Canada is Killing Itself: Some Canadian doctors find euthanasia "energizing"

Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director, 

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an exposé on Canada's euthanasia law that was published in the September edition of the Atlantic titled - Canada is Killing Itself. The article is too long to comment on in one article, so I am writing a series of articles covering the important points.

Calabro first explains out how fast euthanasia has been normalized:

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

There are many problems with the implementation of Canada's euthanasia law. Calabro writes:

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

Calabro interviews several of the euthanasia doctors about their experiences. Some of the doctors consider euthanasia to be the "most meaningful work" of their career.

Stefanie Green compares her euthanasia deaths to baby deliveries. Calabro explains:

Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia to Calabro that:

He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Dr Ellen Wiebe

A previous article about euthanasia in Canada concerning Liz Carr's movie Better Off Dead? features Ellen Wiebe, a euthanasia doctor in Vancouver stated:

'I love my job, I've always loved being a doctor and I delivered over a 1000 babies and I took care of families but this is the very best work I've ever done in the last seven years.'

There are many problems with Canada's euthanasia law. The first being that it gives doctors and nurse practitioners the right in law to kill people. Another is that some doctors and nurse practitioners actually enjoy killing people. 

You are not 'safe' when somebody is happy to kill you.

• Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare seriel killers? (Link).

Ontario: 25% of euthanasia providers may have violated the Criminal Code.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Alexander Raikin

On November 12 I published a commentary on Alexander Raikin's research essay that was published in The New Atlantis that I titled: Ontario: At least 428 non-compliant (MAiD) euthanasia deaths. After publishing the article several people emailed me suggesting that compliant or non-compliant, all euthansia deaths involve the killing of a human being and are inherently wrong. I agree.

On November 18, Alexander Raikin's article: A quarter of all Ontario MAiD providers may have violated the Criminal Code. Does Anyone Care? was published by The Hub. Raikin's article is based on the same research that led to his earlier article, accept that his most recent article adds significant historical context to the issue.

Raikin begins his article by stating that Canada legalized (MAiD) euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada as an exception to the criminal code when it is done based on specificied circumstances, and outside of those circumstances these acts remain criminal acts. Raikin states:

In 2016, following a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Carter v. Canada, Justin Trudeau decriminalized culpable homicide and counselling or aiding suicide in the Criminal Code, only if done by a physician or a nurse practitioner and if each eligibility requirement for MAID is met. Otherwise, clinicians would not be immune through these exemptions in the Criminal Code.

Some of these requirements include having a grievous and irremediable medical condition, a voluntary request to die not because of external pressure, and the ability to give informed consent. Failure by a physician or a nurse practitioner to submit necessary information on a MAID provision—or failure to inform a pharmacist of the purpose of the MAID prescriptions or to follow provincial guidelines—is also punishable by a prison sentence. It means that a clinician who does not follow any of these rules faces serious criminal punishment.

Raikin points out that even CAMAP (The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers agrees with that statement. Their position statement:

“recognizes the need for oversight,” including the guiding principle that it “maintains the public trust and provides accountability for the delivery of MAID against the legislative framework and safeguards.”

Raikin points out that CAMAP lobbied the government to reduce oversight of Canada's euthanasia law.

Yet at the 2018 annual convention for CAMAP, the official summary of the proceedings also described how Quebec’s independent monitoring for assisted dying, Commission des soins de fin de vie, was too thorough: “Reviewing 43 percent of all MAID cases is considered harassment by providers.” CAMAP won. In the 2023 fiscal year, the independent monitoring agency in Quebec sent for further review only 4 percent of MAID cases; and in Ontario, the chief coroner of Ontario classified only 6 percent of MAID cases for full review.

In response Raikin points out that leading euthanasia doctors claim that there is nothing to worry about. Stefanie Green, the past president of the CAMAP said:

“If I break the rules anywhere, there’s criminal liability sitting in the back of my head,”

While Chantal Perrot recently told The Guardian that:

“I have never heard of a case of the MAID criteria being applied wrongly or abusively, or someone who has received MAID who should not have. I’ve heard of none reported by any of the coroner’s offices or any of their provincial oversight groups.”

In response, Raikin published the August 2023 statement by Michel Bureau, the head of Quebec’s independent monitoring board who stated that MAID cases in Quebec 

“are approaching the limits of the law.” 

Raikin also reminds the readers that in 2018, Dirk Huyer, the Chief Coroner of Ontario indicated that there was:

“a pattern of non-compliance, a pattern of not following legislation, a pattern of not following regulation.”

Raikin also points out that a study conducted by Huyer on the first 100 euthanasia deaths in Ontario indicated that from the inception of the law that there was a pattern of non-compliance.

Raikin explains that Huyer told a group of Nurse Practitioners in 2018 that there were

“some…compliance concerns with both the Criminal Code and regulatory body policy expectations, some of which have recurred over time.”

Raikin points out how non-compliance in Ontario has only worsened. The Ontario Chief Coroner (Huyer) pointed out that:

In 2020, his office identified 76 “issues with compliance,” and in 2024 his office identified 428 “issues with compliance.”

Raikin states that the recent report of the Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee found:

A quarter of all Ontario euthanasia providers received at least one compliance issue in 2023, though not a single provider was reported to the police, not even the provider who administered a death that the chief coroner described as “a blatant situation” where “the family and the deceased person suffered tremendously.”

Raikin concludes his article by stating:

It is difficult to understand how these accusations of non-compliance with MAID legislation have remained hidden for so long by all the parties responsible. No provincial report, no coroner statement, not even a leak from a concerned MAID provider or assessor. On the provincial subreddit for Ontario, my article was banned for spouting “false information with the intent to mislead.” It is as good an answer as any: compliance concerns with the Criminal Code are happening, but it seems no one cares.

Previous articles on this topic:

• Ontario: At least 428 non-compliant euthanasia deaths (Link).
• Euthanasia is being used to kill people in poverty, isolation and social suffering (Link).
• Ontario MAiD Death Review stories. Do you have a (MAiD) death story (Link).
• Canadians with disabilities are needlessly dying by euthanasia (Link).
• Ontario Coroner's euthanasia report. Poor at risk of coercion (Link).
• Ontario Chief Coroner report. Some euthanasia deaths are driven by homelessness, fear and isolation (Link).

Does Stefanie Green have a conflict of interest?

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Stefanie Green is Canada's leading MAiD (euthanasia) physician. She does not do the most MAiD deaths in Canada, but she is a MAiD practitioner, MAiD trainer and more. Her own euthanasia access and promoting website states:

Dr. Stefanie Green spent 10 years in general practice and another 12 years working exclusively in maternity and newborn care. She changed her focus in 2016 and now spends the great majority of her clinical time working in assisted dying.

Based in Victoria BC, Dr. Green is the Founding President of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP). She is a co-lead for the Canadian MAiD Curriculum Project, is medical advisor to the BC Ministry of Health MAiD oversight committee, and moderator of CAMAP's national online forum.

Dr. Green enjoys speaking about MAiD to the public, to health care communities and to a wide range of audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. She is clinical faculty at UBC and UVic, and she is the author of the internationally bestselling "This Is Assisted Dying" (Scribner) about her first year providing assisted dying in Canada.

Without further investigation, it seems clear from the information on this site that Green does MAiD, regulates MAiD, teaches MAiD and is a medical advisor to the BC Ministry of Health oversight committee. How can a person who does the act and teaches people to do the act also be an advisor to the government when oversight is necessary?

I am not privy to more information but a conflict of interest investigation is needed.

Canada: How Death Care is pushing out Health Care

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Alexander Raikin has written another excellent exposé on Canada's euthanasia regime published in the National Review on September 14, 2023 entitled: How Death Care pushed out Health Care. 

Raikin's previous article: No other options: An exposé on euthanasia in Canada, published by the New Atlantis on December 16, 2022, provides important insights into Canada's euthanasia law.

Raikin focuses on proceedings from the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), training seminars and interviews with patients and doctors concerning death 'care'. 

CAMAP is an independent organization funded by Canada's federal government to train doctors and nurse practitioners on how to euthanize (kill) patients (MAiD).

A panel at the CAMAP training seminar explained how "strict" the law is:

On the same day that a patient enters into an optional written agreement with only one of his or her two MAID assessors — even if it is unsigned, without any witnesses, and with no family members having been informed — the clinician can administer the lethal injection without asking for the final consent of the patient.

Quoting from a CAMAP training seminar, Raikin writes:

"Next question is from Debbie," the moderator of a discussion on medical decision-making capacity said to her fellow physicians. “How would folks interpret someone who has lost capacity with a waiver in place and is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID?”

The question is important because the patient is clearly unable to consent and is showing signs of resisting. 

The Moderator, Dr Ellen Wiebe, possibly Canada's most prolific euthanasia doctor, responds to the question by stating:

“I’m guessing I would bring in one of their other providers, you know, palliative care or, or whatever, and get them sedated. But what would you say?”

First to speak is Jim MacLean, who claims that he has performed more than 75 “provisions” since MAID expanded to include non-dying patients. “I don’t think I have any great thoughts on this one.” Wiebe laughed. “Everyone’s different. I mean, you try to deal with the situation. Calm the room down. See what you can achieve through conversation and calmness.”

Chantal Perrot is the co-chairman of a clinician advisory council for Canada’s largest pro-MAID lobby group. She described herself to a parliamentary committee as someone who has “cared for hundreds of patients . . . as they navigated the MAID process.” Responding to Wiebe, she said, “That’s a question. If they’re sedated, then have we sedated them into being accepting of MAID? You know, that’s a whole other question.”

Kevin Reel, a senior ethicist at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto and former president of the Canadian Bioethics Society, answers in part with another question: “If what we’re doing by trying to honour the waiver is reducing distress for the patient and also for maybe even the family around them, would it be acceptable to do something similarly covert to keep them from reacting in that way?”

Reel continues, “That might be a way around it, but — ” before being interrupted by MacLean, whose new answer takes the question from the hypothetical to the actual and clarifies what he meant by “conversation and calmness”: “One waiver I did use, the patient was a little agitated. So we did give her some subcutaneous hydromorphone” — an opiate ordinarily used for acute-pain control instead of sedation — “before I did the MAID, did the provision. So we did, we did use it in that situation and it was very helpful.”

“Good,” the moderator says, before moving on to the next question. 

No one on the panel or audience objects.

Raikin explains:

The asterisk in the law is that the agreement is in place only as long as the patient “does not demonstrate, by words, sounds or gestures, refusal,” or “resistance to its administration.” If this demonstration is “involuntary” and “made in response to contact,” the death of the patient may still proceed. But consent is a spectrum, and patients with delirium can flicker between having capacity and not; patients can also change their minds about dying at the hands of their physician or nurse.

The recording from an October 2021 training session documents the use of sedation to obtain consent. 

Raikin explains the importance of the use of sedation to obtain consent for death:

At the core of death care is the presumption that safeguards work and that consent, the most important safeguard, prevents death care from slipping into rampant homicide or suicide contagion. Instead, it is turning into the end of medicine.

Raikin provides examples of the use of sedation to gain consent for death:

In Belgium last year, after a lethal injection failed to kill a 36-year-old woman with terminal cancer, the presiding physician smothered her with a pillow. In New Zealand and Canada, suicidal patients seeking medical care for suicide prevention were prompted to consider assisted suicide instead.

In the Netherlands, a similar story of a physician sedating her patient into accepting euthanasia led to the first criminal trial of a euthanasia physician. She was acquitted. The judges said, “We believe that given the deeply demented condition of the patient the doctor did not need to verify her wish for euthanasia,” even though the patient repeatedly attempted to fight off her physician.

I have written previously about how a failed suicide attempt in Canada was completed through euthanasia, despite concerns of illegality by physicians involved with CAMAP, an organization that has held internal seminars on patients requesting euthanasia because of poverty, lack of medical care, homelessness, and credit-card debt.

Raikin quotes Michel Bureau, head of the Commission sur les soins de fin de vie (Commission on end-of-life care), the independent monitoring agency for MAID in Quebec who told the Canadian Press news agency this summer:

“We’re now no longer dealing with an exceptional treatment, but a treatment that is very frequent.”

In every jurisdiction that has legalized assisted suicide, the number of deaths have ballooned and "safeguards" have been rescinded. Raikin writes:

In California, the number of assisted suicides last year increased by more than 63 percent. In Canada, the number of deaths by euthanasia is on track to increase more than 13-fold in just the first seven years of the practice’s legalization. Belgium has seen a more than twelvefold increase since 2003. In Switzerland, which legalized assisted suicide in 1941, the number of such suicides has doubled every five years since 1999.

Raikin gives examples of deaths that are outside of the law:

A sibling found out that his brother’s MAID paperwork in British Columbia listed only “hearing loss” as his qualifying condition. In the Netherlands, dozens of patients qualified for euthanasia only because of autism. In Canada, “advanced age” helps qualify patients to die, even though Quebec cautions that to rely on it as the sole criterion is illegal. Young patients have died through euthanasia in Belgium for a range of reasons, including a botched sex change, sexual exploitation by a psychiatrist, unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder after a terrorist attack, and again, this time in twins, hearing loss.

Last year the Swiss Medical Association saw a need to issue a statement reminding physicians, for the first time, that “assisted suicide for healthy persons is not medically and ethically justifiable.” The agency responsible for monitoring assisted suicides in Quebec issued a similar reminder over the summer.

Raikin quotes bioethicist Leon Kass, who warns that if the value of a human being is considered subjective, invariably the right to die metamorphoses into the duty to die.

Raikin explains the planning and goals of CAMAP:

In 2018, at CAMAP’s annual conference, the leading death-care practitioners gamed out their plan. It was nothing short of prescient. Many speakers, such as the CEO of Dying with Dignity, stressed that MAID is a “political issue” and that it would require “the political will to speak out against Catholic institutions around MAID.” Moreover, as some panelists insisted, it was important for practitioners to “recognize the harm to vulnerable populations that comes with the assertion of freedom of religion.”

 In comparison, MAID was “sacred.” One speaker implored non-MAID clinicians “to keep the spirit of MAID intact.”

Just two years into Canada’s euthanasia experiment, physicians were busy laying plans for how to expand euthanasia to children, especially Indigenous children, since they “are considered wise because they are closest to the ancestors.”

Raikin explains how CAMAP promotes euthanasia for poverty:

Senior CAMAP leadership has repeatedly denied that patients are receiving euthanasia primarily because of poverty. Yet in 2018, it devoted an entire panel to “providing MAID to vulnerable, Indigenous, homeless, and frail elderly populations.” Panelists described how they could “help to empower vulnerable populations” by helping “patients fight for options that would allow them to have access to MAID” — in other words, to help find “what supports” patients might need to die instead of to live.

“I have a First Nation patient who meets all the criteria for MAID, but much of their suffering is due to a life lived in poverty,” one panelist said. “If I could change their social determinants of health, their situation might improve.” Even a hypothetical example of a patient with “fixed delusions that are causing him severe suffering” was deemed potentially eligible because “it doesn’t matter what he wants [MAID] for.”

Stefanie Green, the leader of  CAMAP, advocated that opposition by hospices to euthanasia will be overcome. Raikin quotes Green as stating:

“Over time, perhaps ten years from now, I think this conversation will happen again. If we push it now too hard and too fast, I think that will put more wedges in.”

CAMAP’s strategy has already succeeded. In 2017, Vancouver Island had a Catholic hospital and four hospice beds. Now as a consequence of a public campaign by death-care advocates, there are no remaining “MAID-free” spaces on the island.

In 2021, Vancouver Island had the highest euthanasia rate in Canada. 

Raikin discusses the cases of several Catholic hospitals that have been taken over by the Australian government in order to provide access to death services. 

Raikin writes of the doctors who object to euthanasia and are being forced out of medicine:

Helen Lord, one of the nine palliative specialists in Tasmania, retired once                "death care" began.

“I know I actually can’t kill someone, I can’t do it.  

“I said I’m not going to have any part of this. It’s not medicine. It’s just not what we do. . . . Half of the people who came into [my] palliative care were scared that they were going to be euthanized.”

When Lord spoke out against euthanasia she was accused of being a right-wing Evangelical, which she is not. Lord does believe that "life is precious" and "time is precious."

Félix Pageau, a geriatrician practicing in Quebec, testified to a national parliamentary committee in Ottawa that in his opinion as a physician, based on research, Canada was not ready to expand MAID to advanced dementia. For this, he said, a colleague in his home hospital “filed a complaint to the Collège des médecins” saying he “lied” to the committee. The Collège decided to “open an inquiry, even though they don’t have jurisdiction over testimony at the federal [level] or in the Parliament.” The investigation became an ordeal — and an expensive one, since Pageau needed to hire a lawyer. Pageau in his parliamentary testimony was exercising his free-speech rights. Eventually, the Collège ruled that it did not have jurisdiction, but the point was made.

Raikin continues:

Another physician, a former director of a palliative clinic in Canada, told me, “I had to leave a job that I loved” because “the MAID situation” made it “just too difficult to practice medicine here.” After she spoke up publicly to urge that MAID and palliative care be separate, she was constantly harassed; her email was flooded with dozens of gory images. Another palliative-care physician told me that he started his own small clinic rather than stay at the hospital where he practiced. “Physicians that go against the narrative are sanctioned,” he said. “They’re marginalized. It’s hard. It’s risky.”

Dr David D’Souza and Dr Mark D'Souza are physicians in Ontario:

“I think already there’s a lot of abuse going on, and I’m seeing it in my own practice,” including when families pressure loved ones to die so that estates or insurance payouts become available sooner. “It’s making me think twice about whether I should be continuing in geriatric care.” His brother, Mark, also a physician, left palliative care entirely. “We’re literally doing harm even though it’s under the guise of compassion,” Mark said.

Raikin states: 

The effect of legalizing death care is not just the hostile takeover of medicine. It hurts those who are the most vulnerable, those who want not to die but to be helped to live.

Gabrielle Peters, a disabled writer and policy analyst in Canada, told Raikin that it is essential that there are MAiD free places in Canadian healthcare. Raikin interviewed Rachel, who lives with chronic pain, PTSD and depression.

Rachel, a woman with a condition that causes chronic pain, told me about the difficulties of the past year. “Every day was really hard to stay alive,” she told me. “I really felt like I was dead.” She also suffers from major depression and has a history of PTSD from childhood abuse. “If I said that I wanted to die or that I couldn’t hack it anymore” when she spoke with health-care practitioners before MAID was legalized, “I was met with, ‘Here’s some coping skills and let’s talk about it,’ and various forms of therapy and resources being brought to bear.”

Once her condition qualified for MAID, in 2021, she began to notice a trend. “I would call the crisis line, the suicide crisis line. Many of these mental-health professionals, their advice would be to go look up Dying with Dignity’s website.” She tried to get help for thoughts of suicide, and instead she was being offered advice for how to die from assisted suicide.

“I have been afraid, you know, over this last couple of years to go to just my local hospital, because I was afraid that if any doctor either brought up MAID themselves or met my kind of ambivalent desire for MAID, all I needed was a push and I would be dead right now.”

Rachel found help at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental-health teaching hospital, located in Toronto. 

Raikin writes:

Its policy is that no CAMH clinicians can provide MAID on site. She felt that she had found a MAID-free space that could treat her illnesses. (CAMH is yet to release a statement on whether its MAID policy will change when, in six months, MAID will be expanded to include mental illnesses.)

Rachel decided to risk everything. With her meager savings from her disability benefits, she purchased a one-way, long-distance bus ticket, not knowing whether she would be admitted to the hospital or instead end up homeless.
“I literally just presented myself at the CAMH ER,” she said. “Part of the reason I felt safe to go to CAMH is just because I knew that they do not endorse MAID for mental illness. They’re pretty strict on that.” In a sense, Rachel lucked out. Despite the usual long wait times at Canadian emergency rooms, especially for psychiatric illnesses, her poor condition meant that her case was triaged to the front of the queue. She soon discovered how MAID was viewed by doctors at the center. “On the psych ward at CAMH, my psychiatrist was terrified — terrified,” Rachel said, carefully enunciating every syllable, “that I would talk about MAID on the floor with the other patients. She was terrified of suicide contagion.”

Over the span of weeks, Rachel began to recover. She was finally put on a new form of pain control; her depression improved. But the most important change at CAMH was that, finally, she felt listened to. “Sometimes, all you need is someone to come alongside you. And just help you cope through the everyday,” she said. “Whether it’s a doctor or just the person who is walking alongside me while I’m in a lot of pain. It may not change how much pain I actually have. But it sure makes a big difference to how much I suffer from that pain.”

Rachel is now happily back home. “I have no intention of using MAID. I have 100 percent turned away from it. Only because I had health care. All I needed was health care and pain care.”

Raikin recounts his previous article about Rosina Kamis, who died by euthanasia and her friend James, who has a similar medical situation:

In the first story that I wrote about death care, “No Other Options,” published in the New Atlantis, I wrote about Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Toronto woman with fibromyalgia. She chose to die from MAID in part because of her inability to access proper medical care. Before she died, she entrusted her friend James, a former neighbor, to represent her as her power of medical attorney; since her physicians weren’t listening to her, she wanted to see if someone else who has fibromyalgia, as James does, could get her the medical care that she needed. Despite his efforts, James couldn’t help her — and now, after her death, he can’t get the help that he needs. He messaged me months after our first conversation to tell me that he now sees his own future in what happened to Rosina.

James told me that he is living with the specter of an imminent administered death, like Rosina’s. He could decide to stop fighting for the care he needs, too. It seems inevitable. “I’m going to take it one day. That’s how it feels to me. I don’t like that, but to me, the way things are going, this society is really sending us disabled people a message,” James said. “We got that message even before MAID. But now it’s codified into law and there’s these processes and resources to expedite it.”

“I have diagnosed mental-health conditions and I can’t get treatment. I need therapy. My doctor asked me the other day, What do I need? I need therapy. I need a long-term relationship with someone. And she told me, she said, That’s impossible.” Instead, he was sent YouTube videos on how to do stretches. He chuckles.

“I need actual health care,” James said. Eventually, he tells me, he’ll get death care instead.

CAMAP, which sells itself as the experts on MAiD in Canada, received $3.3 million from the Canadian government to develop a curriculum for MAiD clinicians.

Thank you Alexander Raikin for your research and your continued advocacy for health care not death 'care'.

Some poverty stricken Canadians opted for assisted death.

The following letter was written by Dr Catherine Ferrier in response to Stefanie Green's letter that stated that Poverty alone does not meet the criteria for MAiD. The letter was published by the National Post on June 14, 2023.

Re: Poverty alone doesn’t meet criteria for MAID — Dr. Stefanie Green, Letter to the editor, June 7

Dr. Stefanie Green calls several National Post columnists disingenuous for expressing concerns about Canadians requesting MAID for poverty, homelessness and other social problems.

Dr. Green knows perfectly well that, contrary to her claim of an “extremely rigorous process,” the Canadian law is so broad that anyone with a serious chronic illness or disability is eligible for MAID, regardless of whether that is their reason for requesting it. There is no need to be close to death and no need to have tried other options to relieve suffering, or even have them available. The 10-day waiting period for people close to death was eliminated in 2021, and the 90-day delay for other people still makes it easier to obtain MAID than to see a specialist in many parts of Canada.

Amir Farsoud stated on CBC’s The Fifth Estate that he was approved for MAID on the basis of his chronic back pain, but requested it because he could not find housing he could afford on his disability pension. Alan Nichols, whose case was documented in the National Post, died through MAID for an official diagnosis of hearing loss, which was not his real reason either.

The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), of which Dr. Green is the president, is well aware that poverty drives many MAID requests. An article by Alexander Raikin in the New Atlantis in December 2022 quoted from many CAMAP seminars discussing exactly this issue.

There are reasons why Canada has the highest MAID rates in the world after only seven years, and why over 10,000 Canadians died through MAID in 2021, compared with 486 through assisted suicide in California, which has a similar population to ours, and legalized assisted death the same year.

Catherine Ferrier MD, Montreal

Further reading:

• Canada passes Bill C-7 allowing euthanasia for mental illness (Link).
• Canada's law will provide not prevent suicide for some psychiatric patients (Link).
• Euthanasia for mental illness. Killing people with an uncertain prognosis (Link).
• Abbotsford police investigating euthanasia death (Link).
• Canada is not as advertised. Euthanasia is eugenics (Link).
• Canada's euthanasia law is the most permissive in the world (Link).
• (MAiD) euthanasia for disability and poverty (Link).
• (MAiD) euthanasia for mental illness and poverty (Link).
• Veterans affairs worker advocates euthanasia for PTSD (Link).\
• Abandoning people. Canada's broadening euthanasia laws (Link).
• Mother wants to stop 23-year-old son from dying by euthanasia (Link).
• Bereaved mother speaks out against euthanasia (Link).
• Woman died by euthanasia because of inadequate home care (Link).
• Infant euthanasia proposed by Quebec College of Physicians (Link).
• How poverty not pain is driving people with disabilities to euthanasia (Link).
• Ontario man seeks euthanasia to avoid homelessness (Link).
• Why did they kill my brother? (Link).
• Canada's doctors offer euthanasia before receiving a request (Link).
• Food bank clients asking for euthanasia based on poverty (Link).
• No other options. An expose on euthanasia in Canada (Link).
• Poverty and euthanasia creates public interest but euthanasia is abhorent on its own (Link).

The cruelty of assisted dying.

Prue and Danny's Death Road Trip.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Prue Leith and Danny Kruger

Kevin Yuill, an emeritus professor of American history, wrote about the Channel 4 UK program titled: Prue and Danny's Death Road Trip. The program featured Prue Leith, who has a UK show - Great British Bake Off - and her son Danny Kruger, who is a UK Tory MP. Yuill explains in his article published by Spike-online:

The catch is that Prue and Danny are on different sides of the debate. Prue is an atheist, while Danny is a conservative Christian. Prue has been a member of Dignity in Dying, a well-funded pro-assisted dying campaign group, ever since her older brother died a long and ‘most horrible death’ in 2012. Danny, a fervent opponent of legalising assisted dying, is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Dying Well.

Kevin Yuill

Yuill states that he considers this documentary as one of the best ever produced on the topic because it is not one-sided, but balanced and it considers the social ramifications of treating death as a from of healthcare. Yuill explains:

Prue and Danny go first to the state of Washington, where it is legal for a doctor to assist a patient in ending his or her life by prescribing lethal doses of medication. Euthanasia – where a doctor ends a patient’s life, usually via lethal injection – is still outlawed. This is Prue’s opportunity to impress upon Danny the case for legalising assisted dying. A woman called Sher talks movingly about how her parents chose to die together after they were both diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and terminal cancer. This is powerful stuff.

In fact, nearly all of the first section of the documentary gives Prue’s side the upper hand in the argument. That is, until they travel from Washington to Atlanta. Here, they interview a doctor who questions whether assisted suicides are any more peaceful than executions. Prue sees this as a red herring. She asks whether different drugs could be prescribed to allow for a more peaceful death. And she suggests Danny is ‘scaremongering’ by exaggerating the pain caused by a lethal dosage of medication. To this he replies: ‘I think you’re scaremongering.’ He points out that, in general, ‘People are unlikely to die terrible and agonising deaths’, if they are allowed to die of natural causes. Touché. Even according to the campaigners at Dignity in Dying, just over one per cent of people suffer as they die in the UK. That gives most of us good odds.

From this point on Yuill explains that Danny's arguments against assisted dying prevail. Prue and Danny now go from Washington state to Vancouver Island Canada. Yuill writes:

Over the past year or so, horrific stories have been coming out of Canada about people being offered MAID rather than medical care. This has made Canada a no-go area for proponents of legalised assisted dying. In the UK, Dignity in Dying mentioned Canada 88 times in its tweets between 2016 and May 2022. But since stories have emerged of Canadians being offered euthanasia because they were poor or homeless, Dignity in Dying has been silent about Canada. Until Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip documentary this week, the liberal media in Britain had largely steered clear of it, too.

Prue and Danny meet with Dr Stefanie Green who has done at least 300 euthanasia deaths. Yuill writes:

In British Columbia, we meet Dr Stefanie Green. She comes across well, despite the fact that she has dispatched at least 300 people. Unlike in Washington, Canadian doctors are able to inject their patients with poison, rather than simply prescribing it. This was the preferred method of death for all but seven of the 10,064 MAID cases in 2021.

Green seems like a good and caring doctor. She is hesitant about approving MAID for Jan, a retired carpenter living with advanced Parkinson’s, at his first consultation. As the programme notes at the end, however, Jan has now been approved for an assisted death.

It is in Prue and Danny’s meeting with Green that we begin to see the self-deception involved in the case for assisted dying. When Danny asks Green about the Hippocratic oath and whether she is violating its prohibition on killing, she squirms. ‘I don’t believe I’m killing patients. I believe the illness and disease are killing the patients. We don’t say killing’, she says. She then demonstrates how to inject lethal substances into a patient.

Roger Foley

Prue and Danny go to Toronto where they meet with Roger Foley, a disabled man who was offered euthanasia rather than care. Yuill continues:

Prue and Danny also meet Dr Ramona Coelho who thinks the Canadian legislation has gone too far. In her view, MAID threatens the disabled, vulnerable and old. She tells Prue and Danny of other cases where MAID has been offered to patients with curable diseases who had previously expressed no interest in dying.

If all that weren’t troubling enough, Canada is currently proposing to extend its MAID programme to allow people suffering from a mental illness to qualify. Prue says that she’s ‘on the fence’ about assisted dying for cases of mental illness alone. Danny isn’t. ‘If someone was trying to jump off a bridge’, he says, ‘the natural inclination would be to try and stop them. So why is this any different?’

Prue and Danny then met John Scully, a former BBC and CTV journalist, who has suffered with extreme depression and PTSD for 30 years and wants to have an assisted death when it becomes legal with mental illness. Yuill explains:

He (Scully) has attempted suicide twice, but he says he can’t try it a third time. ‘It’s a mess’, he explains, ‘I screw it up, and it is terribly devastating to the families’. Prue, obviously rattled, says she is conflicted. Danny concludes – correctly, in my view – that Scully’s story goes to the heart of the debate. It forces us to reckon with the question of whether an individual patient’s wishes trump the wider impact on society. What does it mean for people’s families and loved ones if suicide is made so easily available? And what message does it send to those with suicidal thoughts – that it is right to act on them?

Yuill concludes with his position:

Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip deserves great credit for exploring the grim situation in Canada. After all, Canada is the logical endpoint of legalising assisted death. If death comes to be seen as medical treatment for suffering, how can it be denied to anyone who suffers? Earlier this month, Canada moved to delay the expansion of MAID to patients with mental-health difficulties for a year, but the federal government is still committed to the principle.

The best safeguard against the kinds of horror stories appearing in Canada would be not to legalise any sort of assisted dying in the first place. In the UK, all forms of assisted dying are illegal, but the Isle of Man is currently considering legalisation. Meanwhile, Jersey has approved legalisation in principle and is currently taking steps towards setting up an assisted-dying service.

Yuill, who is an athiest and the author of the book: Assisted Suicide: The Liberal Humanist Case Against Legalization - is right. The only way to prevent the horror stories of what is appearing in Canada is to not legalize euthanasia.

No Other Options. An exposé on euthanasia in Canada.

"euthanasia seems like the only way out"

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

Alexander Raikin wrote an exposé on the experience with Canada's (MAiD) euthanasia exposé titled No Other Options . His exposé was published in The New Atlantis on December 16. Raikin provides important insights into Canada's experience with euthanasia that should be read by everyone concerned with the issue (Link to the article).

Raikin writes his article as an investigative reporter into Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law. He begins the article by speaking with Dr Stefanie Green one of Canada's leading euthanasia doctors. Green tells Raikin that:

The procedure, she assures me on our call, is “100 percent effective.” If her patient asks to die, and if her schedule, her ethics, and the law permits it, she will administer a lethal injection.

To create context, Raikin quotes David Lametti, Canada's Justice Minister, who stated:

Supporters insist that this is not state-sanctioned suicide. Rather, it’s a dignified solution for those who no longer wish to suffer from terminal or chronic illness. MAID allows “for compassionate action, while also protecting those who are particularly vulnerable,” claimed David Lametti, the attorney general and minister of justice, in 2021.

Raikin then quotes from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has long promised to strike just this balance. In 2019, while pressing the need to expand access to euthanasia, he assured that people will be able to choose assisted death “in a way that isn’t because you’re not getting the supports and cares that you actually need.”

This is the promise of medical assistance in dying: that vulnerable people who want to die for the wrong reasons will be encouraged to live, as they always have been — while people who want to die for the right reasons will have their autonomous decision upheld. If even a single vulnerable person were pushed into assisted death, it would be a scandal to the system. That is why safeguards were put into place.

Raikin states:

As this article will show, in internal meetings, those close to the system have long talked openly about red flags that many people are choosing euthanasia because they’re not getting the “supports and cares” they need. The physicians in charge of the process not only know that this is happening, but they have discussed it in seminars, collected evidence, and then kept it quiet in public.

The safeguards promised by Trudeau and others to prevent vulnerable people from heading down the road to euthanasia turn out to be vague, pro forma, and easy to get around by doctor-shopping.

The quotes from Lametti and Trudeau are important considering the scandal of euthanasia for people with disabilities because of poverty, an inability to obtain needed medical treatment or care, homelessness, neglect and abandonment.

Raikin then comments on the number of people who have died by euthanasia.

One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.

...But the picture that emerges is not a new flowering of autonomy but the hum of an efficient engine of death.

Raikin's interview with euthanasia provider Stefanie Green continues:

Asked on a call about stories of abuse, she raises her voice and says, “you cannot access MAID in this country because you can’t get housing. That is clickbait. These stories have not been reported fully.”

Raikin reminds us that the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Carter decision that legalized euthanasia wrote that:

“a permissive regime with properly designed and administered safeguards” would be “capable of protecting vulnerable people from abuse and error.”

To add context, Raikin quotes from former Senator James Cowan who said:

“We have four or five years of experience now, and absolutely no indications, that I’m aware of, of alleged misuse or poor decisions,”

Helen Long, the CEO of Dying with Dignity told MacLeans magazine:

arguing that the stories that people “who are not able to access supports like safe and affordable housing are opting to have MAID instead” are “simply not true and there is no evidence that I’m aware of to support those claims.”

Raikin then points out that Green, Cowan and Long are denying what they know to be true. Raikin quotes euthanasia provider Madeline Li who testified to a parliamentary committee that:

...legislated safeguards are “impotent.”

“I believe the Canadian populace and maybe even the legislators are not aware of who has been qualifying for MAID.”

Raikin then proves that the euthanasia lobby are aware that people are dying by euthanasia because of poverty, access to medical treatment and housing. He writes:

The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care. These are people who do have some sort of medical condition but in many cases are using these conditions to check a box in the approval process, when the relief they are mainly seeking is from other forms of suffering. And the system is doing much more to help them down the path toward death than to protect them as the public was promised.

Raikin uncovers a presentation by Althea Gibb-Carsley, a retired care coordinator and social worker of the Vancouver Coastal Health’s assisted dying program. The title of her presentation asked, “What is the role of the MAID assessor when resources are inadequate?”

Gibb-Carsley describes several people who qualified for euthanasia. Mary (55) with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue who can't afford the food and supplements that would lessen her health issues and identified poverty as driving her to MAiD. Nancy (68) a physician with chronic pain following a car accident who didn't save any money. Greg, 57, a writer who has diabetes, cardiac problems, anxiety and depression, and a history of trauma. Lucy, a 38-year-old trans woman, is an immigrant who has pain, osteoarthritis, depression, and anxiety.

Raikin reports that Gibb-Carsley concludes her presentation by stating:

these patients have “no other options” because of their poverty, their housing situations, their difficulty getting medical care. “I think you will find, and you know already,” she says to her audience of euthanasia providers, that if you want to offer your patients some alternative to MAID, “this will often mean a referral to not very much, and certainly not very fast.” It’s not that they are terminally ill or truly beyond help, but that they can’t get the help they need in the system right now, so euthanasia seems like the only way out.

Raikin then states that it is important what Gibb-Carsley didn't say:

Of Mary, the patient who identified “poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” we do not hear that the system discouraged and denied her application. Of Greg, who the slides say “identified housing as [a] driver” of his euthanasia request, we hear that he is “getting very close to needing to set a date” to be euthanized — and again, not that any effort is being made to stop him. Of Nancy, for whom “uncertain housing is the driver,” we hear of no effort to stop her.

Raikin then explains that people must be protected from abuse.

If the MAID system were working as promised, the presenters should be warning attendees that they must be vigilantly on the lookout for just the kinds of cases described in the seminar, scrupulously ensuring that they are not approved for euthanasia.

Raikin points out that the presenter and the audience understood that these were serious problems, in fact Gibb-Carsley states:

“Our silence is our complicity,”

Raikin shows how they were examining the problem from the wrong point of view. Rather than viewing these issues within the context of changing the implementation of euthanasia they were viewing it within the context of:

an opportunity to highlight the real problem: the inadequacy of the welfare state.

Gibbs-Carsley states that these assessments can be used to leverage the government for improved welfare. She then states:

Your Assessments provide a rare opportunity to hear from the typically disenfranchised patients about their experiences.” The subtext of this sunny euphemism is that giving a voice to the voiceless will, for many, ultimately mean killing them.

The euthanasia assessors are then told that they can withdraw from these cases but they will be obligated to refer those patients to assessors who will be willing.
 

Earlier in the interviews Stefanie Green referred to these stories of abuse as:

“clickbait” that “have not been reported fully.”

Raikin then examines why these deaths are happening in Canada. He writes:

A core reason that Canada’s assisted dying program has grown so much faster than any other program in the world is that it is the most permissive. Eligibility criteria began loose and are rapidly getting looser. You do not need to be terminally ill, only to have a “grievous and irremediable” condition, a standard that is open to significant differences in interpretation. In March 2023, mental illness alone will qualify as an acceptable medical reason to die. And the Quebec College of Physicians now suggests that Parliament expand euthanasia eligibility to minors and even newborns. (Euthanasia for mental illness alone will be delayed).

Raikin then states that the safeguards are clearly not working.

Raikin then interviews Dr Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry for 40 years, who developed the test to determine mental competency for medical decision making. Appelbaum commented about the test used to assess competency for euthanasia:

“it doesn’t strike me as a particularly well-thought-through evaluation process.” Among other things, “it’s not clear from these forms how an evaluator would decide that a condition is ‘grievous and irremediable,’” he says, quoting one of the key legal criteria.

Moreover, the initial screening questions for depression and anxiety “are not detailed enough to result in a diagnosis, and even if they did, the impact the answers to these questions are supposed to have on the final decision about authorizing MAID is unspoken.”

Dr Mark Komrad, a clinical psychiatrist and ethicist who helped craft the American Psychiatric Association’s statement against euthanasia for patients who are not terminally ill called the evaluation process as: 

“Death by checklist!”

Raikin continues by writing:

when I asked Stefanie Green how she decides whether a patient with a mental health condition has the competence to choose euthanasia, she said that she makes a judgment call about whether a patient has an “active” or “stable” case of mental illness. For “active” cases, she will consult a specialist; for “stable” cases, she proceeds on her own. Green is not a psychiatrist, so I asked Appelbaum about her framework. “It’s not a distinction that makes any sense to me,” he says.

Raikin points out that the law allows any doctor or nurse practitioner to assess someone for euthanasia without requiring further training.

Raikin then writes about how easy it is to die by euthanasia in Canada. He begins by pointing out that if an assessor rejects someone for euthanasia that all they need to do is go to another assessor. Raikin explains:

In another CAMAP seminar recording, we learn of a man who was rejected for MAID because, as assessors found, he did not have a serious illness or the “capacity to make informed decisions about his own personal health.” One assessor concluded “it is very clear that he does not qualify.” But Dying with Dignity Canada connected him with Ellen Wiebe, a prominent euthanasia provider and advocate in Vancouver. She assessed him virtually, found him eligible, and found a second assessor to agree. “And he flew all by himself to Vancouver,” she said. “I picked him up at the airport, um, brought him to my clinic and provided for him,” meaning she euthanized him.

Jocelyn Downie states in a seminar that you can ask as many assessors as you want or need disagreement doesn't mean you must stop.

Jocelyn Downie

Downie stated in euthanasia seminars that:

“There is no certainty or unanimity required. There is not perfection required,” says Downie. The result: There are many paths available to reach the end, and you only need to find one. The system makes it easy to die.

When asked by email how these statements reconcile with safeguard reassurances that have been offered to the public, Downie responded:

“This is an inaccurate characterization of what I said and did at the two seminars.” She did not specify the nature of the inaccuracy.)

The fact is that the rules surrounding euthanasia are subjective and enforcement of the procedure is lax. Nancy Hansen, the Director of the Disability Studies program at the University of Manitoba, told Raikin that in effect:

“there’s no consequences for non-compliance” with the law.

When asked for her response to her earlier comment, Weibe said:

“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. As all Canadians have rights to an assisted death, people who are lonely or poor also have those rights.”

Raikin continues his exposé by writing about Les Landry and Rosina Kamis.

Landry, was a truck driver who had a reaction to anesthesia in 2009, which led to his disability. When Landry was turning 65 he requested euthanasia based on poverty. Landry told Raikin:

“I turned 65 [and] lost all m[y] disabilities benefits and now a senior in poverty. I am not going to live my life like this.” On December 2, Les received his first approval for euthanasia. He is now waiting for the second and final approval. And he says he will doctor-shop until he gets it.

Rosina Kamis (41) requested euthanasia because she was in constant pain from her fibromyalgia, had chronic leukemia and a myriad of other mental and physical illnesses. But there was much more to her story. Raikin did an investigation and learned:

Oftentimes, Rosina was hungry. The artificial light in her room would make her migraines worse. It was loneliness driving her to MAID, that she “must suffer alone” with her service dog — which she could “easily lose,” as her landlord was trying to evict her and she had nowhere else to go. It was that she didn’t want her physicians to harm her by changing her pain medication, as they sometimes did. It was that she was “scared” of being institutionalized; that what she needed to live was not what she could reasonably expect to get; and that others would benefit from her death because MAID “is the best solution for all.” Her choices seemed slim. When her fingers hurt, she couldn’t make food. She would post a video of herself going to bed, in her dark room, hungry and crying.

Rankin then states:

Rosina showed one face of her suffering to the MAID system, and another to her confidants. To the latter, the reasons she gave for really wanting to die were not physical suffering. “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical,” Rosina wrote in a message apparently intended for her powers of attorney. “I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” To her two dozen subscribers on YouTube, she said, “Sometimes all the pain will go away just by having another human being here.”

Raikin explains:

Rosina was approved, and specifically asked to die on the date of her ex-husband’s birthday. Rosina died in her shared basement apartment on September 26, 2021, after a doctor gave her a lethal injection.

Raikin further assesses the reality of euthanasia in Canada. He writes:

Whatever your view on euthanasia, stories like Les’s and Rosina’s are not entirely straightforward. In many cases it is hard to sort out the tangle of internal and external reasons someone might make a voluntary request to die. But that is precisely the problem. Canadians were promised a system that would distinguish a rational choice to die from a desperate cry for help. But in stories like Les’s, Rosina’s, and so many others, that distinction breaks down.

This is particularly true in cases where a patient seeking euthanasia has a history of depression. As the psychiatrist Paul Appelbaum told me: “People with depression can be extremely rational in explaining the reasons for the decisions that they’re making. And what is most difficult is to separate the effect of the depression on that decision from what their underlying non-depressed motivations might be.”

Raikin explains that the law requires that a person have an “incurable” and “irremediable” medical condition. Even the euthanasia lobby knows that this is often not the case. Raikin states:

According to an internal study of MAID assessments, presented to CAMAP in 2022, of 54 patients who were not terminally ill, two-thirds had concurrent mental illness. A fifth of the patients had difficulty finding “appropriate” treatment. And, most disturbingly, over a third of patients were “not offered appropriate / available treatments.”

Raikin refers to euthanasia doctor, Ellen Wiebe as an example.

Ellen Wiebe, the poster child for Canadian medical death — in 2016 Maclean’s covered her as a visionary. She has since become one of the most prolific MAID providers, having personally euthanized over 400 patients. In testimony to a parliamentary committee, Wiebe said that she would consider a patient on a five-year waitlist for an effective treatment to have “irremediable suffering.”

Elsewhere, in a public talk, Wiebe described a recent procedure she performed, saying, “It was a beautiful death.” And she admitted that the real difficulty is not protecting the vulnerable from abuse: “Angry family members are our greatest risk,” she says, and laughs.

Even the Simons euthanasia commercial, All Is Beauty, featured a woman who didn't want to die. Raikin explains:

an ad video by the Canadian fashion company La Maison Simons, titled “All Is Beauty,” went viral online. It told the story of Jennyfer Hatch, a 37-year-old-woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome who had chosen euthanasia. Slickly produced, the video showed slow-motion images of people gathered on beaches. At one point it describes “the most beautiful exit,” apparently referring to MAID. Hatch was euthanized the day before the campaign launched. She had told friends and interviewers that she wanted to live, but couldn’t afford it.

Raikin suggests that the tide is turning with relation to euthanasia and quotes from disability scholar Catherine Frazee who says:

has observed patients who become fixated on MAID, who under different circumstances, before MAID was a part of our culture, would have carried on living through difficult times, or who would have pursued treatment options with a reasonable chance of success even though doing so would be temporarily unpleasant or uncomfortable. Many people who are not at risk of suicide are nevertheless at risk of MAID, especially so because it has been so quickly embraced as an honourable, “dignified,” idyllic form of death.

Amy Hasbrouck, a disability advocate told Raikin:

MAID is a way to “get rid of disabled people.” It’s an extreme view. Yet it is possible to imagine a euthanasia system that is set up without that intention, even one that is nominally set up to protect the vulnerable — and yet that, step by step, becomes indistinguishable from a system deliberately designed to usher them to their deaths.

Euthanasia doctor Madeline Li told a Parliamentary Committee that:

“I’ve certainly had cases where I felt compelled to provide MAID against my better clinical judgment because the law did not adequately protect.”

While psychiatrist John Maher, editor of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, who told a Parliament committee that:

he has patients who could get better but “are now refusing effective treatment to make themselves eligible for MAID.”

Raikin ends his exposé by stating:

From Rosina, Les, Mary, Nancy, Greg, Lucy, and so many others across Canada, what we hear are the cries of people in despair asking for help. Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.

Links to more stories of the euthanasia experience in Canada:

• Toronto Star: We need to put the brakes on euthanasia (Link).
• Globe and Mail: No to euthanasia for mental disorders (Link).
  
• Veterans affairs worker advocates euthanasia for PTSD (Link).
• Canadian man claims that he was pressured to request euthanasia (Link).
  
• Why did they kill my brother (Link).
  
• Manitoba woman died by euthanasia based on inadequate home care (Link).
• Quebec man seeks euthanasia based on changes to home care (Link). 
• Alberta man requests euthanasia based on poverty (Link).
• Ontario man approved for euthanasia because he can't get medical treatment (Link).
• Shopping for doctor death in Canada (Link).
• Gwen is seeking euthanasia because she can't access medical treatment (Link).
• Euthanasia for disability and poverty (Link).
• Euthanasia for Long Covid and poverty (Link).
• Canada's MAiD law is the most permissive in the world. (Link).