Canada's mad rush to implement MAiD.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Peter Stockland who has followed the issues related to euthanasia and assisted suicide for many years published a comment yesterday on the mad rush to implement more (MAiD) euthanasia in Canada. Stockland comments on the passing of Bill C-7, the bill that expanded euthanasia. He wrote:

My own sense is that ... an enduring legacy of the past 15 months might be a dawning awareness of the correlative radical expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying, a legal euphemism conflating two distinct acts previously criminalized as euthanasia and assisted suicide.

It’s an immense understatement to note that the MAiD-expanding legislation that passed through Parliament in parallel with the eruption and quelling of COVID was overshadowed by the entirely justifiable focus on the pandemic. But the shade on MAiD could conceivably lift when we enter another phase in March 2023 and federal law alters again to permit life-ending injections for mentally ill Canadians.

Stockland refers to the expansion of euthanasia in Canada as a revolution.

We can agree or disagree about MAiD as a measure. We can approve or disapprove of it in principle and practice. But the legislative alterations that occurred within the pandemic penumbra – and those yet to come – represent a revolution in our understanding of what health care is and, more profoundly still, our shared conception of what human life is.

Stockland comments on the revolution to expand euthanasia to people with mental illness.

On February 24th, 2020, I was in the theatre of the National Press Building as Justice Minister David Lametti and Health Minister Patti Hajdu introduced expanded MAiD legislation. At the press conference, I specifically asked Minister Hajdu whether the changes might put mentally ill Canadians at risk. She insisted the government had no intention of making MAiD an option for the mentally ill.

On March 17, 2021, a mushroomed version of the original expansion passed in both the Commons and Senate. In one year – a year of the worst pandemic to strike Canada in more than a century – Canada’s medically assisted dying law had transformed to the point where expert critics said it allowed for individuals – soon to include those with severe psychiatric conditions – to request MAiD in the morning and receive it by evening.

Stockland stresses the speed at which Canada has expanded its euthanasia law

Again, whether we agree or disagree with MAiD, a single year to legalize such a wholesale change about the ending of human life signals a country moving away from its past at warp speed and toward…what? In fact, COVID disruptions of Parliament meant the bill died and had to be reintroduced in October. Full-time focus on the legislation was little more than five months – months when the nation was riveted by pandemic lockdown.

And here is where the COVID overlay on the MAiD calendar becomes illustrative. The five-month expansion process came only five years after Canada’s historic legal change to allow medically assisted death. By contrast, the Supreme Court’s 1993 Rodriguez decision upholding prohibition of medically delivered death stood for 22 years before being successfully challenged.

Stockland concludes by stating that parliament expanded the law and it set the stage for further expansions of (MAiD) euthanasia.

But the thing is, in the pandemic year just past, with Parliament shut down, Canadians locked down, and our most vulnerable population ravaged by COVID in care homes, we rushed through legislation expanding MAiD availability. We affirmed rejection of the sanctity of life. We extended the 2016 legislation far beyond its original intentions. We ultimately set the stage for it to extend to the mentally ill.

That conflation foreshadows the virtual impossibility of pivoting out of COVID and back to the Canada we once knew.

Peter Stockland is Senior Writer with Cardus, and Editor of Convivium.

Some previous articles by Peter Stockland on euthanasia and assisted suicide (Link).

MAiD Muscles into the Delta Hospice.

This article was published by Convivium on January 8, 2021

Peter Stockland

By Peter Stockland

You might think the middle of a global pandemic is less than an ideal time to disrupt the operations of a hospice where palliative care patients receive comfort as they approach death.

If so, you would not share the apparent thinking of the B.C. government or its local Fraser Health Authority, which as of today has forced layoffs of staff at the Irene Thomas Hospice in suburban Vancouver. The dismissals are part of the eviction of the Delta Hospice Society that oversees the facility.

In a conversation yesterday, DHS board President Angelina Ireland confirmed for me that the pink slips were to be given out this morning because the Society refuses to administer Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) on its premises. As of February 24, the DHS will have to relinquish the palliative care centre that it raised $9 million a decade ago to construct on Fraser Health Authority land. Its 35-year lease on the property will be nullified, and its other assets expropriated, Ireland says.

Irene Thomas hospice

She is adamant the takeover has nothing to do with the hospice Society wanting to prolong the debate over whether MAiD should or should not be legal in Canada. It accepts the 2016 change to the Criminal Code that legalized the administration of toxic injections by health care professionals intent on ending the lives of patients. But DHS’ own legally-registered constitution bars it from administering MAiD in the 10-bed Irene Thomas centre. And nothing in the law requires a change to that constitution because nothing obliges the provision of MAiD anywhere, anytime for anyone who requests it.

As Ireland points out, MAiD is readily available for all who seek it at a hospital barely 100 yards from the Irene Thomas Hospice. The centre has also accommodated MAiD-seeking patients by transferring them home or to the hospital. Of the approximately 1000 palliative patients who’ve been cared for at the facility over the past decade, “three or four” have asked to be administered MAiD, she says.

“This is not a debate about MAiD,” Ireland insists. “This is about the B.C. government destroying a sanctuary for dying patients who want the choice to stay in a facility where MAiD is not offered. They now find their rights to equal choice being revoked. They are being disenfranchised by the very system they pay for.”

At the very least, it seems to be about an ideology flourishing within governmental circles (provincial and federal) as well as in the minds of many MAiD proponents that giving fatal substances to the dying must be established as an always and everywhere practice in Canada. We have universal health care. We now need universally directed death.

Certainly, following the trail of tears that has led to the Delta Hospice Society’s eviction gives credence to that suspicion. The Society was founded 30 years ago to provide end-of-life care, and since that time has been hailed as an exemplary organization for its adherence to palliative principles. But in 2017, following the federal legislative change nine months earlier, an edict went out from the B.C. government ordering all palliative and hospice centres excepting those that are faith-based, to provide MAiD.

Pushback was substantial. In the case of DHS, it met with officials from the local Fraser Health Authority and explained its constitutional predicament: its bylaws banned MAiD and to adhere to the government order would put it in violation of its standing under the provincial Society’s Act. The issue seems to have been quietly moved to the backburner by a wise and deft health bureaucrat.

That state of equilibrium-preserving inaction prevailed until 2019 when agitation by local MAiD activists coincided with a change in the bureaucracy. The result was a comply-or-else order, which DHS countered by offering to forego half its publicly funded operating capital – $750,000 – in order to be considered a private palliative facility. Doing so, it believed, would relieve it of the purported obligation to provide MAiD.

The offer did not even get the courtesy of a reply. Instead, DHS was served with a one-year notice of eviction for allegedly having breached its service contract with the local health authority. Months of court action followed until, immediately before Christmas, the eviction notice was reinforced with an order that the Society vacate its building and cease overseeing the Irene Thomas Centre by the end of February.

Today, no one seems to know exactly what will happen to those being laid off. There is talk of an orderly transition to a facility where MAiD will be on tap 24/7. We have, of course, learned a great deal from the COVID pandemic about government and bureaucratic understanding of orderly transition. Apparently, the employees will just have to trust.

And in the midst of that pandemic, political, bureaucratic and activist advocates of MAiD ubiquity will have forced a small suburban palliative care centre to bend to their will. Even as COVID death rates soar, the dream of having a sanctuary for authentic palliation will have died.

As Nancy Macey, Delta Hospice Society founder and former Irene Thomas executive director puts it almost wistfully: “The Society has done all it can to have discussions with Fraser Health. It has done all it can to follow its service agreement and the required legislation.”

You might think in Canada that would be enough. Think again.

MAID in Canada: A Thankless Fight

This article was published by Convivium on January 20, 2020

Peter Stockland

As Canadians weigh in on prospective changes to MAiD laws, Peter Stockland sits down with Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s Alex Schadenberg to discuss his serious concerns with the country’s trajectory.

By Peter Stockland

Alex Schadenberg has been leading the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in the thankless fight against doctor-administered death for more than 20 years.

In the nearly 10 years that I’ve known him in that capacity, I’ve never heard him so close to almost terminal frustration. Irrepressible by apparent genetic disposition, Schadenberg continues to urge on the battle. But the federal government’s latest “public consultation” on revisions to the 2016 Medical Assistance in Dying law has him sending out signals of serious retrenchment.

“My focus is becoming far more heavily on how we protect our own,” the EPC executive director says with a discernible tinge of weariness in his voice. “It’s important (to remind) the whole compassionate care community, those who recognize the nature of the human person, that just because you think euthanasia is wrong doesn’t mean that in your own time of darkness, you will not also succumb. We have to recognize that’s how humans are and how we react.”

Alex Schadenberg

Schadenberg’s reaction to recent events in the pushing forward of MAiD is a far cry from his unwavering certainty a decade ago that euthanasia and assisted dying not only could, but would, be stopped by battling on all fronts from the legislative and legal to media-shaped popular opinion.

Long invariably irenic, he sounds incensed describing the fight that has blown up in B.C. where the provincial government has ordered a hospice in the Vancouver suburb of Delta to begin permitting medical assistance in dying contrary to its founding principles. But there is a special scorn in his voice for Ottawa’s online “consultations” that were launched Jan. 13 and will end next Monday.

*Delta Hospice Must Not Be Forced to do Euthanasia (Link).

Federal Justice Minister David Lametti and two of his Liberal cabinet colleagues are shepherding the process in response, at least purportedly, to a 2019 Quebec lower court ruling that found Ottawa’s MAiD law to be unconstitutional. A one-judge decision in September held that the Criminal Code cannot require death to be “foreseeable” before poison can be injected into a patient’s veins. An equivalent stipulation in a bill passed by Quebec’s National Assembly was also struck down. The judgement will have the force of law in the province by March 11.

*Guide to answering the Canadian MAID Consultation Questionnaire (Link).

Schadenberg scoffs at the very idea of the federal government asking the public for direction when it failed to even do its constitutional duty and appeal the low court verdict through the Quebec appeal courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court of Canada. He also finds it darkly laughable that Justice Minister Lametti is reassuring Canadians the decision applies only in Quebec.

“They (the federal government) know there’s not a judge in the land who’s going to let a prosecutor go after a physician for performing euthanasia on someone whose natural death was not reasonably foreseeable. It’s been decided by the Quebec court already, and whether I like it or you like it, it is a national decision and the law has technically been changed anyway,” he says.

In Schadenberg’s eyes, the online appeal for public advice is a “dog and pony show…a set up…almost a sham” for the foregone conclusion of expanding MAiD far beyond the initial limits embedded in the already-flawed 2016 federal legislation. He picks apart several of the questions being put to Canadians, particularly one that asks whether MAiD should be available only when doctor and patient agree reasonable efforts to relieve suffering have been tried without success.

“Writing the question the way they did assumes I agree MAiD should be available. But of course I don’t agree with that. They’ve very carefully left me no way, though, to answer that I don’t agree. I don’t like people playing with me or using me like that.”

Hard as it might seem, he fears there’s worse coming. The consultation does not ask, for example, about extending MAiD to children, something many of its advocates began pushing for almost before the ink was dry on the 2016 legislation. That might seem cause for relief – except to someone who’s been face first in the euthanasia and assisted suicide issue for more than two decades.

“It makes me think they’re not done yet,” Schadenberg says. “As much talking as they’ve done about adding children, maybe they didn’t think now was the right time to do it. They left children off this list because they’ll be back looking at another list of changes in the future.”

As bleak – and gruesomely cynical – as all that sounds, the warrior in him refuses to say “die” and abandon the field. He finds hope in the prospect of applying pressure at the provincial level to limit at least the worst excesses of administering medical aid in dying. Even Ottawa’s woeful attempt at ersatz public consultation is worth indulging if only to remind those opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide that their defiance must remain stalwart in the darkest of times.

“Silence is not golden. I can’t just be quiet and hope it’s all going to turn out well in the end because I don’t think it will turn out well in the end if we stay quiet. So, please, participate. Who knows? This might be the best time of all to express your opposition.”

Schadenberg celebrates 20 years opposing euthanasia.

This article was published on August 9, 2019 by Convivium under the title MAiD In Canada.

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition stands unsurprised at this week's news of Dr. Ellen Wiebe's exoneration after she administered death to a patient in a facility where Medical Aid in Dying is prohibited.

 

Peter Stockland

By Peter Stockland

After 20 years leading Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Alex Schadenberg is unsurprised by news a B.C. doctor has been exonerated for sneaking into an Orthodox Jewish nursing home and terminating an elderly resident.

“What Dr. (Ellen) Wiebe did was completely wrong, but it was completely expected she’d be cleared of any wrongdoing,” Schadenberg told Convivium this week. “She was welcomed into that home to kill someone, and that’s what she did.”

Last month, the B.C. College of Physicians and Surgeons dismissed a complaint against Dr. Wiebe for taking the life of 83-year-old Barry Hyman at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital in Vancouver. The College ruled Hyman had asked for so-called Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) and was entitled to it despite the hospital administration prohibiting termination of patients on the premises. The decision was made public only this week when Dr. Wiebe shared it with the lobby group Dying With Dignity and The Globe and Mail.

Schadenberg said Dr. Wiebe could apparently kill Hyman with impunity because his hospital room was considered his home. The termination required that she and a nurse smuggle drugs and equipment into the nursing home to inject the octogenarian cancer patient with the toxins that ended his life in June 2017.

“She intentionally went into a nursing home where it had been made very clear that (the administration) did not want euthanasia going on because some of the residents had lived through (the Holocaust). I think it was unethical. I think she broke the trust of other people living their Jewish faith in that institution. But as much as I think it’s wrong, she had no problem being exonerated.”

Schadenberg, who celebrated 20 years as executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in August, noted Dr. Wiebe has become a “celebrity” euthanizer for her commitment to delivering medical death and pushing the boundaries of what Canada’s 2016 euthanasia law allows at least on paper.

“This is a person whose whole focus is on killing people. It’s what she does. You have to think about what that means we’ve become,” he said.

He stressed, though, that if Dr. Ellen Wiebe hadn’t taken on the role, it would almost certainly have fallen to another of her medical colleagues. The outcome was virtually inevitable given how sloppily the 2016 law was written, and how far it strayed from the Supreme Court of Canada’s narrower decision in the 2015 Carter judgment.

Wiebe’s clearance will ratchet up pressure on Canadian medical facilities, especially faith-based institutions, to offer MAiD service, Schadenberg predicted.

“Say you’re running a Catholic institution now where you’ve said, ‘We do not want this on the premises; this is a euthanasia-free zone.’ Well, Dr. Wiebe has basically told people ‘too bad, we’re going to do it anyway.’ The (euthanasia lobby) has been pressuring governments to change policies and pressuring hospitals to change policies. One of my fears is that all this is going to be leading to forced change.”

He is not without forecasting success. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition wasn’t able to prevent euthanasia coming to Canada in 2016, but it wasn’t for lack of foresight, warning and activist advocacy on the part of Schadenberg and his colleagues over the past two decades. In fact, he became engaged in the issue in the very early 1990s because of Robert Latimer’s gas chamber execution of his daughter.

What moved Schadenberg to action was a poll showing more than a third of Canadians thought Latimer should be acquitted, or at least not serve jail time, for putting his pre-teen child in the cab of his farm pickup truck, sealing it to make a chamber and pumping it full of gas from the vehicle’s exhaust pipe.

“People were saying he was loving father, and what he did was fine. I interpreted that as showing a very strong eugenic attitude within the culture. It wasn’t just that she was disabled, as bad at might seem to many people for a young girl. It was the fact they thought she was better off dead. That is highly eugenic because it says that certain lives are considered not worth living, that Tracy was less human than other people. I thought then that was a serious problem, and I see the same thing in the culture today.”

Schadenberg says he was troubled by the assault on the sanctity of life that Tracy Latimer’s killing represented, but also by the way it undermined basic human equality. The eugenics and euthanasia mindsets are both threats to equality rights, he says.

“People say, ‘Oh, I have equality through freedom of choice to do what I want with my body.’ No. Euthanasia destroys equality. Certain people are seen as so much less worthy that their lives should be ended. It’s not just about you ending your own life. Someone else is ending your life because someone else is deciding what your life is worth. They are deciding your life isn’t worth living.”

As he moved toward leadership of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Schadenberg was surprised by how few of those in his community were able to see the juggernaut of medical killing bearing down on Canada. He recalls a conversation with a doctor friend who assured him it would never happen here.

“His response was ‘Oh, Alex, we’ve already won. The Canadian Medical Association has held its position (against medical killing). We’re not going to follow the Netherlands. We’re not the Dutch.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What makes you think we’re any different? We’re human just as they are.’ But he was quite convinced.”

Schadenberg was fully convinced of exactly the opposite and, despite the stress it placed on his family, took on the EPC leadership role to, at least, slow down the medical killing future he saw coming. He has since become an international expert on MAiD, most recently travelling the globe to warn jurisdictions as diverse as Croatia, India, Australia and New Mexico against going down the assisted suicide-euthanasia-medical-aid-in-dying path. The EPC also worked in association with filmmaker Kevin Dunn last year to produce the documentary Fatal Flaws, which dissects the arguments propounded by, and the calamitous outcomes of, the worldwide MAiD industry.

Intriguingly, although a person of deep personal faith, Schadenberg has long argued the case against MAiD first from a secular perspective. You don’t have to believe in God, he says matter-of-factly, to believe it is wrong to kill people, especially the sick, the weak, the vulnerable, the unwanted and less than worthy.

“It’s not about being religious or not religious. It’s about living my life as a human being. It’s about answering the question of how I help and protect other human beings. You don’t have to believe in God. You can believe in whatever you want. But you have to look at the real nature of the human person, how we live our lives creating interdependent community with others.”

After 20 years of watching the MAiD juggernaut gain increasing power until it has the means to exonerate from even professional impropriety a doctor who terminates an elderly Jewish man in a hospital where Holocaust survivors live, does he still have the drive to create that kind of community, to keep the euthanasia prevention battle going long after it seems well and truly lost?

“I started doing this because I looked around and didn’t see anyone else doing it. I have to keep involved, whether at this level or not I don’t know. But the reality is, you can’t be silent. You can’t be silent about a law that allows physicians and nurse practitioners to kill people. I have no fear of death. I do fear a country that allows people to kill me.”

The truly surprising thing is that only 20 years ago, Schadenberg’s final sentence would have surprised absolutely no one.

Peter Stockland is Senior Writer with Cardus, and publisher of Convivium.