Juno News - Canada has an assisted suicide CRISIS

00:00:00.000 Hi, Juneau News. Alexander Brown here, host of Not Sorry, director of the National Citizens

00:00:07.680 Coalition, writer, communicator, campaigner. It was great to meet many of you last week

00:00:12.720 at convention in Calgary. I was in convention along with Juneau News. We had an event afterwards,

00:00:19.680 which it was a real pleasure to get to meet so many in the audience. And thank you so much for

00:00:23.720 saying hi to those who did. And one person who was there was John Carpe, our guest today. He is the

00:00:29.480 president, the founder of the Justice Center. He's been on our show before. He's a lovely guy. And

00:00:35.020 they have a damning new report released at the end of January that we wanted to bring to you today.

00:00:40.620 Of all the crises of our government's making, perhaps none is more insidious right now than that

00:00:45.820 of medical assistance in death, assisted suicide. And the expansion of that program and the problems

00:00:52.000 therein, it warrants further highlighting in a robust and principled response. Canada's assisted

00:00:59.200 suicide regime was established by legislation in 2016. Originally justified as a narrow exception

00:01:06.300 grounded in first principles of consent, a massive expansion of eligibility threatens that very

00:01:13.180 foundation. The JCCF feels that proposals for advanced requests and emerging professional discourse

00:01:20.860 around involuntary non-consensual euthanasia risk shifting end-of-life decisions, that decision-making

00:01:28.860 process from personal autonomy to third-party judgment. As assisted suicide becomes increasingly

00:01:35.820 routine, the erosion of informed consent threatens charter protections and human dignity. True end-of-life

00:01:42.920 freedom requires strict safeguards, rejection of non-consensual death, and vastly improved access to

00:01:50.720 quality palliative care. These concerns are valid. In many ways, the potential for the worst of the

00:01:57.640 slippery slope has already shown up through programs such as gender-affirming care, where hundreds of

00:02:04.000 millions in funding ran headlong, well past the supporting evidence, never waited to see if some

00:02:10.140 of the underlying aspects of social contagion were worth investigating. And now we're seeing landmark

00:02:15.740 lawsuits in that arena. A New York judge saddled a psychologist and surgeon with a $2 million medical

00:02:22.380 malpractice verdict for the surgical removal of a teenage girl's breasts under the guise of gender-affirming

00:02:28.740 care. The landmark lawsuit, first reported on by the Epoch Times, featured here in Juneau,

00:02:35.180 alleges the teen was pressured into the procedure by those she entrusted with her care.

00:02:39.540 And Canada has its own potential landmark cases presently with the courts. In Ontario,

00:02:46.360 Michelle Zecina is fighting a medical malpractice lawsuit that could have ripple effects throughout

00:02:51.660 Canada. She claims that eight health professionals rushed her into testosterone therapy, a double

00:02:58.420 mastectomy, and a partial hysterectomy without properly considering her complex mental health history,

00:03:04.680 which includes ADHD, autism, and PTSD. In another case reported by the National Post,

00:03:11.420 Loise Cardinal, an Indigenous woman, has launched a historic legal challenge in Alberta against

00:03:16.820 provincial authorities and medical staff regarding a 2009 vaginoplasty. The lawsuit contends that the

00:03:23.780 procedure was performed when Cardinal was just 21, allegedly under financial coercion and fraudulent

00:03:30.680 misrepresentation, and despite her having verbally withdrawn consent to a staff nurse on the day of

00:03:36.600 the surgery. Beyond the lack of informed consent, the claim suggests Cardinal did not meet the necessary

00:03:42.880 medical benchmarks and lacked sufficient psychological preparation for the permanent changes that followed.

00:03:51.420 These stories illustrate the very real life-altering consequences of these modern medical decisions,

00:03:57.680 of evidence-based medicine losing out to apparent activism. Assisted suicide, long-term physical pain,

00:04:04.660 irreversible sterilization, and deep psychological distress are now hallmarks of a system that purports to first

00:04:12.580 do no harm. We can surely be compassionate for those with different proclivities and experiences,

00:04:19.600 challenges, but know that left-leaning activist medicine and offering death in place of timely or quality care,

00:04:27.140 takes us nowhere good. Join myself and John Carpe, President and Founder of the Justice Center for

00:04:33.960 Constitutional Freedoms for this chat. While you are here, take advantage of our promo code,

00:04:39.820 junonews.com slash not sorry for 20% off. John Carpe joins the show. John, great to have you back on.

00:04:47.280 Glad to be with you and your viewers and listeners.

00:04:49.700 Yeah, John, you're the President and Founder of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.

00:04:54.180 I just had the pleasure of meeting you in Calgary during a convention week where you had onlookers

00:05:01.440 and well-wishers and I was introducing you as Canada's great civil libertarian. So it's terrific

00:05:06.540 to have you back here. Well, so glad to be with you again. And yeah, it was great to see you in

00:05:11.440 Calgary over the weekend. Yeah. Thank you for so well informing our listeners. You have your

00:05:17.300 organization has a new report that is startling, important, chilling, but I hope that we can be

00:05:25.600 motivational with this and everyone can be better informed on principles such as informed consent,

00:05:30.200 because we have a assisted suicide crisis. This report highlights that our assisted suicide

00:05:37.900 accounted for 5.1% of all deaths in Canada, 7.9% in Quebec. We're a global leader now in this

00:05:45.700 area. What do these numbers reveal? What are your concerns about this rapid expansion?

00:05:51.640 Well, it's been quite the shift from in 1993, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a decision

00:05:57.660 in a case called Rodriguez. And the Supreme Court upheld the criminal code prohibition

00:06:04.980 on helping another person to kill himself or herself. And for obvious reasons, this law had

00:06:10.840 been with us for generations, perhaps for centuries. Obviously, you've got a legal quagmire if somebody's

00:06:19.280 standing there with a smoking gun and there's a dead person on the floor and the person with the gun

00:06:24.060 says, well, she wanted to commit suicide, so I helped her out. So there's an obvious problem

00:06:30.700 there. If it's legal to help somebody commit suicide, that doesn't really go away. And the

00:06:36.980 Supreme Court said the sanctity of life and the dangers of opening the door, a crack and letting it

00:06:43.680 expand. Nevertheless, only 22 years later, the Supreme Court did 180 degree reversal in a decision called

00:06:51.480 Carter from 2015. And they said that the charter right to life, liberty, security of the person

00:06:58.020 entitles gives you a constitutional right to commit suicide. And with that constitutional right, you also

00:07:04.960 have the right to ask for assistance. And so they struck down this criminal code prohibition. Now, what's

00:07:11.640 interesting is that the court based its decision on bodily autonomy, informed consent. And the court suggested,

00:07:19.740 we're just opening the door, just a crack, this should be used for somebody who is terminally ill,

00:07:26.020 they're going to die in the next few days, weeks, months, they're in severe pain and suffering,

00:07:30.500 and they won't be able to commit suicide on their own, and they need a doctor's help. But this should

00:07:36.160 be a very narrow exception. And so then Parliament in 2016 changed the law. In 2017, the first full 12

00:07:45.800 months of having assisted suicide being legal in Canada, there were just under 3000 Canadians who

00:07:54.280 killed themselves with the help of a doctor. So 3000 in 2017 grew up to 16,499 people in 2024. That's the

00:08:06.520 most recent year for which we have data. So it's gone from this, you know, bodily autonomy, choice,

00:08:14.920 informed consent, unusual rare situation, it's just turned into the fourth leading cause of death in

00:08:22.580 Canada. And currently, the law is that in March of 2027, the law will change again, to allow mentally

00:08:32.400 ill people, including depressed people, to request made medical assistance in dying, I think assisted

00:08:38.180 suicide is a more accurate term, but either way, depressed people will be allowed to ask their

00:08:45.840 psychologist, psychiatrist, doctor, counselor, for help in committing suicide. And it puts all those

00:08:55.140 professionals in a quandary, because traditionally, somebody who wants to kill themselves is deemed to be

00:09:00.980 mentally ill. And you help them to overcome their mental illness by getting them to a place where

00:09:06.920 they no longer want to commit suicide. Yeah, I, we've come a long way from narrowly limited exception,

00:09:13.880 which I believe was the original terminology. It as an individual, the questions and concerns that I

00:09:20.300 think of, by hearing your response there, I think of just the last few years in the medical space,

00:09:29.760 in this mix between sort of social pressures and some aspects of modern progressivism, where we say gender

00:09:41.500 affirming care, for example, it raced headlong through the evidence, it, it became a quick kind of industrial

00:09:48.220 complex, the we're quick to affirm mental illnesses and diagnoses, we have pills for every problem, we industrialize and

00:09:55.980 warehouse our issues instead of deal with them, we. And these are issues that can be heavily influenced by our algorithms,

00:10:02.880 peer pressures, temporary emotional states. Yet, we are offering forever solutions. And nothing is more forever than I call it

00:10:12.520 government suicide. And I can appreciate assisted suicide is the one step removed from made the safe supply barreled through the

00:10:19.840 evidence. We're seeing that fall by the wayside again, certainly the COVID mandates of which many in this audience are

00:10:25.360 familiar with your work, because you are you were on to onto the COVID mandates from the from the early days, we both attended the

00:10:32.080 Freedom Convoy as well. And so looking at this, almost from a political science perspective is where I have I have a great

00:10:40.000 concern. And does it does it remind you in any ways of these of these other kinds of boondoggles of the last few years?

00:10:47.840 Well, there is a tendency that seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, that, you know, there's this thing called

00:10:55.340 the science, right? And you trust and you trust and you not not only are you expected to trust it, but if you disagree

00:11:03.600 with it, you're anti science, you're a Neanderthal, or you're just a really terrible person, you know, you don't care about

00:11:09.320 transgender teenagers committing suicide. You don't care about grandma getting killed by by COVID. You don't care about the

00:11:15.680 planet getting burned into a crisp. And it's just like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, you

00:11:20.820 know, are these measures actually effective? What is the actual data? And when there are studies, let's look

00:11:27.260 at those studies, was it was it a large sample? Were the researchers unbiased? So this is, this has been

00:11:34.280 around for millennia, right, this tendency to not debate issues and to do these, you know, political

00:11:39.980 posturing, name calling, and if you disagree with me, you're anti science, that's not new, but it seems to be getting

00:11:45.480 stronger. When you look at, for example, this whole agenda to tell little Johnny in kindergarten that he's not really a

00:11:54.720 boy, or he might not be a boy, and he could be a girl, or he could become a girl. There's, you know, there's a Swedish study

00:12:03.900 from about 10-15 years ago that tracked transgender people who had fully transitioned

00:12:11.200 medically with all the surgeries. And after transition, their suicide rate was like 19 times

00:12:19.980 higher than the national average. And this is a secular, progressive, non-Christian country that's

00:12:25.440 very open to all of this stuff. And, you know, here's the research. And yet in court actions, it's just

00:12:32.540 routine to see that anybody who disagrees with giving puberty blockers to kids, that you're anti science.

00:12:39.020 Yeah, no, and it doesn't make you a bigot. The way the audience, our audience would have been cast for

00:12:45.260 having those questions or folks like you and me for, because I hear that stat, and I just find that

00:12:49.660 incredibly frustrating and depressing. And it's a human tragedy at scale. As we discussed, we touched on

00:12:56.860 it briefly for those who recall our last chat here on Juneau, I picked up a heart condition out of the

00:13:02.300 COVID vaccine. It was my second Pfizer shot. And I wasn't trying to be some radical Yahoo. I felt

00:13:11.260 very much coerced. I'd already had COVID. I wasn't thrilled about feeling like I needed it to get on

00:13:17.580 a plane to cross my country. And I felt an immense alienation when I was, again, barred from buildings.

00:13:24.540 And I finally went like, you know what, I'm just going to get this over with. And I developed

00:13:28.300 inflammation. I needed a cardiologist. I, I was sent to a hastily assembled cardiology clinic in

00:13:34.380 a basement in downtown Toronto, where there was a line out the door and they were running out of

00:13:38.540 halter monitors. And no one in that lineup were beer drinking, mega hat wearing monster truck drivers.

00:13:47.420 It was a, it was the full Canadian diaspora, all concerned, all kind of making jokes about the

00:13:52.380 situation we were in. These were, these were science trusters. And so it's, it's so frustrating to see,

00:13:59.260 to see the, the, the way we talk about these people, John, the report also warns that, as you

00:14:05.500 mentioned, informed consent is increasingly at risk. Like my big concern, the moment I heard about this

00:14:12.540 expansion is the fact that it is depression. For example, uh, the young infants, people living in

00:14:19.660 poverty, living in poverty, and this is a country where many live in poverty and our economy doesn't

00:14:26.140 tend to grow over the last decade. How does this not just threaten Canadians charter rights, but

00:14:33.100 potentially erode this country? Well, the door, the door was open to crack and now it's open,

00:14:40.620 you know, a foot or two. Yeah. And the, the shift has been away from, I mean, what, what, what the,

00:14:47.740 what the Supreme Court used to, to justify its, its ruling in Carter in 2015 was autonomy and informed

00:14:54.540 consent. And now, uh, not long ago, um, Dr. Louis Roy of the, uh, Collège des Médecins du Québec,

00:15:02.780 the Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons, testified before a parliamentary committee

00:15:07.420 and suggested that we should consider, uh, severely disabled infants should be euthanized. So there's no

00:15:14.380 informed consent there, obviously for, for an infant, uh, as well as seniors who are not thriving.

00:15:22.220 You know, so it's, it's, it's really shifted and, and the social pressure is horrible. Now we don't

00:15:27.900 have data on this, but, but anecdotally I've heard it so often from so many sources that it's become a

00:15:35.100 routine practice all across Canada to offer MAID or offer assisted suicide to patients, uh, just routinely.

00:15:44.700 Um, there's a woman in Calgary who needed some back surgery to get rid of a back problem.

00:15:49.580 And at one point in the preoperative process, I don't know if it was a doctor or nurse or

00:15:54.300 another healthcare worker said, Oh, and by the way, MAID is an option for you as well.

00:15:58.940 This woman was like, she's not terminally ill. She's just in line for back surgery to, to get rid of

00:16:04.700 her back pain. And it's like, you know, would you like MAID? Um, this has come to a real header,

00:16:10.220 especially in British Columbia where the, uh, Delta hospice society had a, um, palliative care

00:16:16.860 facility and, and it was for, there's a lot of patients in Canada, a lot of people in Canada,

00:16:23.260 they don't want to be offered assisted suicide. They find it, you know, more than annoying. They

00:16:28.780 find it offensive and disrespectful. So this facility, the Delta hospice society was shut

00:16:36.220 down by the NDP government in British Columbia because they refused to provide assisted suicide

00:16:42.300 to people who had chosen to be there in a hospice for palliative care. And it's like, no, no,

00:16:48.220 you're not allowed to choose that. Uh, we're involved in a court action in, uh, in Vancouver,

00:16:53.340 their St. Paul's hospital, Catholic hospital does not perform, uh, abortions, euthanasia,

00:17:00.060 sterilization or assisted suicide. Now the hospital compromised, I think they've bent over backwards.

00:17:07.180 They will provide information to patients about MAID or assisted suicide. And if a patient wants that,

00:17:15.180 they will transfer the patient to another hospital or facility that's willing to carry that out.

00:17:21.980 Not good enough says, says the pro suicide group dying with dignity, Canada, they have a lawsuit

00:17:27.420 on the goal. The justice center is involved with it to get a court order to compel St. Paul's

00:17:33.180 Catholic hospitals to actually provide assisted suicide as a treatment. So we'll, we'll see where

00:17:39.420 that goes, but that's not respect, right? It's, it's like, there's no respect for people who want

00:17:47.500 palliative care and they do not want to be offered that suicide option. If they come up with it on their

00:17:53.740 own, they can just request a transfer. Yeah. And thank you for fighting the good fight there because I,

00:17:58.940 I don't want to make a moral judgment, but you, if that's their fight, it's, it's, it's hard for me

00:18:05.180 just as the host who's outside of this to not, uh, to not cast judgment there. So what, what role

00:18:12.060 should the government be playing then in protecting freedom of conscience for medical professionals?

00:18:17.500 Because it's, it's, it's one thing I think to be horrified if you're a member of our audience or a

00:18:21.580 guy like me who gets to talk to an expert here, but, but I have friends who are doctors who object to this

00:18:28.140 policy. I have, heck you talk to any good one and they tell you that they, they see incredible

00:18:35.260 concerns. We're in place of timely care where we're, we're building exit ramps. We're not building,

00:18:39.900 you know, the new hospitals. We're not building a chance for folks to, to see, uh, and, and have

00:18:45.980 a quick surgery or to, or to improve their chances of improvement and, and living a better life. What,

00:18:54.060 how can we better protect the freedom of conscience for our medical professionals, for our

00:18:58.140 for our Catholic hospitals? Well, the conscience rights legislation can be, uh, adopted by, by every

00:19:06.940 province. To me, it's a no brainer. I mean, the, the college of physicians and surgeons in, in every,

00:19:12.460 there's one in every province, they, in their code of ethics, uh, I'm sure our viewers and listeners

00:19:19.260 have heard about the female genital mutilation, um, which barbaric practice in, in parts of Africa

00:19:28.220 and the Middle East. And it's interesting that the college says, the college says to doctors,

00:19:33.740 to medical doctors, you cannot perform, uh, this surgery. I mean, it is a medical procedure, but

00:19:40.940 it's unethical. You can't do it and you cannot refer. And so they're very clear on this. If you refer

00:19:47.660 for, uh, female genital mutilation, you're in violation of, of the code of ethics, but, and that

00:19:54.300 same standard should be applied. Uh, there, there are doctors and nurses who don't want to participate.

00:19:59.020 There are others who are willing to participate in assisted suicide. It's not that complicated. You

00:20:04.620 say that, you know, those who, for who it's a violation of conscience. And often these are

00:20:09.420 not religious people. These are doctors, like some of the ones, you know, um, they're, they're not

00:20:15.580 religious, but they believe that the medical profession should be oriented exclusively to the

00:20:20.860 preservation of life. And they, they will not, uh, do not want to participate in helping somebody to,

00:20:29.020 uh, to kill himself or herself. So that can be handled with, with provincial legislation.

00:20:34.620 Yeah. And federally, you know, parliament for a starter, uh, parliament can change the law so that

00:20:42.300 we do not 13 months from now start offering suicide to depressed people as a treatment.

00:20:48.780 Yeah. And I, I, I personally and anecdotally, I, I've, I've done quite a bit of reading about, um,

00:20:58.140 um, depression care and the impacts of certain drugs or treatments. And it's always,

00:21:06.540 there's no panacea. There's no perfect treatment. There's no, oh, you just take this and you get

00:21:11.820 better. And so the fact that they're brain science is this great unknown and, and constantly involving,

00:21:19.260 and that we're, we're, they think that this is acceptable in place of telling someone to get

00:21:23.900 their, get, you know, get their life together, good habits, uh, work harder. Uh, I worry about,

00:21:30.140 cause you know, you go into a doctor now and you say my back hurts and you're offered, you know,

00:21:33.820 an opiate and it's like, no, or you could, you know, work on strengthening your back or work on, uh,

00:21:39.260 work on, uh, coming at it in a more holistic way. How does offering made in lieu of, of palliative

00:21:44.860 care, mental health supports, other treatments reflect, um, uh, and honestly, I have this actual

00:21:51.020 concern that it, it might be a cost savings metric. I know that to the cynic, um, that might be thinking

00:21:58.620 the same thing. And I am a cynic on this is in this report. Is there, is there a concern or

00:22:02.700 something outlined that this will end up being a cost saving metric? Well, yeah, unfortunately,

00:22:08.380 um, there's a study produced by, uh, some economists and it's referenced in our, uh, in,

00:22:14.140 in our report and, uh, between now and 2047. So in the next 21 years, if, if, if, uh, assisted suicide

00:22:24.140 is promoted even more aggressively, uh, could save taxpayers $1.27 trillion says a thousand times a

00:22:35.340 thousand times a thousand times a thousand is a trillion. I mean, it's an astronomical amount of

00:22:40.700 money. And if, if we were looking at this purely through a financial lens, we should all be in

00:22:45.340 favor of it. We should be promoting it because it is cheaper because the fact is that for, for the

00:22:50.300 average person, and there's exceptions, but for almost, for the vast majority of people,

00:22:56.220 more than half of your total healthcare expenses over the course of your life are incurred in the last

00:23:03.020 two years of your life. Dying is expensive, right? Most of us in our teens, twenties, thirties,

00:23:08.140 forties, fifties, sixties, we're not consuming a lot of healthcare dollars, but it's in the last two

00:23:13.100 years of your life that you become, again, if we're looking at it purely from a financial perspective,

00:23:17.900 the last two years of your life, you are very expensive, right? Because whether it doesn't

00:23:23.260 matter what you got, it's going to be very expensive to deal with. So, um, it's a cultural

00:23:28.940 thing. I mean, do we choose a culture of life or a culture of death? Uh, if you're looking at it only

00:23:33.340 through money, then the, the euthanasia and assisted suicide makes a lot of sense.

00:23:37.900 Yeah. So looking ahead and, and I, and I like leaving our audience with action items. I don't

00:23:43.740 like talking about something grim and, uh, and then just saying like, well, it is what it is.

00:23:49.660 How can Canadians join you in advocating for changes to ensure that informed consent remains

00:23:56.460 non-negotiable that we, we fight for this further expansion to those experiencing potential temporary

00:24:03.980 states of mental illness. And, and, and that assisted suicide does not become a default response

00:24:10.140 to our healthcare challenges, because I, I am frankly ashamed that we are now a world leader.

00:24:15.740 Uh, I'm, I'm ashamed that the UK is following, uh, following our lead. That is not a lead that

00:24:21.180 anyone should want to be following in that regard. How do we, how do we join you? How do we help?

00:24:25.340 Well, people can contact their own member of parliament. I don't care if he or she is,

00:24:30.780 is a conservative liberal NDP green block, um, contact your own MP and say,

00:24:38.780 let's not offer suicide to depress people as a treatment. And, um, we need to, um,

00:24:46.940 we need to change the federal law so that this does not go into effect in, uh, in March of 2027.

00:24:53.340 We're talking 13 months from now, uh, the, the assisted suicide will become available to

00:25:00.220 depressed people. It will be perfectly legal for counselors, psychologists, therapists, doctors,

00:25:06.460 psychiatrists to, uh, to offer that as an option. So that's the first thing. Second thing, provincially,

00:25:11.980 contact your MPP MLA provincial representative and, uh, insist on, on protection for the conscience of,

00:25:22.620 of, uh, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers. And I am, we are looking at, uh, generating

00:25:31.420 a tool to help voters with a letter to an MP. We have one in place right now for, um, uh,

00:25:38.300 the online harms act. There's threats to reintroduce that people can go to our website

00:25:43.260 and click, find out their MP and fire off a letter to their MP saying, please don't introduce bill C 63,

00:25:50.540 the, the, the online harms act. So we are looking at, uh, creating a similar, uh, function that's easy for

00:25:57.660 voters to use to contact their MP about the, uh, assisted suicide.

00:26:02.700 Perfect. John, you're Canada's great civil libertarian. Thanks for joining us.

00:26:06.460 Thank you.

Juno News - February 03, 2026

Canada has an assisted suicide CRISIS

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