Deadly calculations

Many of us warned our fellow Canadians in 2015 that euthanasia would be a slippery slope and that access to “assisted suicide” would widen very quickly. New statistics show just how slippery that slope is and how fast we are hurtling downward as a society.

Ben Woodfinden recently wrote of the Supreme Court decision legalizing euthanasia in The National Post. In his words:

The court rejected the concern that once assisted suicide was allowed in some rare cases, there would be a “slippery slope” from helping terminally ill people end their lives, to a system in which vulnerable people like the disabled were caught in a euthanizing net.

The court was wrong.

More and more reasons for euthanasia are deemed legitimate. Now what is dishonestly named “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) is available for those with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” and next year it will be available to those with mental illnesses. This fall Parliament will receive a report that likely will recommend that MAID be made available to children as well as adults.

As noted by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, both doctors and nurses are permitted to inject a patient with a lethal substance. The ten-day waiting period was abolished by Bill C-7. Only 4 percent of written requests for assisted suicide were deemed ineligible.

Advocacy groups for the disabled, such as the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, have been sounding the alarm, but the Trudeau government routinely ignores them all.

The numbers are climbing and there is no levelling off in sight. In 2021 over 10,000 people were euthanized in Canada, which represents 3.3 percent of all Canadian deaths. That is up from 7,603 in 2020, 5,661 in 2019, 4,480 in 2018, 2,838 in 2017, and 1,018 in 2016. 

As predicted, we are now starting to see stories about how economically advantageous MAID is for Canada. A recent headline read: “Doctor-assisted suicide could save Canada up to $139 million each year, Alberta study suggests.” This study assumes that MAID will account for 4 percent of all deaths. But in seven years we have reached 3.3 percent already and access is expanding rapidly. So, 4 percent is surely a low estimate, which means that the potential “savings” are even greater.

Canada’s socialized medical system is perpetually under-funded at the best of times and all it takes is a relatively tame pandemic like Covid-19 to push it over the edge into chaos. A more serious plague could make the system implode in a matter of weeks.

The Trudeau government is too focused on spending billions on “green energy” boondoggles to care about properly funding health care. In this situation, euthanasia looks like a juicy bone to a hungry dog. For people who have no respect for the sanctity of human life the cost savings are enticing, and they see no downside.

What has happened already in Canada from 2015 to 2022 is now history. Without doubt, history now shows that once a society decides that human life is not inherently valuable—apart from whatever limitations an individual may or may not have—then the slide toward the commodification of human life is inevitable. Once we put a price tag on human life and start calculating how much we could save by killing off the elderly, disabled, sick, weak, and mentally ill, then the slippery slope is greased with fake compassion. In the name of cost savings, we are in a race to the bottom of that slippery slope.

In post-Christian Canada our rationale for respecting the inherent value of human life is now mostly gone. In a way, we are worse off than cultures that never were Christianized because most of the great non-Christian cultures of the world had religions that at least taught some respect for human life.

In the late modern West, the atheistic materialism that says humans are just “clumps of cells” used to be applied only to babies before birth, but it is increasingly being applied to the sick and elderly. Eventually, we will all be considered nothing but “clumps of cells” and whether the state decides we are worth caring for (or not) will depend on a cost-benefit calculation done by faceless bureaucrats and bean counters.

By the way, I have a disability—a hearing loss—and the government subsidizes hearing aids. This policy is a relic from our Christian past. According to the guidelines, I am eligible for MAID now. That’s a sobering thought.

Follow the money “saved” by euthanasia. It leads straight to death.