Western Standard - March 15, 2024


'MAiD： the made in Canada solution to end of life health costs'

Mentioned
Dave
The failure of addiction enablement ideology Budget 2024： Investing in Alberta’s artists

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

156.45

Word count

581

Sentence count

57

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the controversial case of a woman who was granted an assisted death for her terminal cancer patient. Her family and supporters are fighting to keep her alive, and the judge is weighing in on whether or not to allow her to die.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The MAID statistics in Canada are quite staggering.
00:00:03.400 We're leading the world and killing people.
00:00:06.200 And not just by a little bit.
00:00:07.700 The growth is exponential.
00:00:10.840 Thousands and thousands of people in Quebec alone.
00:00:13.340 I think it was 15,600 or so last year.
00:00:17.540 Sorry, in 2022, we don't have the three numbers yet.
00:00:20.820 It was 10,000 the year before.
00:00:23.100 It had been 5,000 the year before that.
00:00:25.160 So, yes, an exponential growth.
00:00:26.380 There's funeral homes in Quebec City that are setting up shop.
00:00:30.000 Come to us. 0.92
00:00:31.640 You can die here and be basically in your coffin already. 1.00
00:00:35.360 I mean, it really is. 0.75
00:00:36.700 It is frightening.
00:00:37.960 And I think you're right.
00:00:39.320 I mean, we're all fathers here.
00:00:41.640 We'd do anything for our children, anything to keep them alive.
00:00:45.240 And, you know, what is the right?
00:00:48.720 What is the right of an adult?
00:00:49.700 When can an adult not make proper decisions?
00:00:57.440 And I don't know if that's really up to a maid doctor or something. 0.98
00:01:01.700 I'm not sure who makes that decision.
00:01:02.900 And as you said, I mean, as the judge said, is it complicated and difficult?
00:01:07.460 There will never be an easy answer to that one.
00:01:10.880 He says he wants to make a ruling quickly.
00:01:13.440 This woman was scheduled to die April 1st. 0.99
00:01:16.040 April 1st.
00:01:17.020 And he says, look, there's no point in appealing this.
00:01:19.760 So, you know, over years, because by that point, this woman will be dead. 0.82
00:01:24.000 And she will have got her an assisted suicide and appeals become meaningless. 1.00
00:01:28.820 So, yeah, it's going to go through the court system quite rapidly, I think.
00:01:32.960 Yeah.
00:01:33.760 And it's tragic, tragic.
00:01:35.140 You know, this is something that's kind of always been there.
00:01:38.340 But in the background, I mean, we've always kind of known the terminal cancer patient.
00:01:43.300 His caregiver might leave the room and say, there's your morphine button.
00:01:46.680 And, you know, if you push it once, it'll make you comfortable.
00:01:49.600 Be careful not to push it four times or it would give you an overdose.
00:01:52.480 I mean, that did happen.
00:01:56.140 It's more formalized kind of now.
00:01:59.760 But, you know, I think the fact that the three of us are trying to have this highly emotive situation
00:02:07.800 talked about in a dispassionate way, it's very hard.
00:02:13.700 And I think we need to say that very, very sympathetic to the individuals involved and the pain that they feel.
00:02:24.940 So, being in a mental frame where death looks like a good option is something that we need to feel enormous sympathy for.
00:02:38.960 The father and the case have great empathy for somebody like that.
00:02:47.500 But, you know, they do say that hard cases make bad law.
00:02:53.240 And in the end, preserving life has got to be the priority because you can get a second chance to litigate this.
00:03:04.900 But if somebody lives through the first court hearing, but you don't get a second chance if it's all over.
00:03:11.800 And the precedent that this could set could be horrible.
00:03:17.340 Absolutely.
00:03:18.100 Well, we'll watch and see.
00:03:20.280 Yeah, we should err on the side of life when it comes to these things in my view.
00:03:23.560 Just to be highly provocative, look at all the kids who are coming up with, they're getting their sex change. 0.85
00:03:29.780 They wait five years and suddenly find that this is terrible.
00:03:33.820 There are already high suicide rates amongst people who have had sex change operations.
00:03:38.280 I thought we were going to go an entire show without talking about gender.
00:03:42.180 Sorry, Dave.