Juno News - December 04, 2022


MAiD in Canada has clearly gone off the rails

Mentioned
David Lamedi Cardis
Does this look like a country where protesting is allowed？ Conservative MP slams Veterans Affairs minister over assisted suicide reports

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

201.28

Word count

705

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the growing tide of liberal support for medically assisted dying in Canada, and why I think it needs to be called a timeout. I also talk about why I don't think this is a partisan issue and why a reversal is needed.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So I was just out running errands, sitting in a coffee shop, reading some articles on medically
00:00:04.520 assisted dying in Canada. Yep, seeing people's social media responses, seeing what liberal
00:00:10.820 cabinet ministers have been saying about the issue. And I said, Fury, you got to do your next
00:00:15.320 video on this. I mean, I just felt so passionate about it. And I hopped in the car and I said,
00:00:19.260 you know, I just got to record it right now. I'm just so, so passionate about this. It just can't
00:00:23.280 wait. Crazy stories. One of our veterans, disabled veteran, she calls up Veterans Affairs Canada,
00:00:30.000 and says, you know, I'm laughing. It's not funny. I'm laughing because it's so, it's in the realm
00:00:35.200 of the absurd. It's just ridiculous. She calls up and she says, I'd like to get a new ramp installed. 0.97
00:00:40.360 Okay, well, you know, the ramp will take some delays. So, you know, have you considered medically
00:00:44.080 assisted dying? Like what? It's a government employee speaking to one of our veterans. Like
00:00:52.140 this is madness. And I will tell you back, back when Parliament realized that they had to cobble
00:00:58.900 together some legislation to allow some form of assisted dying in Canada, I was, like many people,
00:01:05.320 you know, I was supportive of the idea that, fine, we have adults of sound mind who are in these health
00:01:11.400 positions where, you know, they're a late stage four cancer. They have awful ALS. And at the very end,
00:01:18.180 they wish to, you know, preempt that by a couple of weeks or what have you, by making this very
00:01:22.040 personal decision. Maybe I wouldn't make it myself, or maybe I wouldn't wish on loved ones, but,
00:01:25.540 you know, who am I to judge in those scenarios? And a lot of people at the time, I wrote columns
00:01:29.500 about this, whatever it was, six years ago, seven years ago. And people said, you know,
00:01:33.540 we're embarking on a slippery slope. And I said, well, I don't, I don't think we are yet. But,
00:01:37.940 you know, when we get there, I'll, you know, I'll acknowledge it. And oh boy, we are not at a
00:01:42.360 slippery slope right now. We are just, we are just speeding off the cliff. The things that are going on
00:01:49.060 right now in this country, we used to talk about things in European countries as wild, but what's going
00:01:53.960 on in Canada is just so wild. And here's the thing, to hear cabinet ministers like Justice
00:01:59.420 Minister David Lamedi, who's on a Toronto Star podcast, talking about this stuff. And now the
00:02:04.200 think tank, Cardis, is calling on him to clarify and apologize because he was talking about assisted
00:02:09.680 suicide in very cavalier ways. And it's like, what's going on? I don't think what I'm saying
00:02:14.320 and what Canadians are feeling right now is a partisan issue at all. Things have gone off the
00:02:19.960 rails. And I think people of most walks of life, of most political backgrounds, liberal,
00:02:24.080 conservative, NDP, Green Party voters, whatever, they're looking at this and they're going,
00:02:28.420 how did it get to this point where things are just so liberal, where you have those other stories
00:02:33.220 about, about persons who are facing homelessness and issues of despair. And they're being told,
00:02:39.600 yeah, sure. You know, this is an option, medically assisted suicide. What? This is very different
00:02:44.380 than someone in great, great pain, irreversible pain towards the end of their life anyway,
00:02:50.100 taking up this option. We've just suddenly opened the floodgates wildly. And I know people who are
00:02:55.980 advocates for persons with disabilities, persons with disabilities themselves, stepping forward,
00:02:59.980 saying, I'm worried about what this means for me. And you can't blame people for going, what does
00:03:05.240 this mean? Now there's concerns about the degree to which minors might be involved in the way these
00:03:11.180 things can be expanded. And yeah, you've got to be concerned because the stuff we're hearing is just
00:03:15.360 so crazy and so unexpected. This issue is just off the rails and it's more than a timeout that's
00:03:22.240 needed. A reversal is absolutely needed. And I think it's a totally nonpartisan issue that,
00:03:27.580 wow, pretty much everybody is going to agree on.