Western Standard - MAID violations widespread, ethicist says

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. My name is Leah Muschett. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard. And

00:00:14.000 today I have a guest named Alexander Raikin. He is a visiting fellow in the bioethics technology

00:00:20.800 and human flourishing program at the ethics and public policy center. He focuses his research on

00:00:27.360 dignity of human life and end of life issues, which also is related to our topic today, which is

00:00:34.080 made. He's done a few investigative pieces on this issue. And I thought it was very relevant

00:00:39.040 considering in the news of past past month, there has been a case where a 38 year old Canadian man

00:00:47.120 with youth euthanized, and his heart was donated to a 59 year old American man. So this is also

00:00:53.840 relevant because you're also based in the US right now in Washington. So but anyways,

00:01:02.000 my first question to you is, in your investigative work, you were talking a lot about how lots of

00:01:10.240 there's been lots of non compliance issues by medical practitioners in MAID, especially in Ontario,

00:01:17.120 in Quebec, at least there's been basically like audits on the topic of this. So why don't you tell

00:01:24.640 us a little bit how these medical professionals haven't been following following criminal law in

00:01:30.320 regards to Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a great question. So I would also say, having grown up in

00:01:36.560 Canada, I also feel that my heart is in Canada, even though I'm working in the US. But this is pretty

00:01:42.240 grim. So it will, to start out with, in theory, Canada should have one of the strictest laws on

00:01:49.680 euthanasia, because it's written in our criminal code, right? So it's in the criminal code of Canada

00:01:54.560 that MAID is theoretically regulated and legalized. The issues is that sometimes those legal safeguards 0.94

00:02:02.880 are not being followed by practitioners. So I wrote a report that looked in Ontario,

00:02:07.360 the chief coroner of Ontario found somewhere around that one in four MAID providers were failing to

00:02:14.080 follow some sort of regulation or law. In Quebec, we know that there are, you know, as of now,

00:02:21.840 there have been hundreds of cases where MAID practitioners failed to follow the law. And in fact,

00:02:28.240 every single annual report since I believe something like 2022, in Quebec, by Quebec's independent

00:02:35.280 commission that audits these sort of MAID reports that you were talking about, they actually invented

00:02:40.960 a new category of underlying illness that qualifies for MAID, which is, to wit, no illness that qualifies

00:02:49.920 under Quebec's law, right? So they're literally recording under, you know, when they're detailing

00:02:56.480 patients who died from underlying illness with cancer, with, you know, with different types of

00:03:04.240 cancers, with ALS, and then there's also reporting category of no illness that would qualify under

00:03:09.840 Quebec's provincial law, right? And this is official provincial reporting. So I think that that should

00:03:15.840 tell you sort of, A, the scale, and B, the extent that this is happening. And the fact also of that there's

00:03:22.400 pretty much no real consequences for medical practitioners who violate the criminal code in Canada.

00:03:31.200 Yeah, that's actually insane, because if they're violating the criminal code, like, why aren't they

00:03:37.040 receiving any punishment? But in that regards, so even though, so they're violating the law,

00:03:43.760 and they've been audited by, I don't recall the names of the people who were auditing them,

00:03:48.800 but in those cases, did you read any, like, statements by the two men, the Ontario person and the

00:03:56.400 Quebec person, saying, like, these people should be punished in some way, they should be at least,

00:04:03.200 like, reprimanded, or we should introduce these new standards, like, anything like that?

00:04:08.400 So the problem is, okay, the problem is really with, like, the prosecutors in those provinces,

00:04:16.800 and the problems with the Minister of Justice in those provinces. So for instance,

00:04:22.080 the independent commissions, it's Commission sur les soins de la vie, or like Commission on End of Life

00:04:29.680 in Quebec, that commission doesn't have any powers on its own to, well, to discipline anyone, right?

00:04:38.640 All that they're doing is that they're looking at the chart reviews of different made devs,

00:04:43.680 and then they're determining if those made devs follow the law or didn't follow the law.

00:04:48.080 Then they're sending those out to every single case to the Quebec's College of Health,

00:04:54.240 the Quebec's College of Health, Quebec's College of Physicians.

00:04:57.680 And then the Quebec's College of Physicians has then the ability to then further send those on

00:05:02.880 to the police. The issue is that the Quebec's College of Physicians, even in those cases where the

00:05:08.400 people who died from under pain did not have an illness that would qualify under Quebec's law,

00:05:14.000 and under, you know, under the federal law on MAID. Even in those cases, the Quebec's College of

00:05:22.240 Physicians has refused to really entertain any serious investigation. You know, I also reported

00:05:30.720 earlier that there was a physician who was, you know, who warned about the cases of, or who

00:05:38.960 who cautioned against legalizing MAID for people with dementia. And then, and he tested like this

00:05:47.120 in Parliament, right, so in Ottawa. And the Quebec's College of Physicians response was to investigate him

00:05:54.000 for spreading misinformation. Okay, so they're investigating the completely wrong people.

00:05:58.960 And in that case, it was completely, you know, they found that he committed nothing untoward,

00:06:05.360 considering he was testifying to a parliamentary committee. And this is also, I should also say,

00:06:10.640 the Quebec's College of Physicians is also the same college that was urging Parliament to expand

00:06:16.560 euthanasia to neonates, right, to infants. Which, Inclusion Canada, which is one of the leading 1.00

00:06:24.880 disability organizations in Canada for children and adults with intellectual disabilities,

00:06:30.240 refer to that as simply murder. So that's on Quebec's side. On Ontario's side, I can't really

00:06:39.360 explain. The coroner of Ontario, he has not sent a single case to the police to investigate. The coroner

00:06:48.960 has, the provincial coroner in Ontario has a lot of powers that you could use to actually

00:06:54.400 investigate some of these cases. And we know that, you know, if you do not follow the exact detailed

00:07:01.760 safeguards and eligibility criteria under Canada's federal law, that you are breaking a criminal law.

00:07:07.920 Whatever reason, the chief coroner of Ontario has not really done anything about that. And in fact,

00:07:16.480 he's been, and this is a problem that's been going on for many, many years. The last public

00:07:21.760 statement that the chief coroner of Ontario made was a letter to every single Ontario healthcare

00:07:27.200 practitioner warning of repeated compliance concerns with MAID, with MAID providers, excuse me,

00:07:37.520 not following the criminal code, right? So he was referring to violations, compliance concerns with the

00:07:45.440 criminal code. In a healthy, normal society, that would raise red flags. And after the chief coroner

00:07:56.480 of Ontario warned about this, that was the last public statement, but then he made many, many

00:08:02.560 other statements to, internally to physicians and nurses, including MAID providers, that he also,

00:08:10.960 that that exact same problem has continued over the years and in many ways has actually expanded

00:08:16.640 with the number of violations rising quite precipitously. And yet there's been nothing,

00:08:22.720 right? There's been nothing that was done. One of the results of actually my reporting on this,

00:08:26.640 sorry, you have to laugh because it's so absurd, was that I sent a question to the chief coroner of Ontario

00:08:34.400 and I should also mention, it's been the same chief coroner, I believe, since the paint has been

00:08:40.080 legalized. I think he was on that job, which was 2015, where it was effectively decriminalized in 2016,

00:08:46.080 when it was legalized. But I sent an email, you know, asking him about these issues and what he was

00:08:53.040 thinking about it. And, you know, I also mentioned that under his office's interpretation of the federal

00:09:02.320 rules, that if there was a minor who was euthanized, that according to the consequences

00:09:12.160 that he reported, that he would not refer to that case to the police, right? So in that hypothetical

00:09:18.800 situation of a minor getting, being euthanized. And I asked him, why is that? And his response was,

00:09:26.240 on second thought, I would actually report that to the police. So he did update that on.

00:09:31.120 Wow.

00:09:32.000 On the provincial. I think that kind of tells you everything, right? Like under candidate,

00:09:38.160 in the criminal code, right? It explicitly says, it explicitly states different eligibility criteria,

00:09:44.000 right? So you need to have a qualifying illness or disability. You need to 0.87

00:09:49.440 you need to, you need to be over the age of 18. It needs to be in an advanced state of decline,

00:09:54.560 right? And there's other eligibility criteria and safeguards, or theoretical safeguards, I should say,

00:09:59.360 that are opposed, that are part of all this. And if you think that a minor being euthanized is not

00:10:05.440 something that you would immediately report to the police, as not only as a healthcare practitioner,

00:10:10.160 but as a public bureaucrat, what are we even doing here? And I think it explains a lot of this.

00:10:16.400 There was another case that I also reported on, which was the chief coroner of Ontario describing

00:10:21.040 a blaming case where a maid provider just plainly didn't follow the law. I mean, in that case,

00:10:29.440 according to the chief coroner of Ontario, the maid provider didn't even know any of the rules,

00:10:37.920 and she didn't know what the protocol was. She used the wrong medication,

00:10:42.320 according to chief coroner's office, or according to chief coroner of Ontario,

00:10:47.920 the patient and the family suffered tremendously from that. It was definitely not a quote, unquote,

00:10:52.960 dignified death. And the response to that, to that blatant violation, was not even a license

00:11:00.640 suspension, right? So this physician is still practicing medicine in Ontario, last time I checked.

00:11:08.480 She was only not allowed to practice palliative care, unless she was supervised, and she was not

00:11:13.760 allowed to provide assessments or to perform euthanasia. But think what this means, right? If

00:11:20.320 if you don't even know any of the safeguards, right, and you essentially torture a patient

00:11:27.280 with just providing whatever ad hoc medical supplies you have that you believe will kill the patient.

00:11:37.200 And the response to quite blatantly, according to chief coroner of Ontario, is causing suffering to

00:11:46.480 the patient and the family. And the response to that is that you can still remain a physician in

00:11:52.880 good standing in Ontario. I mean, it shows that the criminal safeguards aren't worth anything.

00:11:59.760 They're not being forced, they're not being followed. And patients and family members are

00:12:05.040 suffering tremendously from it. Yeah, wow. Yeah. Like, from all that you've said so far,

00:12:13.280 it just makes me think like, there has to be is there like incentives for people to like,

00:12:18.080 have like, have like a certain number of like maid patients? Yeah, I mean, it's fee by service,

00:12:25.680 like anything else in medicine, right? So, or fee per service, excuse me. So yeah, I mean, there's

00:12:32.560 really, you know, if you're being paid by the maid assessment, and you're being paid by the

00:12:39.680 maid provision, we we know that look, the vast majority of physicians and nurses in Canada do

00:12:49.040 not want to do anything with maid, right? They do not provide assessments, they do not do maid provisions.

00:12:56.240 People who do maid assessments and maid provisions, there are very small percentage of available of

00:13:02.560 Canada's total physicians and nurse practitioners. And for some of them, I just proportion a few,

00:13:09.120 that is their primary way of making money. And that is their primary medical, you know, specialization.

00:13:18.880 So we have in Canada, maid physicians who have provided hundreds of cases. I believe in Ontario, 0.99

00:13:27.040 I believe in Ontario, there was the there was one maid provider who in 2023 performed almost one maid

00:13:38.720 provision every single working day. So I mean, you have a select few who have done hundreds, if not

00:13:46.400 thousands by now, maid provisions, right? And maid provisions is, let's not be coy about what the

00:13:53.920 language means, right? It is explicitly ending the life of a patient through lethal injection,

00:14:00.960 right? Like this, this sugar coating of language, I feel is part of the problem.

00:14:04.640 And I also just say just one last thing about this, is that in the US, there's a whole scandal over

00:14:13.600 lethal injection of prisoners, right, that this is inhumane, that it is not a dignified death,

00:14:20.560 etc, etc. Well, the US struggles to perform something like 10 capital punishments, executions

00:14:30.160 a year. Whereas in Canada, we're now nearing at almost 15,000, over 15,000 maid debts a year.

00:14:38.400 So we're talking about a massive, massive number of what is effectively what are effectively lethal

00:14:48.560 injections. And there's been surprisingly little interest in the media about what that actually

00:14:55.840 entails. And what I worry is that a lot of it on a second look, looks a lot closer to get to the

00:15:04.480 American experience, rather than a sort of dignified death that proponents are talking about.

00:15:11.200 Yeah, that's literally when you're talking stuff, I'm like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Like,

00:15:15.200 why hasn't there been more attention on this? Obviously, you've done good work on it. But like,

00:15:21.440 yeah, I even remember like the case I mentioned earlier, the 38 year old man who got euthanized,

00:15:26.400 I know, it's not exactly like there wasn't evidence that there was non compliance or whatever. But

00:15:31.840 the fact that that happened as well, I just think there wasn't that much media coverage,

00:15:36.240 especially in Canada for it. So yeah.

00:15:40.000 And I should also say, just on that, Canada is leading the world in organ donations post-Meg.

00:15:48.720 What one of the reasons for that is, again, it is so absurd. It's very difficult to understand

00:15:58.640 how we got to this point. Because the original guidelines in Canada, when MAID was first legalized,

00:16:08.640 was that organ donations would only be possible, like soliciting for organ donations would only be

00:16:14.320 possible after someone is already fully approved for MAID. This is the procedure in the Netherlands,

00:16:20.160 for instance, right, that organ donations are only possible once someone is approved for MAID,

00:16:25.040 because if you offer organ donations as a pathway, especially if someone is struggling with

00:16:31.600 depression, especially if someone has a serious illness at the same time, that would be very

00:16:39.280 difficult for it to be, for them to choose in sort of unbiased, uncoerced way to donate their organs.

00:16:47.760 That is, I mean, I think that if you ask a random person on the street, I think most people,

00:16:56.080 and especially most medical practitioners, would support that policy. The issue is that Canada

00:17:04.480 became the first jurisdiction in the world to recommend MAID providers to offer organ donations,

00:17:13.760 even before someone is fully approved for MAID, right? So it is policy to offer organ donations

00:17:22.480 for people who are applying for MAID after only their first approval by the first MAID provider

00:17:32.560 or assessor, right? And as part of the legal process is you still have to go for a second assessor.

00:17:37.440 But instead of waiting for that process to finish, right, it's literally in the MAID process itself,

00:17:43.440 right? The person hasn't been fully approved for MAID, which is to say they haven't been approved for MAID.

00:17:50.240 They're being asked about organ donations, if they otherwise qualify therapeutically for that.

00:17:57.040 Yeah. So this is, I mean, this is crazy. In my humble opinion, that exists a lot of the sort of,

00:18:07.040 just the massive expansion in MAID and MAID organ donations.

00:18:10.480 Mm-hmm. No, like, it is crazy. And I guess I have another question for you. So since you said, like,

00:18:20.560 Canada is the first country to, like, offer it before even they have decided that they are a candidate

00:18:26.560 for MAID, I just, like, I'm just thinking, is it, is this just a consequence of just even allowing, like,

00:18:33.680 these provisions to even have MAID? Is, like, is there even a way to regulate this so none of this

00:18:40.560 would happen? Or are we so far gone that it's just, like, you can't do anything? Like, it's just,

00:18:45.520 I don't know. It just seems so corrupt that, yeah, that's my question.

00:18:49.760 Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's an excellent question. And I mean, like, I'll, my personal

00:18:58.320 opinions, my personal opinion is I don't think it's possible to regulate a safe practice of an

00:19:06.720 assisted death. I think that when healers, when the role of a healer is being corrupted into the role of

00:19:12.560 a killer, no matter how you couch that language, it ultimately leads to dangerous consequences,

00:19:22.400 like what we're seeing right now in Canada. I mean, Canada's MAID program, that said, Canada's MAID

00:19:28.000 program is especially, it goes above and beyond of the normal problems with assisted dying. Canada's MAID

00:19:40.720 program is almost a pariah on an international stage. The state of New York, which just recently

00:19:47.360 voted in the state Senate to legalize assisted suicide, one of the reasons that it passed on a

00:19:56.080 very narrow vote was because the proponents of that bill specified that their assisted suicide bill

00:20:02.880 would look nothing like Canada's. In the UK, there was also another close vote. Proponents had to

00:20:09.120 distance themselves from Canada's euthanasia program, even though at the beginning, you know,

00:20:15.040 they actually supported Canada's euthanasia program. So we're really talking about a program

00:20:22.400 that is internationally viewed as a system not working. And look, the reason that assisted suicide

00:20:30.720 and euthanasia are legal in Canada is because the Supreme Court of Canada, after barely 20 years,

00:20:36.960 after it in the Rodriguez case, when it said that there was not a constitutional right for euthanasia,

00:20:43.200 then changed its mind, and then unanimously said there all of a sudden is a right for euthanasia.

00:20:48.800 I think the logic of that is very flawed, and it's very weak. And it definitely has not been held

00:20:54.160 up by Canada's example. But that is why is legal, legal in Canada, Canada's parliament voted many,

00:21:01.920 many, many, many times, you know, I think close to a dozen times against legalizing this,

00:21:06.880 prior to the Supreme Court case. So all of that said, it is still possible to have basic common

00:21:13.600 sense safeguards. You know, the right now there's a bill, there's a bill that's that was proposed

00:21:22.320 in Parliament to stop Canada's expansion of MAID purely for mental illness. If this bill doesn't pass,

00:21:30.240 then in 20, then in 2027, I believe, Canada is going to expand euthanasia to include people whose 0.76

00:21:38.720 only diagnosed conditions will be things like depression. So I, you know, I think that is a

00:21:47.040 very common sensical safeguard that can be implemented now. And, you know, I don't want to

00:21:52.320 go on and on and on. But I do worry tremendously about where Canada is going. Now, I wrote another

00:22:00.640 report that MAID in Canada is now the fifth most common cause of death. And it's going to, and I

00:22:07.760 think that's only going to increase over time. I think the issues are another sort of statistic that

00:22:15.440 I that's hard to grapple. Do you know how long the wait time is to get the median wait time to get a

00:22:23.280 CT scan in Canada? No, unfortunately, fortunately. Yeah, yeah, that's fortunate. But it's 40 days.

00:22:31.280 Okay, so it's 40 days. This is odd. This this isn't an elective procedure, right? Like this is a

00:22:38.080 priority procedure. No one goes to their family physician says, you know, I really want I want a

00:22:42.640 CT scan. Right? Yeah, this is, you know, this is one of the you know, this is this has to be

00:22:47.920 recommended to you by your physician. And they have to file that in, okay, the median wait time in 2023

00:22:55.120 to, to tell orally, your physician or nurse practitioner that you want to die for MAID,

00:23:02.000 get the paperwork, complete the paperwork, find the witnesses for it, find your first MAID assessor,

00:23:08.400 which either has to be a physician or a practitioner, get get find your second MAID assessor, 1.00

00:23:14.640 which has to be a physician or nurse practitioner, get those appointments, go through those meetings,

00:23:19.600 get approved by both of them. Finalize your end of life plans, schedule your your death, schedule your

00:23:28.800 funeral, schedule your final end of life matters. And then go to that your your MAID procedure and die 1.00

00:23:38.880 that entire process, the median weight, the median number of days to complete that from request to death

00:23:45.440 for MAID in 2023 was only 13 days. Oh, my God, less than two weeks, less than two weeks, right? Versus the median

00:23:55.520 wait time for a CT scan, right? So 50% of people have a longer wait time for that. To get a CT scan,

00:24:02.240 right? It is more than a month, right? Like, this is this where we're at. And I think that Canada's

00:24:08.240 healthcare system is is massively struggling. The former the past head of the Canadian Medical

00:24:15.120 Association described Canada's healthcare system as undergoing a collapse. We're the only country

00:24:20.960 country in the world with a public healthcare system that has no private option whatsoever,

00:24:27.680 right? It is against law to to sell your service. As a physician, if there's a public health option,

00:24:35.280 you know, where you can as healthcare system is is massively, massively strained. And yet,

00:24:43.680 you know, the one medical procedure that seems to be fully funded is the medical procedure that would

00:24:49.680 end your life. Medical procedure that could also be used to could also be used to help you become

00:24:56.960 an organ donor, when you otherwise are potentially not able to. If you're if you're someone with a

00:25:02.640 serious illness, it will be unethical for you to donate an organ, right, if your body can't handle

00:25:09.120 the strain. But if you're at first, well, then it's almost unethical, right? So I, you know,

00:25:15.280 I, I, it wasn't that long ago, right? Like in two, what was it in 2016, right, when Bernie Sanders was

00:25:23.040 talking about Canada's healthcare system as something to be emulated in the US, right?

00:25:30.960 I don't think any US are making that argument right now.

00:25:33.600 Wow. Okay, well, that's, like, literally, so there's so much I didn't know that now I know,

00:25:40.160 and it's just really wild. And it's probably even more corrupt than I thought it was. So

00:25:44.560 thank you very much, Alexander, I really appreciate you coming on. And yeah, you had a bunch of great

00:25:48.880 information. So I think lots of people are gonna learn a lot from this. So thank you. Likewise. Thank

00:25:54.640 you, Leo. Thanks. Okay. Well, if you guys enjoyed this video, and you feel like you've been informed,

00:26:00.800 you can also check out our website, which is westernstandard.news. It's $10 a month and $100 a

00:26:07.680 year. And you can subscribe to our YouTube channel for more content like this. So that's all I have

00:26:13.360 to say. And thank you for joining us today. And goodbye.

Western Standard - October 26, 2025

MAID violations widespread, ethicist says

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