Now that the federal government has introduced a bill to delay implementing psychiatric MAID – assisted dying for people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness – this is a good time to step back and reflect on how Canada got here. Last week’s release of a joint parliamentary committee’s report on MAID only adds to the need for such reflection.
Campaigners have slammed as ‘reckless’ and ‘horrible’ a plan by a Canadian parliamentary committee to expand the country’s assisted-suicide program to terminally sick children.
They told DailyMail.com that sick and disabled kids could soon be joining the roughly 10,000 adults who end their lives each year by state-sanctioned euthanasia in the world’s most permissive such program.
Parents should be consulted “where appropriate,” states the document, but the will of the child would “ultimately take priority.”
On Wednesday, a parliamentary committee report, presented for discussion in the House of Commons, recommended that Canada should expand doctor-assisted suicide to include “mature minors”—teenagers as young as 12, who are ‘capable of making decisions concerning their health’—and patients with mental illnesses, currently not covered by the law. The report also called for providing the opportunity of “advance requests” for people with serious illnesses, such as dementia, that could, later on, hinder their ability to consent to euthanasia.
Canada’s assisted dying laws should be expanded to include minors, a parliamentary committee has recommended in a report tabled in the House of Commons.
After hearing from nearly 150 witnesses and reviewing more than 350 briefs on Canada’s medically assisted dying (MAiD) program, the special joint committee of MPs and senators concluded that minors deemed to have the appropriate decision-making capacity should be eligible for assisted death.
It’s based on a false distinction that the Canadian government can’t even keep straight
Two cheers for a brief hiatus in the Canadian stampede towards suicide for all. Earlier this month, David Lametti, Justin Trudeau’s justice minister, announced that legalization of euthanasia for the mentally ill will be delayed by one year. This, he said, will give the health system and regulatory bodies more time to prepare. Mentally ill adults will now become eligible for euthanasia in March 2024.
His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic.
In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.
When the Senate, an unelected body, introduced a clause into its Medical Assistance in Dying legislation (MAiD) that added mental illness as a qualifying factor, it showed a deep disconnect from the people of Canada and a lack of care for those who suffer from mental illness. Since then, psychiatrists, psychologists and thousands of Canadians have called for a stop to this madness. It seems the federal government is finally listening.
Over 1500 of Canada’s publicly funded psychiatrists, pediatricians, medical professors, and general practitioners have joined an organization to fight the government’s expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAID). In March 2023, patients suffering from conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, or any other mental affliction will gain access to the lethal injection.
Oregon has become America’s first ‘death tourism’ destination, where terminally ill people from Texas and other states that have outlawed assisted suicide have started travelling to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives, DailyMail.com can reveal.
In the liberal bastion Portland, at least one clinic has started receiving out-of-staters who have less than six months to live and meet the other strict requirements of the state’s Death with Dignity (DWD) law.
Dr Nicholas Gideonse, the director of End of Life Choices Oregon, recently told a panel that he was advising terminally ill non-residents on travelling to Oregon to end their lives, despite a legal gray area.
OTTAWA – Canadians whose sole condition is a mental disorder will not be eligible for a medically assisted death for another year under legislation introduced in the House of Commons Thursday.
Justice Minister David Lametti introduced a bill seeking to delay extending the eligibility until March 17, 2024.
The Liberal government agreed to expand eligibility in its 2021 update to assisted dying law after senators amended the bill. The senators argued that excluding people with mental illness would violate their rights.
March huh? in time for Josef Mengeles Birthday?
A French YouTuber who told her followers she was travelling to Belgium for assisted suicide to end the suffering of ADHD and multiple personality disorder has been rebuffed by doctors.
Olympe, as she is known to her 255,000 subscribers, said she was in talks with doctors across the border to end her life this year in a case that has shocked France.
But on Monday a Belgian doctor ruled out helping the 23-year-old, who runs a hit channel on mental health issues including split personality disorders.
The Canadian health care system–it’s free you know!–is killing people and harvesting their organs.
Why not? Obviously, those bodies were people useless enough to society to kill them off–so why not use the leftover husk as a resource for the right sort of people to use?
What are your thoughts on assisted dying and assisted suicide? That’s the question asked by a Health and Social Care Committee consultation, closing today, that could shape changes to the law on euthanasia. Having had intimate experience of what can happen when a vulnerable person feels themselves to be a burden, I’m against.
My mother had Parkinson’s, and once she burst out to me that: ‘You’d have so much more time and money if it weren’t for me’. It would be the easiest thing in the world to push someone in that condition towards feeling that it would be better for everyone if she were given a dignified death. Actually my mother did have a dignified death, at home, even though, by then, she had to have everything done for her.
Canada performing more organ transplants from MAID donors than any country in the world
A growing number of patients who request medical assistance in dying are asking to donate their organs for transplant, says an international review that found that Canada is performing the most organ transplants from MAID patients among the four countries studied that offer this practice.
The report is the first-ever review of the growing use of this new practice around the world. The review was conducted in 2021 and the results were formally published in December 2022.
“We saw everyone is working in different directions. And then we said ‘OK, well, let’s start an international (discussion) of all the countries involved,’” said Dr. Johannes Mulder, a physician and MAID provider in Zwolle, Netherlands, in an interview with CTV News.
For profit is the next step…
As Canada prepares to expand its euthanasia law to include those with mental illness, some Canadians – including many of the country’s doctors – question whether the country’s assisted death programme has already moved too far, too fast.
Dr Madeline Li can recall the first patient she helped die, about one month after Canada first legalised euthanasia in 2016. “I remember just how surreal it was,” she said.
A psychiatrist at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, she recalled checking on her patient that day, asking if she had the right music and final meal, and if she was sure she wanted to go ahead. The patient, in her mid-60s and suffering from ovarian cancer, said she was.
Five minutes later, the woman was dead.
