slick media campaign featuring almost nothing but white women with terminal illnesses clamoring for suicide (so much for Canadian multiculturalism). It’s the motte-and-bailey rhetorical strategy: Canadians, like Americans, largely support assisted suicide for terminal illnesses, so those were the stories that advocates shared. But the policy of euthanasia was expanding far beyond terminal illnesses: People were dying from hearing or vision loss; treatable illnesses; diabetes or arthritis; loneliness, poverty, old age. Their stories were not told.

Harper Schipper, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, told me that after Rodriguez, Death with Dignity Canada was run in a way that was “absolutely brilliant strategically.” He knows this because he believes he was on the receiving end. In the opening session of the Council of Canadian Academies’ panels on MAiD, it was announced that he would chair an important panel. The event was sequestered and barred to the media in order to maintain the integrity of the proceedings; the panelists were told not to reflect on the proceedings publicly until after the panels’ conclusion. But as Schipper’s panel convened the next day, a coordinated campaign created negative publicity about him. Even before his appointment was announced, a “gotcha” article came out impugning Schipper’s objectivity by noting that he had warned that a slippery slope in euthanasia could lead to a replay of Nazi Germany. It was an open secret on who pulled it off.

“I am called out of the meeting,” Schipper recalls, “because Dying with Dignity has found a reporter, a stringer for the Globe and Mail who writes a piece basically saying Dr. Schipper is a shrill opponent of assisted dying. He’s been named chairman of this group. And while we’re not asking him to step down, we asked that he be fair in his chairmanship. And at the same time, two voices pop up in the Commons, making the same kind of comments.” Ultimately, he was forced to resign from his chairmanship

DWDC’s media savvy isn’t a surprise: Its first major donor was a media mogul, Moses Znaimer. In 2008, Znaimer set his sights on seniors. He created a for-profit company, ZoomerMedia, which he used to buy outright the CARP (Canadian Association of Retired Persons) magazine. Then he leveraged this financial partnership into becoming the president of CARP’s board.

The maneuver was strategic. When the longtime executive vice president of CARP, Susan Eng, said that she had a neutral position on euthanasia — neither supporting nor criticizing it — Znaimer fired her. Her replacement was the former CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada. “The only reason he fired me,” Eng has said, “was so that they can put out an official position for CARP saying that they want to insist on assisted dying on demand.” Znaimer also used his position to hire at least four pro-euthanasia lobbyists and arranged a personal meeting with David Lametti to persuade the government to expand assisted suicide further.

In 2010, DWDC raised just $90,000 and, according to a civil discrimination suit, was on a path to bankruptcy. Yet it continued to spend so much on lobbying, public relations, and other forms of activism that in 2015 the Canada Revenue Agency (Canada’s IRS) stripped it of its charity status. DWDC was then revitalized by big donors. A $7.75 million bequest from a supporter who had died through MAiD, and another bequest of $500,000, transformed the organization’s capacities in 2018. It could now do so much more.

Canada has another pro-dying group, one specifically geared to physicians: CAMAP, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Its purpose, its president Stefanie Green told me, is to be “the support for people that do the work.” I’ve written before in the New Atlantis on how CAMAP has kept hidden from the public and the Parliament stories of MAiD’s being offered as an alternative to poverty and inferior medical care. We know little about CAMAP except that it was founded shortly after the Carter decision. In 2021, CAMAP became a registered charity, revealing some curiosities in its financing. Unlike most charities, it spent $0 on fundraising, yet it had an astonishing $780,000 in near-liquid capital in the bank. Where did this money come from? It’s unclear. But much of CAMAP’s resources, training briefs, and studies show that its activities are funded by Dying with Dignity Canada.

Sometimes CAMAP crosses the line into activism. Green told me (and Parliament) that her organization does not advocate for any position on MAiD, but rather that CAMAP impartially reports what is happening on “the front line” to interested parties. But in a seminar, Aaron McKim, a MAiD provider in Newfoundland, hinted at actions that MAiD providers take to counteract other professional associations. “Our nursing association and social-work association have both put out practice advisories that their members aren’t really supposed to even bring up MAiD unless the patient specifically asks about it,” said McKim in a CAMAP seminar on “lack of resources” in May 2021. “And so we’re, we’re trying to kind of figure out ways to counteract that.”

“It’s clear that people associated with Dying with Dignity have been unusually influential in the policy-making in Canada related to [MAiD],” Trudo Lemmens, a law professor from the University of Toronto, told me. “It contrasts sharply with how disability-rights organizations and Indigenous organizations have been ignored in this debate.” Heidi Janz, a disability scholar and activist, said in an email interview with me that “proponents of the so-called ‘right to die’ and the federal Liberals — who are often one and the same — have consistently framed the expansion of eligibility for MAiD as advancing the autonomy rights of people with disabilities, but this claim is blatantly false.”

Lobbying records indicate that Lemmens and Janz are right. Dying with Dignity Canada has met ten times with staffers for the Ministry of Justice, including once with David Lametti himself. Every senator but one that their lobbyists spoke to was appointed by Justin Trudeau. Every vote to pass and then amend MAiD succeeded because of Liberal members. There are no records that David Lametti met with any lobbyists from disability groups.

The connection between DWDC and the Liberal Party is now even familial. James Cowan, the former leader of the Independent Liberal senators who made possible the passage of the first MAiD legislation in the Canadian senate, is now in political retirement as chairman of the board of DWDC. His daughter is Suzanne Cowan, the president of the Liberal Party.

In sum, euthanasia advocates dominated the political and media conversation and have finally come to control the expert panels and their power of imprimatur. The experts now chosen are able de facto to shape euthanasia policy as they wish while giving the Trudeau government a veneer of supposed scientific legitimacy (as if medical expertise were sufficient to resolve what is at root an ethical question). The most recent example was the expert panel formed to study safeguards for euthanasia in cases of mental illness. The panel reported that current safeguards around MAiD work well and recommended no additions. Unsurprisingly, the chairperson of that panel was an enthusiastic MAiD supporter and others had already argued for the expansion of MAiD to mental illnesses. Two board members resigned in protest, but the needed conclusion was reached.

It has been a proven strategy from the beginning of the euthanasia boom. When the Royal Society of Canada issued a report in 2011 on “end-of-life decision-making,” the chosen “expert panel” included only supporters of euthanasia. It wasn’t even subtle: The chairman publicly wrote his thoughts on the topic beforehand, while two other commissioners had published books that argued for the legalization of permissive euthanasia. The panel of course reached the desired conclusion. It was even more unsubtle that the panel thanked Peter Singer for editing the philosophical section that justified euthanasia. (Singer is a philosopher who argued in Practical Ethics [1979] that it is moral to kill “defective infants.”) When the time came for the Supreme Court to revisit the legality of euthanasia in 2015, it cited this report as proof that Western mores around death were changing.

At some point, historians or judges will lay blame for all the lives thrown away. Many major institutions in Canada will bear responsibility: the Supreme Court for failing to abide by its precedent in Rodriguez protecting the right to life; political leaders, for failing to safeguard the same right; the medical system, for failing to see people with disabilities as people with lives worth living; and the media, for failing to cover the debate with objectivity. What they should not blame is “a consensus.” There never was one.

CARP, Wettlaufer and Euthanasia.

By Adrian Rhodes

CARP’s magazine Zoomer published an article in January 2019, on Elizabeth Wettlaufer, the nurse who murdered her patients while working in long-term care homes in Ontario. The article by Alex Roslin is titled: Looking at the Complete System Failure that led to the Wetlauffer Murders. Wettlaufer cited psychological reasons, in part – she was stressed because of poor working conditions. This does not excuse the murders, but it also does not allow for the use of those murders to justify better care.

Elizabeth Wettlaufer

In this political climate, to argue that better care is needed because otherwise patients will be at risk from the Wettlaufers of the world is disingenuous. Patients are already at risk in “…an environment where patients are disrespected, abused – even sometimes murdered.” This environment came about with the legal permission being given by the Canadian government for medical representatives to kill their patients.

The permission to kill is further permission to neglect. One allegation has been made that if one is approved for death, that after approval one’s pain medication is curtailed to ensure that they are competent at the time of injection. The argument has not been made, but I am sure it is in the back of many people’s minds on reading the CARP article – ‘well, at least the patient isn’t suffering’. These statements above are probably shocking, but they are also normalized in our social lives. This is because we are normalizing the act of killing.

It is expected that suffering people will demand death instead of better care. When someone demands care, this is incomprehensible. Consider the Roger Foley case: he was demanding better care and control over his care at home, and he was offered euthanasia instead. In his case, hr publicized the offer and this caused him to become a dubious celebrity as a result. In the meantime, he had doctors and nurses using presence coercion to convince him to die. This was probably because it was good for the organization: he was apparently costing the hospital $1500 per day. So it was all about the money, not the right to care as enshrined in the Charter of Rights. So it is expected that death is preferred over treatment, care or protection of other rights.

So for CARP to be lobbying for changes to care when they are the same organization that sings the virtues of euthanasia comes across as a little precious. Remember, the push is on to save money and to allow those who have dementia – as many of Wettlaufer’s victims did – to get euthanasia. There is a push to kill incompetent people and to kill children by euthanasia. And people have said that this is a virtue, particularly when we consider the responses to Sick Kids Hospital saying they would be willing to euthanize children under 18 without parental consent. The implication is that this organization will kill children in their care – and they argued that killing and letting die are the same act.

The article reported that Wettlaufer’s victim, Maureen Pickering, was given a high dose of insulin – twice. She subsequently died. The coroner’s office representative opined that her death wasn't investigated because “Her death was foreseeable, and it was expected.” Remember, MAiD can be done if “…death is reasonably foreseeable”. So we can argue that Wettlaufer was a euthanasia enthusiast by other means.

Wettlaufer slipped through the safeguards, time and again. She even talked to her friends about the killings. They did nothing. That alone should have triggered charges. The organizations involved did nothing. The care home never told the College of Nurses about Wettlaufer’s shortcomings. They said themselves that nurses were hard to come by and this is why Wettlaufer was kept on. The deaths of elderly people are expected, after all…

The article stated that one relative of a victim said, “It seems to me that all the parties are accessories.” Another family member said, “Nobody is taking any of this seriously.” This is true, but what is also significant about this CARP article is this: CARP is a pro-euthanasia organization. CARP has advocates on staff who decried what happened to those residents while establishing a glaring contradiction with their pro-euthanasia stance.

Wettlaufer got away with these deaths because no one believed that this would happen in such an active way. This is the same reason medical organizations have attempted to impose death on patients such as Candice Lewis and Roger Foley. No one believes professionals would act against the interest of patients, even when they are acting to convince those patients to die.

People aren’t that evil, they just don’t go around killing patients. Except that in Canada, we do. There is one doctor on the West Coast who has already killed over 140 people, skirting the law to do so and without sanction.

To quote the article: “It remains to be seen if the horror of Wettlaufer’s deeds will make a difference.” Yes: people who euthanize will continue, and organizations will become even more monolithic when they attempt to kill. And then the number of deaths will continue to rise.

It is interesting that CARP would deplore the actions of someone who was neglecting patients to the point of euthanizing them. CARP’s advocates: Moses Znaimer and Wanda Morris have stumped for euthanasia, so the two situations – the magazine and its political position and Wettlaufer’s actions – are related. The article says that what Wettlaufer did was ‘shocking’. Canada’s euthanasia law and Carp's pro-euthanasia position is also shocking.

Canadian Association of Retired Persons is pressuring governments to force medical institutions to kill.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) released its policy platform for the 2019 Federal election. 

CARP is focusing on 19 areas for action including pressuring the government to force every medical institution that receives government funding to provide euthanasia, also known as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

The CARP "Exceptional Health Care" policy includes to:  Make Accessible End-of-Life Care a Right (page 21 of the platform). 

This platform statement first demands palliative care for everyone:

Make access to palliative care a right so that all Canadians can access it regardless of where they live or receive care, including rural, remote and indigenous communities.

The platform then demands that all publicly funded medical institutions provide euthanasia:

Ensure access to medical assistance in dying (euthanasia) is provided at publicly-funded institutions and available to Canadians regardless of where they live or receive care.

By demanding that every funded medical institution provide euthanasia they are then demanding that every religiously affiliated, every palliative care and every long-term care medical institution provide euthanasia.

Promoting euthanasia is not new for CARP.

Wanda Morris

CARP officially became a pro-euthanasia advocacy group in January 2016 when CARP fired Susan Eng, the long-time Executive VP of CARP. Moses Znaimer, the President of CARP, disagreed with Eng's neutral position on euthanasia. Znaimer then hired Wanda Morris, the CEO of the euthanasia lobby group - Dying with Dignity to replace Eng.

In July 2018, Wanda Morris, the current Executive VP of CARP, published an article attacking palliative care institutions and services refusing to provide euthanasia. Morris argued that euthanasia respects the Hippocratic tradition and argued that refusing to do euthanasia causes harm to patients.

Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) promotes euthanasia and attacks palliative care.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) has gone overboard in promoting euthanasia. In 2016, CARP hired Wanda Morris, who at that time was the CEO of the euthanasia lobby group Dying With Dignity, as CARP's VP of advocacy.

• CARP is now a pro-euthanasia advocacy group.

CARP which is a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization was essentially neutral on euthanasia until Moses Znaimer, the former owner of CITY TV, took over CARP.

The recent article by Wanda Morris promotes euthanasia while attacking palliative care institutions and medical providers who are not willing to kill their patients by euthanasia. Morris writes:

Palliative care practitioners bravely pioneered a critical role. They believed that, just because a disease was incurable, the patient should not be left to suffer. By palliating, or lessening, symptoms, these doctors and nurses helped patients die gentler, more peaceful deaths. 

Those in palliative care spent time, effort and energy communicating with their peers and the public: we are not here to bring about your death but to help you die well. Palliative care proponents stated they would neither hasten nor postpone death. 

In the context of history, this position made a lot of sense. But it is still being used today — even though our medical landscape has changed significantly.
Thanks to a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2015 and subsequent federal legislation, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is now legal in Canada. While the legalization of assisted dying had overwhelming public support (84 per cent in favour) among both CARP members and the general public, many in palliative care, such as Nancy Macey, executive director of the Delta Hospice Society in B.C., have gone on record as saying it is undermining their ability to provide end-of-life care and want nothing to do with it. 

This is causing real harm to patients because these hospitals and hospices are preventing patients from accessing an assisted death on their premises.

Wanda Morris
Dying with Dignity, former CEO

Morris is stating that hospices and medical care givers who refuse to lethally inject patients are causing harm. She is intentionally undermining the Hippocratic tradition by suggesting that not killing is harming patients:

I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.

Morris then coyly interviews Shanaaz Gokool, who became CEO of the euthanasia lobby group, Dying With Dignity after Morris was hired by CARP, who said:

According to Gokool, a number of publicly funded health-care facilities across the country are refusing to provide assisted dying. Some, like the palliative care unit at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, refuse to allow patients access to medical assistance in dying for religious reasons.

Gokool attacks a palliative care unit that is known for its excellence in care because they refuse to kill their patients. Morris completed her article by stating:

Tragically and ironically, the hospice movement — born out of the need to alleviate patient suffering — is, in some cases, causing suffering in patients who choose an assisted death.

Clearly CARP is more concerned about promoting euthanasia than caring about the needs of people who are approaching death.

CARP has lost their way. Canadians need to abandon their memberships in CARP.

CARP assisted dying poll results may be skewed.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) may have skewed the results of their assisted dying poll. 

As a CARP member, I was sent a link to the "assisted dying" poll on March 3. Even though CARP claimed that it was a "members poll", the link to the poll could be accessed by anyone. After answering the poll questions I was shocked by the radically pro-euthanasia results.

Late that evening, I checked the poll results and noticed that there were already more than 5000 responses with the results remaining unbelievably one-sided.

Susan Eng

On January 27, Moses Znaimer, the President & CEO of CARP, fired Susan Eng, the CARP executive VP, based on her neutral stand on assisted dying and Znaimer replaced Eng with Wanda Morris, the CEO of Dying With Dignity, a euthanasia lobby group.

Considering the recent official poll results as compared to the Nanos poll and the Angus Reid Institute Survey, my assertion seems likely.

According to the CARP poll 80% stated that publicly funded health care institutions, including hospices and long-term care homes should participate in assisted dying. The Angus Reid Institute Survey found that 68% oppose forcing religiously affiliated hospitals to participate and 62% oppose forcing nursing homes to participate.

According to the CARP poll 85% stated that waiting periods should be flexible, while the Angus Reid Institute survey found that 88% support waiting periods.

According to the CARP poll 87% stated that a doctor must refer a patient for an assisted death, while the Nanos poll found that 75% support doctors having the right to opt-out from participating in assisted death.

Since the CARP poll could be done by anyone (even though it claimed to be a members survey) and the Angus Reid survey and the Nanos poll were scientifically done based on representative samples, it seems likely that the CARP poll was intentionally skewed.

CARP is now a pro-euthanasia advocacy group.

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Susan Eng

The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) under the leadership of Moses Znaimer, the former owner of CITY TV, has officially become an advocacy group promoting unfettered euthanasia.

According to an article by Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail, Susan Eng, the long-time Executive Vice President of CARP was fired by Moses Znaimer based on her neutral position on euthanasia and assisted suicide and replaced by Wanda Morris, the former CEO of Dying With Dignity. According to the article:

The woman who has been the public face of Canada’s leading seniors organization for the past eight years says she has been dismissed by media mogul Moses Znaimer, who is also the organization’s president, because she insisted on taking a neutral approach to the emotionally charged issue of assisted dying. 

Susan Eng was told on Tuesday that she was no longer needed as the executive vice-president of advocacy at CARP Canada. She then learned on Wednesday that she was being replaced by Wanda Morris, the head of Dying with Dignity Canada, which advocates for access to physician-assisted dying and against unnecessary barriers when safeguards are being imposed to protect the vulnerable. 

... “The only reason he fired me was so that they can put out an official position for CARP saying that they want to insist on assisted dying on demand,” said Ms. Eng, a Toronto lawyer and former chair of the city’s police services board.

Znaimer has been promoting a radical pro-euthanasia position for some time. He his written one-sided propaganda articles urging "euthanasia on demand." Znaimer also wrote an article misconstruing the Bentley case in BC, a case that concerned the issue of whether normal feeding is medical treatment. 

Many seniors are members of CARP to enjoy the travel, insurance and other benefits that are obtained through a CARP membership. Many seniors will now not renew their CARP membership or seeking an alternative organization to attain similar benefits.

Canadian seniors need to know that purchasing a membership in CARP is actually supporting a euthanasia advocacy group.

The CARP media release stated:

A New Vision of Aging for Canada, Chairman, President and CEO Moses Znaimertoday announced that Susan Eng has departed CARP effective immediately. 

Moses has also announced that Wanda Morris has been appointed as CARP’s new Vice President of Advocacy and COO. 

Most recently, Wanda was CEO of Dying With Dignity Canada (DWD Canada) where she led a strategic campaign for legislative change leading up to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the ground-breaking Carter v. Canadacase for the right-to-die with dignity.

Dying With Dignity also changed its position while under the leadership of Wanda Morris. Historically, Dying With Dignity officially supported assisted suicide but opposed euthanasia. Dying With Dignity is now a radical supporter of euthanasia.

Last year Dying With Dignity lost its charitable status based on the fact that had become a political lobby group and their purpose ceased being charitable. It is possible that Znaimer hired Morris because Dying With Dignity was unable to continue paying her a competitive salary.

CARP asks federal government to add the offence of elder abuse to the criminal code.

The Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) is urging the government to enact legislation to place elder abuse into the Criminal Code. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition supports the direction of CARP and we hope that an Elder Abuse Prevention Act can be devised to be introduced after the next election.

The article from 680 News stated:

A seniors lobby group is calling on the federal government to add the offence of elder abuse to the Criminal Code. 

The call comes as a Toronto couple stands accused of forcing a 68-year-old woman to spend four months living in a freezing garage. 

The woman's 43-year-old son and 28-year-old daughter-in-law have been denied bail. They've been remanded in custody until their next appearance in court on March 15. 

CARP spokesperson Susan Eng said doctors or caregivers should be obligated to report any signs of abuse, like they do for child and domestic abuse. 

"There should be some kind of duty to report when they see something going on, and we need to have some kind of investigative support for police officers who have to investigate these crimes," she said.
Eng also said our seniors should not be considered disposable. 

"We don't have an ice-float mentality here, and we're not about to start one," she said.