Juno News - October 09, 2023


Has ‘death care’ replaced health care？


Episode Stats

Length

10 minutes

Words per Minute

170.00807

Word Count

1,826

Sentence Count

95

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Obviously, the death of free speech is incredibly important, but it is an issue that pales in
00:00:13.520 comparison to some of the very real and very mounting deaths that are taking place across
00:00:18.600 the country because of MAID, the euphemistic name for doctor-assisted suicide, which is
00:00:25.940 quickly making Canada a very unlikely and I would say unpleasant capital around the world,
00:00:32.060 even more than many places in Europe. And when you compare the Canadian story to
00:00:35.800 that of, say, California, it is particularly egregious that this has been something that
00:00:40.820 Canadians have embraced, except maybe not. The Canadian government seems to be putting
00:00:45.600 forward an approach on this that is incredibly liberal and incredibly open, but Canadians are
00:00:51.000 even generally socially progressive Canadians finding themselves a little bit uncomfortable
00:00:55.960 with the status quo, certainly as we move to further this liberalization by expanding assisted
00:01:02.260 dying to those who have solely mental illness, as we have stories of people whose issues are not
00:01:07.740 even medical in nature, but to do with housing or inequality or poverty. This was put under the
00:01:14.920 microscope in a fantastic, but I will also say chilling piece in the National Review by Alexander
00:01:21.620 Raikin, How Death Care Pushed Out Healthcare. Alexander joins me on the line now. It's good to talk to you.
00:01:28.760 Thanks so much for coming on today. It's a pleasure to be on. So, I mean, you've written about this in the
00:01:35.020 past and this is one of these issues. I mean, the Freedom Convoy was one, these internet regulations we were
00:01:41.020 talking about are one, but this issue is one that I'm getting people that I know from around the world
00:01:44.880 coming to me and saying, what's going on in your country? Is that similar to reaction you've seen
00:01:50.560 from National Review readers? Oh, 100%. I mean, the earlier speakers said that if you violate the
00:01:58.900 criminal code, you'll face repercussions. There's an exemption to it. If you're a physician in Canada
00:02:03.580 who provides medical assistance in dying, you don't face any repercussions for talking or even
00:02:11.360 violating the criminal code. So one of the cases that I talk about is a patient who was, it's a
00:02:18.340 group of physicians flippantly discussing sedating a patient into me. This would be unthinkable just a
00:02:26.760 couple years ago. And yet, no repercussions, no investigations, no apologies. And this is part of the
00:02:34.680 course of for how MAID functions in Canada.
00:02:39.240 One of the things and you touched on this, and I'm glad you did, because it's often missing from the story is
00:02:44.360 that there is the letter of the law and the letter of the regulations. And then there's the actual practice on the
00:02:50.040 ground. And it's long been established, even when MAID restrictions were fairly stringent in nature,
00:02:56.520 that there were situations where these rules were being bended, where capacity rules, eligibility rules
00:03:02.840 were. And if you keep that pattern in place, and you expand the regulations, it stands to reason that
00:03:09.080 it will become even more permissive as time goes on. Exactly. Every day in 2021, and I'm saying 2021,
00:03:17.480 because we're still waiting on the 2022 data. But every day in 2021, more than 29 Canadians died by
00:03:24.280 the hands of their physicians or nurses. That's double the official suicide rate. If we were talking
00:03:29.320 about any other group of people, if we were talking about any other people besides people with disabilities,
00:03:36.280 who were being impacted by this, this would be a national tragedy. And yet, I don't really see this
00:03:42.200 being recorded in mainstream media in Canada. No, and I'm kind of curious about this. And I'm not
00:03:48.680 second guessing your approach to publish it in an American outlet. But I'm wondering why you think
00:03:53.560 Canadian media has not been as interested to do this deep dive. That's a good question. I mean,
00:04:00.440 we definitely know that there is an element of bias in all of this. CBC, they had a pretty good
00:04:07.240 investigative report on the Fifth Estate that looked into all the ways that MAID was falling
00:04:13.160 short in Canada. And yet, unlike other Fifth Estate investigations, it was never pushed on CBC's
00:04:19.480 website. It was only on cable, which is pretty jarring. Now, like they have other reports that are
00:04:25.000 pushed to their online newspaper. And yet, with MAID, for some reason, editors decided not to do that.
00:04:34.680 And you can see this throughout the whole gamut of conversations around MAID.
00:04:40.360 One of the things that I found interesting was situating Canada in the global context,
00:04:45.080 because I used to, when this issue came up, look to the Netherlands and Switzerland, I think,
00:04:50.360 and be like, oh, although like, we're never going to... I don't know if I would have ever said we're
00:04:53.880 never going to be like that. But I certainly would have said we're far off from that. Whereas,
00:04:58.440 how would you actually, having done the research and the legwork, rank Canada against some of those
00:05:03.000 really permissive approaches to this in Europe?
00:05:06.920 Oh, I mean, we already have the largest and most permissive assisted suicide program in the world.
00:05:13.400 In the Netherlands and Belgium, they have additional safeguards where if a patient wants to apply
00:05:18.440 for euthanasia or assisted suicide, they have to at least try some acceptable level of medical
00:05:25.160 treatment first, right? This is a very commonsensical safeguard. In the Netherlands,
00:05:30.120 physicians would not push MAID onto patients. And yet we have stories of exactly that. In the
00:05:37.000 Netherlands, there were review processes. There are no such review processes in Canada.
00:05:41.640 So it's, I mean, we're already far ahead. I mean, just look at the numbers, right? Between, you know,
00:05:46.440 over a span of seven years, we're on track to have a 13 fold increase in the number of euthanasia and
00:05:52.440 the number of deaths from euthanasia. We have never seen that anywhere in the world.
00:05:56.600 Amanda Act, actually, Sean, if you could get that picture that I sent you from Amanda Actman in the
00:06:05.320 queue, I want to show that in a couple of moments here, because I'll ask you about where you think
00:06:11.480 this goes from here. Because I do feel like the government, when it loosened the restrictions and put
00:06:16.600 that change in place on the mental illness aspect, that was a turning point. And that was what moved this
00:06:24.040 from a lot of like into a territory where a lot of people were very uncomfortable this and even
00:06:30.120 people that you wouldn't call social conservatives or, or pro-life activists. Do you see that
00:06:34.600 continuing? Or do you think like anything else, people will talk about it for a couple of moments,
00:06:38.680 and then kind of forget about it and move on?
00:06:41.480 I don't think people are going to be able to forget about this or move on. I mean, just look at the
00:06:46.360 just look at the disability community, you have over 140, over 140 disability organizations
00:06:52.680 nationwide, saying that the latest expansion to MAID was a direct threat to their lives over 140.
00:06:59.320 You have the United Nations, several human rights experts at the United Nations condemning Canada
00:07:06.360 for expanding MAID to those who are not terminally ill. And even those who are terminally ill are dying at a
00:07:11.880 later stage than in other jurisdictions. So it's, it's pretty fascinating to think about this,
00:07:19.560 right? We had over again, over 140 disability organizations, pretty much every single major
00:07:24.440 disability organization in Canada, made a firm statement against MAID. You had another letter that
00:07:30.760 came out of earlier this year. And yet the reaction from Canadian media has been pretty abysmal. And the
00:07:39.080 reaction from the government has been even less. So I don't think that people are going to be able to
00:07:44.280 forget this or move on. But when we're talking about the massive normalization that certain lives
00:07:49.800 are not worth living. Amanda Actman, who's a pro-life advocate and speaker, I forget where she's based
00:07:57.800 now, she's moved around, she shared this image that I wanted to show you in the audience. This is an 88 year
00:08:04.280 old woman from Calgary named Christine Nagel, who, if you can make that out, had tattoo, never had a
00:08:10.600 tattoo in her life, but at 88 got tattooed on her arm. Don't euthanize me. And you can say it's a bit
00:08:16.920 cheeky and feisty. Sorry, she's 81, not 88. My apologies. You can say it's a bit cheeky and feisty. But
00:08:23.480 you know, at a certain point, there must be some people that genuinely live with a sense of fear
00:08:28.920 that their life will be ended when they're no longer in a position to say, I don't want this.
00:08:36.200 Right. I mean, the impact is not just on physicians who are being censored, and we can discuss that,
00:08:41.000 or hospitals that are effectively being defunded, because they're choosing healthcare over death
00:08:46.520 care. The largest impact is on patients, patients like Rachel, who I spoke to, and I talk about in my
00:08:53.960 piece. She's someone who is someone with disabilities. She has chronic disabilities.
00:08:58.840 She has a chronic pain condition. She has depression. And yet when she tried to get help
00:09:04.440 for her depression by calling suicide hotlines, she was instead being advised to look up Dying
00:09:11.000 with Dignity Canada. Like, think about what that means. You call it a suicide prevention hotline,
00:09:16.200 and instead you're getting recommended ways for you to die from assisted suicide.
00:09:22.120 And she said, and I'll read this quote, I've been afraid, you know, over those last couple of years
00:09:26.840 to go to just my local hospital, because I was afraid that if any doctor either brought up maid
00:09:31.800 themselves or met my kind of ambivalent desire for maid, all I needed was a push, and I'll be dead
00:09:37.000 right now. What she ended up needing to do was to purchase a bus ticket for an hour, like for an hour
00:09:43.800 and a half away. She had to go all the way to Toronto to CAMAGE, which is a mental health hospital,
00:09:48.280 the largest mental health hospital in Canada that does not allow maid on site in order for her to
00:09:55.160 attempt to get healthcare. And we know how broken the healthcare system is. So it doesn't seem to be
00:10:00.920 kind of a coincidence that you have the largest expansion of euthanasia ever seen in the world
00:10:07.000 in a voluntary euthanasia system happening at the same time that Canada's healthcare system is
00:10:11.720 disintegrating. Well, it's a very important story. And you've touched on Rachel's story and many
00:10:17.640 others in the feature you wrote for the National Review, which is in this month's issue and also
00:10:22.760 online, how death care pushed out healthcare. Alexander Raikin, very good work on this. And thank
00:10:28.520 you for coming on today. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.
00:10:34.440 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news