The moral cowardice of Compassion & Choices.

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader

Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

Before getting to the main point of this post, I want to acknowledge the tragic passing of my colleague and friend Stephen Mendelsohn, who died instantly when he was struck by a car on June 1st. In my time with Stephen, I enjoyed hearing about his devout Jewish faith and his references to concepts like “tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world.” In addition to being a kind and honorable person, Stephen was the EPC-USA's primary researcher who kept us apprised of the assisted suicide movement’s activities across the country. The anti assisted suicide and disability rights movements are much poorer without him. I’m sorry, Stephen. May you rest in eternal peace.

Stephen Mendelsohn

One of the things I liked most about interacting with Stephen was that as a fellow autistic person, Stephen had a similarly blunt way of communicating his thoughts. It was a refreshing opportunity for camaraderie. In honor of Stephen, I won’t mince words when I talk about the ableist moral cowardice expressed in “A Patient-Directed Approach: How the U.S. Model of Medical Aid in Dying Balances Compassion with Safeguards” by upper middle class, able-bodied Compassion and Choice’s leaders Kevin Diaz and Bernadette Nunley. In the piece contrasting Canada’s “MAiD” program with their policy goals, they assert:

“This commentary does not dispute nor confirm the facts or interpretations of Canadian law referenced in the article. Instead, it highlights key aspects of the U.S. legal framework, exploring its effectiveness and the principles that distinguish it from the Canadian model. Any comparisons are intended for context and insight, not to assert superiority or to question the legitimacy of the Canadian approach.”

Ie, “Hey, everyone, murdering disabled people is a matter that we should all agree to disagree about!”

I’m sorry, no deal. I’m all for not making prejudiced judgments about, say, people who need to use EBT benefits or who immigrated from a different country, but forcing disabled people of all backgrounds to live in an environment where the government, medical system, media and members of the general populace function as death pushers is not the same thing.

The moral relativity expressed in the aforementioned essay reflects and reinforces the same callousness demonstrated by Canadian Senator Stan Kutcher during Canada’s “Track 2 MAiD” hearings, when he snidely dismissed Canadian disability rights advocates’s attempts to save disabled people’s lives as “moral panic.”

Well, suggesting “MAiD” to someone who has called a suicide hotline, as my friend “Amy” experienced, is a crime against humanity. It’s evil to subject members of a marginalized group to horrible oppression and then take that to the lowest common denominator by offering them to “choice” to be killed.

When I was helping “Amy,” I sent Amy a box of things that had helped me when I was depressed. When I mailed the box, I had the sense that I was sending humanitarian aid to someone being persecuted by a government, because I totally was.

The ethical equivocation in Diaz and Nunley’s paper is nice for them, I’m sure, as they sip cocktails at their organization’s posh lobby events. But, that kind of ethical cowardice is not nice for the disabled community.

The expedient moral relativism expressed by C&C’s leaders about Canada's Track 2 MAiD is an extreme consequence of the world’s pattern of neutrality towards systemic ableism. It’s because of this longstanding apathy towards disability justice that people support incentivizing disabled people to die by suicide in the first place. If a society routinely persecutes and dehumanizes a marginalized group, then it becomes easier for members of that society to tolerate killing members of that group.

Compassion and Choices’ leadership apparently does not comprehend how predatory it is for a person who is functionally an Angel of Death serial killer to look into the eyes of a viciously subjugated person and suggest that they let themselves be killed. And that does not reflect well on the organization’s agenda.

The federal government plans to pause euthanasia for mental illness until March, 2027.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition calls on Members of Parliament to reject euthanasia for mental illness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Canada's Health Minister, Mark Holland, has introduced a bill that would delay the implementation of euthanasia for mental illness until March, 2027.

Stephanie Taylor and Laura Osman reported for the Canadian Press that:

Health Minister Mark Holland introduced legislation that, if passed, would postpone the government's plan to expand the medical assistance in dying program until March 2027.

It would be the second such delay for the expansion, after Liberals added a year to the timeline just before the change was supposed to take effect last March.

Now, the next implementation date is being pushed well past the next federal election, which must happen no later than fall 2025.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is pleased with the delay, but we will be urging all Members of Parliament to reject euthanasia for mental illness. When considering that most Canadians who support euthanasia do so based on the person being terminally ill and capable of consenting, people who ask for euthanasia based on mental illness alone are not terminally ill and have a questionable ability to consent.

Join our campaign by ordering parliamentary post-cards (above) that state: I demand that the government reverse its decision to permit “MAiD” for mental illness alone. The cards are ordered for free by contacting EPC at: 1-877-439-3348 or email: office@epcc.ca.

The decision by Health Minister Holland will make this issue an election "wedge issue" as stated by The Canadian Press report:

Should he form the next government, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has pledged to scrap the expansion altogether.

Nearly every Province asked for the delay and Québec passed legislation last year prohibiting euthanasia for mental illness. The Canadian Press reported:

Quebec passed its own provincial law last year to exclude adults from accessing a medically assisted death solely for a mental disorder.

A spokesperson for the Manitoba government says it welcomes the three-year extension, while Alberta maintains its belief that assisted dying for medical disorders doesn't belong in health care at all.

"While we are pleased to know this is not happening next month, our call remains on the federal government to indefinitely delay and stop this policy from ever existing in Canada," Dan Williams, its mental health and addiction minister, said in a statement.

Euthanasia activist Senators Stan Kutcher and Pamela Wallin argued that delaying euthanasia for people with mental illness discriminates against their rights.

It was Senator Kutcher who originally introduced the amendment to Bill C-7 to permit euthanasia for mental illness alone and Senator Wallin has been promoting euthanasia by advanced request.

EPC thanks Hon Ed Fast who sponsored Bill C-314, a bill that would have removed euthanasia for mental illness in Canada's law. The bill was defeated last fall by a vote of 167 to 150 but the excellent debate around Bill C-314 that motivated people to pressure the government to not implement euthanasia for mental illness.

As stated earlier, EPC welcomes the delay in implementing euthanasia for mental illness but we continue to urge all members of parliament to reject the concept of euthanasia for mental illness and we will be active in the next election reminding Canadian which Members of Parliament voted against Bill C-314.

Canadian Press article pushes government to implement euthanasia for mental illness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Canadian Press published an article Stephanie Taylor on January 8, 2024 that appears to pressure the federal Liberal government to implement euthanasia for mental illness alone on March 17, 2024. 

The article also responds a previous article by Stephanie Taylor who reported for the Canadian Press on December 15 that Canada may pause the expansion of euthanasia to people with mental illness.

*Sign and share our petition to Justice Minister Hon Arif Virani, Hon Rob Moore (CPC Justice Critic) and Randall Garrison (NDP Justice Critic) (Petition Link).

Taylor begins her recent article by writing about John Scully, a former journalist, who appears to be suffering from PTSD and has attempted suicide twice. Scully wants to die by euthanasia based on psychological suffering.

Scully reportedly tells Taylor:

"Not as a definitive, 'I want to die now.' I want it there as an option to suicide"

It is interesting that the euthanasia lobby insists that euthanasia for mental illness is different than suicide and yet Scully wants it as an option to suicide.

Taylor interviews Senator Stan Kutcher, who is a psychiatrist and a strong supporter of euthanasia who believes that the courts have declared that there is a "right to euthanasia" in Canada.

Taylor also refers to Jocelyn Downie, a professor at Halifax's Dalhousie University, and possibly Canada's leading pro-euthanasia advocate who said that: 

another delay on the expansion could force individuals who are suffering intolerably to have to go to court, as others have in the past.

The euthanasia lobby is pressuring the federal government to accept euthanasia for mental illness by telling them that they will force a "Charter challenge" if the government doesn't permit euthanasia for mental illness alone.

Taylor attempts to "even" the article by quoting from Kerri Froc, a law professor at the University of New Brunswick who stated:

"Anyone can bring a case, anyone can bring a Charter challenge,"

"The question is, is it going to succeed?"

Froc contends that a charter challenge may not succeed.

Meanwhile the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has launched a campaign titled: Don't abandon people with mental illness to death by euthanasia (MAiD). The EPC campaign includes a petition to the Justice Minister and the Justice Critics (Link to Petition) and a parliamentary post-card campaign.

More articles on this topic:

• Don't abandon people with mental illness to death by euthanasia (Link).
• Canada's government may pause the implementation of euthanasia for mental illness (Link).
•  Canada's MAiD program has gone mad (Link).

Barbara kay: Canada's Death System is Top of the Line

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Barbara Kay

Barbara Kay wrote an excellent opinion column that was published in the National Post on Saturday March 18 titled: Thanks to Trudeau, Canada's death-care system is top of the line.

Kay begins her article by announcing that Ed Fast MP introduced Bill C-314 titled the Mental Health Protection Act which would prevent euthanasia for mental illness alone. She then points out that Senator Stan Kutcher, who was responsible for the amendment to Bill C-7 that extended euthanasia for mental illness alone is arguing against Bill C-314 by stating that the issue is already decided.

• Sign our petition supporting Bill C-314 (Link).

Kay states that with reference to Canada's euthanasia law, slippery slope which conjures up an avalanche is more like a toboggan ride.

Kay continues:

Writing in National Review in the fall, one American commentator called Justin Trudeau “modernity’s Doctor of Death,” whose willed expansion of MAiD makes Canada “arguably the assisted-death capital of the world.” An exaggeration? Consider that California, with the same population as Canada, and universally regarded as a singularly progressive domain, legalized medically assisted death in 2016, just like Canada. In 2021, 486 Californians availed themselves of the program. In the same year, 10,064 Canadians ended their lives with MAiD (a term for euthanasia used only in Canada, and brazenly stolen from palliative care, where it rightly belongs.)

Kay points out how Canada's MAiD law has become an international cautionary tale. A British writer used Canada's euthanasia law as an example bad public policy that is based on "good" intentions. Kay writes:

Canada’s MAiD, “originally marketed as a rational choice for sensible adults and therefore an indisputable moral good, it is now being used to kill the poor and the mentally ill as well as the physically sick and the elderly.”

Kay continues:

Too many reported incidents of MAiD chosen and executed for bad reasons — including credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care — attest to the truth of this criticism. In the legislative pipeline are “advance requests” — and consent by “mature minors.” Be afraid , be very afraid.

Kay then refers to the $86 million in health-care spending savings due to the original euthanasia law, as stated by the parliamentary budget office in October 2020. The budget office estimated, based on the expansions of euthanasia in Bill C-14, that there would be $149 million in health-care savings. 

I estimated that the numbers in the report were low based on several factors. First, I stated that there would be more deaths than predicted. Sadly I was right. Secondly, the shortened time of life was under-estimated by the budget office, meaning many people would die months, if not years before their death would otherwise had been. Sadly I am right.

Kay then writes about the fact that doctors are required to falsify the death certificate:

the medical certificate of death, physicians are obliged to list the illness, disease or disability leading to the request for MAiD as the cause of death, rather than the medications administered, the actual cause.

Kay argues that if euthanasia is a public good, then why the deflection?

Kay concludes:

This deliberate obfuscation is consistent, however, with the honed tactics of boundary-pushing activists whose Dignity-R-Us rhetoric captured the nabobs. Liberals settled on a winning strategy. Don’t make euthanasia a political plank; do use the courts to keep the expansion ball rolling. The fix was always in for expansion of the death as “reasonably foreseeable” guardrails established by the 2015 Carter decision. Thus, the 2019 Quebec Truchon decision that found Carter’s limits to MAiD access unconstitutional went unchallenged by Quebec and Ottawa, in spite of a flawed trial process.

• Canada's Healthcare Savings attributed to euthanasia (Link).
• Study: Legalizing euthanasia saves money (Link).