True Patriot Love - [Sneak Peek] The MAID Program ft Tom Koch

00:00:00.000 Hi and thanks for joining us. This is tplmedia.ca, tplmedia.ca slash local. I'm Mike Wixson.

00:00:06.660 Medical assistance in dying, or MAID, has become one of the most debated public policy issues in

00:00:11.600 Canadian history. Supporters see it as a compassionate choice that gives people

00:00:15.440 dignity and control at the end of life. Critics argue that as eligibility has expanded, so have

00:00:21.080 concerns about safeguards, vulnerable Canadians, disability rights, mental illness, and whether

00:00:26.620 our health care system is offering enough support before offering an assisted death.

00:00:32.260 It's a conversation that touches medicine, ethics, law, and the values we hold as a country.

00:00:37.860 Joining us today is author, medical ethicist, and health policy expert Tom Koch, who spent

00:00:43.020 years examining Canada's approach to MAID and asking whether we've struck the right

00:00:47.180 balance between personal autonomy and protecting those most at risk.

00:00:51.480 tom thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us on this very complex uh and frankly

00:01:02.340 interesting topic of medical assistance in dying or uh made as it is known i appreciate your time

00:01:10.360 on this i'm pleased to be here this is something i've worked on as a caregiver for my own in my

00:01:18.380 own family as a researcher as an investigative reporter i served as consultant to justice

00:01:24.380 candidate in its legal cases as a researcher as an ethicist writing about it since the 1980s

00:01:31.720 so i go back to when we both had hair on our heads hey you know what i remember the era

00:01:37.380 specifically uh you know that is a long time to focus on a topic you must have had

00:01:45.260 caregiving for your dad must have been a real impactful moment in your life it certainly it

00:01:53.480 was and afterwards so many people wrote me i did a book on other caregivers i've worked with over

00:01:59.380 150 200 families and in the best of cases and in many cases it becomes a positively life-changing

00:02:08.020 event to be the caregiver for somebody for whom you love yeah and whether you are a spouse whether

00:02:16.980 you are a daughter a granddaughter and sometimes even a neighbor the issue of caring unto death

00:02:23.380 becomes an important thing and as an investigative reporter uh when i began to see the way this was

00:02:34.740 being misapplied and misused i dealt with other cases uh so that's why in the last year two years

00:02:43.060 ago i decided to take all of the work i have done since 1996 uh and put it into a new book

00:02:52.100 seeking medicine's medical center where i could review the cases and where i could say what have

00:02:57.780 we learned and how do we see all of this as an emotional issue an ethical issue and a social

00:03:04.980 issue at once and we are dealing better with it in some ways than in others what ways are we dealing

00:03:12.900 it and you say from the 80s on what ways are we dealing with it better now than we ever have in

00:03:18.900 that experience for you one of the things medical termination legal medical termination that's the

00:03:25.780 the Dutch term for our polite medical aid in dying.

00:03:31.140 One of the things it has done

00:03:33.220 is it has brought many people in the caring community,

00:03:37.500 the people who reflexively care for their relatives

00:03:41.320 to the fore and the idea of caring for people

00:03:45.560 with fragilities as an important thing to do.

00:03:49.220 And we didn't really think about this so much in the 70s

00:03:52.220 or in the early 80s.

00:03:53.500 So as our generation, my generation has aged, it's become a little more necessary for some, but what we come down to is rather than focusing on what they call dying with dignity, let's focus on living with dignity despite restrictions.

00:04:13.940 And until we can assure people the likelihood of living with dignity despite restrictions,

00:04:20.260 providing the care to the caregivers and the person, then we're asking people to play Russian

00:04:26.420 roulette with a loaded revolver. And that is neither ethical nor sensible.

00:04:32.500 So where do we lose our way on this path between what is good and reasonable and humane and kind

00:04:40.660 and what is defined maybe as not good use of this medical assistance we lost our way i think in

00:04:53.140 several spots one of them was ethically the insistence on autonomy that everybody can make

00:05:00.740 their own decision everybody knows what's right for them uh i cannot tell you how many times

00:05:06.740 somebody has told me i would rather die than not be able to drive a car i would rather die than be

00:05:13.220 able have to have a have a colostomy i either had a german fellow in his 70s back when i was young

00:05:20.340 who had a colorectal cancer and needed a colostomy and he said he didn't want to live like that he

00:05:26.260 wasn't going to use a bag to go to the bathroom and his son and his wife and everybody ganged up

00:05:31.940 on him and he found that if he could put on a cummerbund over his tuxedo and still go to the

00:05:38.660 annual german dances life was still worth living i remember another time when i was working in a

00:05:47.540 rehab hospital and there was a beautiful rehab uh technician physical therapist a sort of nordic

00:05:56.820 looking a woman blonde large brother well-built uh and this fellow freddie was wielded we'll

00:06:04.980 call him freddie and he had lost his leg just below his knee in a car accident and freddie

00:06:10.260 was about 23. and so we'll call her heidi said well freddie you ready to get to work 0.98

00:06:18.020 oh he said screw you i can't do nothing without my goddamn leg what do you think i'm gonna do 0.98

00:06:23.380 that's how he looked and said okay take him back the next day i was down there again and they 0.99

00:06:29.860 brought freddie again heidi said freddie ready to get to work sorry i can't do nothing nothing

00:06:36.580 you can do to grow my new leg she said no she said what can you take him back well i got very

00:06:44.740 interested in this being something of a voyeur so the next day it was friday

00:06:50.100 comes down same thing happens she leans forward puts her hands on the wheel on the arms of her 0.94

00:06:58.540 wheels his wheels here she said freddie you're not going to screw anybody if you can't get out 0.98

00:07:03.500 of the goddamn chair turn back send him to his room i was there an hour early monday to see how 0.97

00:07:12.440 this turned out monday freddie comes down and he says to hi he says so do we sort of have an 0.99

00:07:19.440 agreement the will to live heidi leaned forward she put her hands on his wheelchair bent right 0.92

00:07:30.300 into his face she said cupcake the only agreement to get is the ability to try take him back up the

00:07:39.340 room next day he comes down she says well freddie you ready to get to work he said yes ma'am

00:07:50.320 I learned more from that moment in that woman than in all the ethics courses I went to.

00:07:57.040 We all mourn what we have lost. The life we lived is over. He was not going to become

00:08:04.240 a professional footballer. But when we mourn what we have lost, we need to also look to what we can

00:08:11.440 live with and what we can do with what we have. And often it is as good as or better than what

00:08:17.680 was with care uh i did some work with a parent quad for lead paraplegics some years ago and

00:08:25.280 there were studies which showed that in the first six months people with spinal injuries

00:08:31.280 have over 90 percent suicidal ideation that is they don't want to live especially if they're

00:08:38.800 quadriplegics and that's pretty serious i mean paraplegic is bad enough

00:08:45.360 quads is really 90 over 90 percent two years later

00:08:51.440 two-thirds of them found that life was equally worth living if different and sometimes even a

00:08:56.480 little better they had to jettison all the things of the life that had one with an airplane pilot

00:09:04.240 who i talked to well he wasn't going to fly a plane basically the quad he had jumped into a

00:09:09.520 swimming cool junk drunk when there was no water in the swimming pool but his wife stood by him

00:09:15.120 and his kids he found another way to work somewhat from his wheelchair and what he found was that

00:09:22.960 without all the detritus of his life that the life with his family the life even with these

00:09:32.720 limits was still worthwhile and even better yeah it's incredible it's incredible in a lifetime the

00:09:40.560 people that you'll meet and you know i i have a i remember a friend saying to me there is no limit

00:09:46.640 to the amount of pain a person might experience in their life and that is the truth but then you think

00:09:53.600 Think about it.

True Patriot Love - July 07, 2026

[Sneak Peek] The MAID Program ft Tom Koch

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