Canada has one of the highest rates of assisted dying in the world, allowing ‘terminally ill patients to die with dignity’.
However, new information raises suspicions that state-sponsored euthanasia is designed as a way to get rid of ‘welfare’ for the poor and disabled.
According to a report in Jacobin, warnings about Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) programme have been raised for years. Disability rights advocates argue that in a system that impoverishes people and disproportionately affects people with disabilities, the risk of people choosing death because it is easier than fighting to stay alive is all too real.
Underinvestment in medical care, these rights groups say, would “push people to the brink and beyond,” meaning that some would choose to die rather than “burden” their loved ones or society at large.
Canada currently has one of the highest rates of assisted dying in the world. As The Guardian reported in February, 4.1 per cent of deaths in the country were physician-assisted, and that number is growing, increasing by 30 per cent between 2021 and 2022. In a survey of more than 13,100 people who opted for MAiD, the vast majority (96.5 per cent) chose to end their lives in the face of terminal illness or imminent death, writes author Leyland Cecco. By contrast, only 463 people chose to do so in the face of a ‘chronic illness’.
Welfare not even enough for rent
Canadian journalist Jeremy Appel, who previously supported state-sponsored death, said in an article last year that he had given up on the idea, writing: “I’ve come to realise that euthanasia in Canada represents the cynical end of social funding with the ruthless logic of late capitalism: we’re going to deprive you of the resources you need to live a dignified life […] and if you don’t like it, why don’t you kill yourself?”.
In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a person on disability assistance receives about $1,300 a month. Ontario Works, the province’s social assistance programme, pays a maximum of $733 a month. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment routinely averages $2,000 a month in many cities. In April, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto was nearly $2,500.
The article points out that one person with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis died because he could not find adequate medical care, while another person died through state-sponsored euthanasia despite suffering only ‘hearing loss’.
“The consequences of our MAiD regime, which incentivises access to death as a benefit and trivialises death as a harm to be protected, are becoming increasingly clear,” University of Toronto law professor Trudo Lemmens wrote for the Globe and Mail in February.
700 state-sponsored deaths for the disabled
Lemmens criticises MAiD’s second pathway, which allows physician-assisted death for those who are not facing a ‘reasonably foreseeable death’, noting that within two years of its introduction, MAiD second pathway providers had ‘ended the lives of nearly seven hundred disabled people, many of whom likely had years to live’.
Raising concerns about the extension of MAiD to mental illness, Lemmens said that ‘there is growing concern that inadequate social and mental health services and housing support are driving people to seek MAiD’ and that ‘making mental illness the basis for MAiD will increase the number of people at greater risk of premature death’.
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