Assisted suicide offered to homeless people in Canada

[gnarlynarwhal]

I came across an article online about this earlier today and I’m shocked this is seen as acceptable by so many people in Canada. It’s advertised on the tv over there as if it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do. The National Post is claiming that one third of Canadians think that it’s perfectly acceptable to approve medical assistance in dying ‘MAID’ to healthy people purely because they are impoverished. I find it really saddening.

Statistics about who has had MAID in Canada in 2022.
That report is saying about what I thought.
2022 data.
4.1% of all deaths were after MAID granted.
63% of applicants have cancer as their underlying disease driver.
Mean age 77-78
More males than females
Loss of quality of life cited as main reason, 86%
A tiny % died when death was not expected at pretty much any time.

Can you not see that this shows how dangerous it is? One third of 1000 is a terrifying proportion of people prepared to let this happen. The disabled athlete being offered assisted suicide without having asked for it is terrifying too. These thing happen when a society loses its values.

Yes, this is what stops me supporting the right to die. I’m totally in favour, for terminally ill people or those whose lives are being destroyed by an untreatable health condition.

People used to say the ‘slippery slope’ argument was a red herring, because society would never allow it to happen. Yet here’s the proof if how far social norms can be corroded.

I hope your uncle stays safe.

The problem I have with people who oppose assisted dying because the "wrong" type of person being given that assistance is that they rarely have an alternative to offer.

The idea that we should focus on making it so people don't see an assisted death as the best option is fine, but nobody seems to know how to actually do this. I don't think it's feasible to do it because making someone happy requires another person - many other people - to be miserable. Humans cannot have universal happiness because those who are happy and content rely on the work of others, work that causes misery for the person doing it.

I think of it as being similar to the abortion debate - the choice is not "legal abortions versus no abortions" it is "legal abortions versus illegal abortions". With euthenasia the choice is legal, safe, pain free suicide versus a risky, frequently painful and deeply unpleasant one.

What it says is that one-third of people (and it was a tiny poll of only 1,000 people)

That's not a tiny poll. That's a very robust sample size for a survey of this kind.

Oregon's assisted dying legislation, about people who took the death with dignity option:

"Of the 278 DWDA deaths during 2022, most patients were aged 65 years or older (85%) and white (96%). The median age at death was 75 years."

More stats on Oregon situation.

Why shouldn't I have the option of AD. if I don't want to be a burden, why must the state insist they have right to take that decision away from me? Most people choosing AD. could commit suicide by other means, why take away means for me to do it with greatest dignity and least distress to my loved ones?

New Jersey statistics: 94% white, 70% college-educated, most age 70+, 73% had cancer as primary diagnosis. In NJ, they have to be privately funded.

So the minister for VA agrees that "we've isolated four cases involving one individual. If there's other information that needs to come forth that is not represented in those files" ie 4 incidents where there are written references to MAiD. Along with someone being referred to the RCMP. Though there are arguments that there are more cases of case workers making verbal references to veterans.

I am all for assisted dying for very clear cases of the terminally ill under careful physician oversight. However, in Canada the looseness of understanding if not the law has given rise to these cases and there will be more as the legislation gets wider when mental health is included next year.

@DrBlackbird its a relatively new government program and all the worker was doing was informing clients that it’s an option.
in the case of cg, the conversation had turned in this direction after cg began discussing wanting to die in a melodramatic attention seeking manor. She (cg) 100% pushed the sw into making the comment.
in the end cg is alive and who knows if she got her ramp. That she might not have been entitled to get in the first place from the va vs some other seniors retrofit program.

Canada has become a hugely destructive woke nightmare.

In what way?

I ask because I regularly see claims on here of ‘Woke Canada’ that are gross distortions of stories.

For example, regular claims that beauticians are forced into offering bikini waxes to self-IDing men (originating from a story where a trans woman tried to argue this but promptly lost her court case) or that you can be thrown in prison for misgendering your child (based on a story where a man was imprisoned for contempt of court for publicly releasing his teenage child’s medical records, despite a court order prohibiting from doing so).

You only have to read the responses to this thread title to realise that people are very gullible, believe everything they read and don’t read past a headline. And these people can vote!

@C8H10N4O2 I would say authoritarian rather than liberal. Trudeau is like many other MC and wealthy white people, usually men IME who style themselves as super liberal-left but are pretty damned authoritarian in practice toward anyone who disagrees with their ideologies

Actually, yes I would agree. Trudeau is quick to silence critics who threaten him in quite a ruthless manner. The ‘genial good guy’ image is just a convenient image.

@OhmygodDont No healthcare system in the world is amazing or rarely even great when it comes to life long or mental health issues

But what we’re talking about here is not exclusively or even primarily about our health care systems. It’s wider institutional structures and systems. And it’s about governments not spending / wasting tax payers dollars to benefit connections and friends. It’s about wishing for politicians with integrity to put resources towards our most vulnerable in education and housing and meaningful jobs. Maybe that is a pipe dream, but I think it’s still possible to have better ones.

We can say that the money isn’t there but there’s half a billion to spend on illogical plans to ship illegal immigrants to Rwanda and millions for mates on useless PPE and billions for a track and trace system that never worked, whilst the Post Office wasted hundreds of millions on legal fees to defend the indefensible.

It’s been law for 7 years.

If you read the report you cited, she had approval already granted, the work was botched and then 5 years later, she’s still waiting.

The point being that no one should be ‘informing’ clients of this option. Especially in this context of a cw with a veteran. A professional is not ‘pushed into’ doing anything, let alone making this completely inappropriate comment/suggestions. Makes it sound as it was a passive aggressive immature response to being frustrated with an emotional veteran. Exactly the concern that’s being raised with too lax legislation.

I don’t like, and have never liked, Trudeau but ‘authoritarian’ is hyperbolic, particularly by comparison to recent US and UK leaders (admittedly, not a yardstick you’d want to measure a Canadian PM against).

Trudeau is just your typical, centrist liberal.

Agreed that the caseworker had zero business raising it. It is not within their role or mandate.

Whatever problems there might be with the legislation, though, I don’t think one junior government employee being an arsehole is a major issue.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt2AuVQKpq0

This documentary is very enlightening.

I’d say more ‘grossly misleading’ than informative. Honestly, there is so much utter bullshit to unpack in the first segment (homelessness in Vancouver, British Columbia) In alone.

To understand it, though, you need to know a little about Canada’s political structures.

You have the national government that oversees certain policy areas, then the Provincial governments that oversee others.

At a national level, the three biggest parties are the Liberals (Trudeau’s party; centrists), the Conservatives (right) and NDP (left).

In British Columbia, it’s a little different. The BC Liberal Party is right wing (not affiliated with the national Liberals) and you have the BC NDP (left wing, currently in government).

So, with the above in mind, here is why the first segment of the documentary is an absolute nonsense.

There is, categorically, a crisis of homelessness and opioid use in Vancouver, that has unfolded since the early 2010s.

It arose when the (right wing) Conservative government was in power, federally, and the (right wing) Liberal Party were in power in British Columbia (and remained in power until 2017).

It’s primary cause is poverty - Canada is increasingly expensive and does not have a strong safety net, like the UK and other European countries do.

Decriminalization of possession of small quantities of drugs was introduced, in B.C., by its provincial NDP government only this year, in response to the crisis it has inherited.

The documentary conveniently ignores that the crisis started and accelerated under right wing governments, could not possibly have been caused or contributed to by decriminalization (which only happened this year) and that decriminalization is a policy of the Provincial NDP government, and not Trudeau’s, Liberal, national government.

Honestly, I am shocked that such a ‘documentary’ could be affiliated with an actual British newspaper. Appalling stuff.

I have heard quite a few concerning practices about the MH system in Canada

in some ways the country is very progressive in others quite the opposite (during in Covid it was shocking what the government got up to)

it’s strange I am not quite sure where they are going

but it’s not as simple as if someone wants to kill themselves they should be able to in some kind of clinical setting as many people will go through times in their life where they will feel this way

I have heard quite a few concerning practices about the MH system in Canada
Mental health care is appalling here, compared to the UK. Although Canada does like to tout that is has ‘universal healthcare’ what that actually covers is very slim compared to the UK’s NHS or the healthcare systems in other European countries. Ours is like a halfway point between US and European healthcare.

Poor/unemployed people here have little access to MH services, which is why so many people will MH issues end up untreated and homeless.

Canada has never really had a left wing, federal government. It flits between the right wing and the centrists (at times, you could call the Liberals centre-left, but they’re the type that are left wing on purely social issues and more to the right on economic policy). That’s broadly why the social safety net and access to healthcare here is as poor as it is.

Geez. Just made the mistake of listening to more of that ‘Woke Canada’ documentary, it’s really awful.

You have some wingnuts whining about the ‘narrative of genocide’ surrounding the residential school system.

For those that don’t know, during the 19th and 20th centuries, Canada established a system of boarding schools for Indigenous children, in order to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian culture. Tens of thousands of children were snatched from their families and placed in these schools, where they were forbidden from speaking their native languages or otherwise practicing their cultures. Neglect and sexual abuse was rife. Thousands of children died in these schools but the number is unknown (ranging from lower estimates of 3,000 to highs of 30,000). The schools successfully disrupted (without completely stamping out) indigenous cultures.

I have visited the graveyard of the school near where my DP grew up. Despite it being a small town, I think there were around 50-100 graves. They were marked, at least, although sometimes generally (e.g. ‘child’, but no name).

In recent years, efforts have been made to try and locate remains of other children, who remain unaccounted for (and particularly given the uncertainty as to whether there were ‘only’ thousands of deaths, or tens of thousands). Potential mass grave sites have been identified but it isn’t known, at least yet, whether they are truly graves (at least one exhumation, at one potential site, found no bodies).

The ‘experts’ in the documentary are using that to challenge the ‘narrative of genocide’, even though thousands of deaths are entirely evidenced.

To suggest ‘the narrative of genocide’ narrative is wokeism-gone-mad is appalling.

It was a right wing Prime Minister (Harper) who issued the first formal apology to First Nations people for the residential school system. Canada (Trudeau included) was initially resistant to calling it a genocide (instead preferring to use ‘cultural genocide’) but ultimately it’s gained momentum. Last year, the House of Commons unanimously (i.e, including every right wing member) voted that the government should recognize the residential school system as a genocide.

I have little doubt that many of the ‘potential mass grave sites’ being identified will not, in fact, turn out to be mass grave sites - but using that to question whether or not there was a genocide at all, while pretending that the schools were benignly implemented simply to give indigenous children an education, is fringe in the extreme (and not dissimilar to Holocaust denial arguments). Again, every single conservative in the House of Commons agreed that it was a genocide.

Oooo but the wokies are woking everything.

One thing that does need stamping out is this post-truth brand of right wing politics that has emerged in recent years. I cannot believe these claims went unchallenged in a documentary put out by a mainstream British news source.