Winston Churchill famously reassured the U.S. that its long northern border was ‘guarded only by neighbourly respect and honourable obligations’.
And generations of US leaders have tended to agree – there’s nothing to worry about from solid and reliably uncontroversial Canada.
Anyone who ever thought that the compassionate response to extreme human suffering is a society that helps people find permanent release from their pain may want to look at some of the horror stories coming out of Canada recently.
To be clear, euthanasia laws in the US are nothing like those of its neighbor to the north. But American acceptance of the practice has been growing for decades despite warnings that legalized suicide is a slippery slope toward a calamitous debasement of human life.
Canada, a country that prides itself on its open-mindedness and tolerance, has the most permissive rules on euthanasia in the world – and the results have been frankly terrifying.
Last year, more than 10,000 people in Canada – astonishingly that’s over three percent of all deaths there – ended their lives via euthanasia, an increase of a third on the previous year. And it’s likely to keep rising: next year, Canada is set to allow people to die exclusively for mental health reasons.
Only last week, a jaw-dropping story emerged of how, five years into an infuriating battle to obtain a stairlift for her home, Canadian army veteran and Paralympian Christine Gauthier was offered an extraordinary alternative.
A Canadian official told her in 2019 that if her life was so difficult and she so ‘desperate’, the government would help her to kill herself. ‘I have a letter saying that if you’re so desperate, madam, we can offer you MAiD, medical assistance in dying,’ the paraplegic ex-army corporal testified to Canadian MPs.
Ms. Gauthier, who injured her back in a training accident in 1989, competed for Canada in the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro and the Invictus Games the same year.
Despite being confined to a wheelchair with a musculoskeletal disorder which affects her legs, backs and hips, she is a gold medal-winning para-canoeist and won a silver medal participating in Canada’s women’s ice sledge hockey team.
She is very far from most people’s idea of a hopeless case and yet her government’s Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t hesitate to suggest that she might like to end her life if the battle to get a ramp was proving too much for her.
Ms. Gauthier said she recently expressed her concerns about it in writing to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Mr. Trudeau described what happened to her as ‘absolutely unacceptable’ even as his government admitted that her case wasn’t unique.
Around five cases of military veterans being offered assisted euthanasia have been referred to Canadian police and officials urged others who’d received the same treatment to come forward.
Veterans Affairs minister Lawrence MacAulay tried to blame a single female official, and yet even if that is the case she hardly dreamt up the appalling suggestion out of thin air but offered a fatal solution that experts say is becoming far too common in Canada.
Alan Nichols, for instance, was a 61-year-old British Columbian with a history of depression and other medical issues – though none of them life-threatening – who was hospitalized in 2019 over fears he might be suicidal.
Although he asked his brother, Gary, to ‘bust him out’ as soon as possible, within a month of going into hospital he’d submitted a request to be euthanized. He listed only one health condition – hearing loss – as the reason but that was enough to satisfy his keepers and he was killed. ‘Alan was basically put to death,’ said his brother Gary.
Erin Smith said her 71-year-old father, Rod McNeill, went to an Ontario hospital after suffering a fall. A month later, he had been euthanized. She says the doctors responsible didn’t even get hold of his medical records from his own physician.
He was subsequently euthanized for a condition – end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – that an autopsy shows he didn’t have, she said.
Sheila Elson, the mother of a 25-year-old woman with cerebral palsy said a hospital doctor in Newfoundland actually told her she’d be ‘selfish’ if she didn’t consider pursuing the euthanasia option.
Roger Foley, a patient with a degenerative brain disorder, secretly recorded staff at his hospital in London, Ontario, mentioning euthanasia.
In one recording, the hospital’s director of ethics told Mr Foley it would cost ‘north of $1,500 a day’ to keep him in hospital, adding: ‘My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.’
Mr Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia, but the hospital said there is no ban on staff raising the issue.
These damning accounts were obtained in an investigation by Associated Press and almost every other week has brought fresh controversy surrounding Canada’s right to die policy and further evidence that a practice that was once intended as the last-ditch solution to only the most incurable and terminal diseases is slipping dangerously out of control.
In America, long gone are the days when the US pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian and euthanasia pioneer served eight years in prison in the 1990s and 2000s after his life-ending assistance to dozens of terminally ill people was judged to be second-degree murder.
Kevorkian seemed to revel in the public spotlight and saw himself as a champion for assisted suicide. He enabled his first patient, Oregon school teacher Janet Adkins, to end her life in the back of a rusting Volkswagen van. That was in 1990.
Since that time, 10 states and the District of Columbia have elected to allow doctor-assisted suicide. They include California, Colorado, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, New Mexico and Montana.
Public opinion has also trended towards more acceptable of the practice.
In 1950, 37% of Americans supported euthanasia. By 1996, as Kevorkian made headlines, public support spiked at 75% support and remains at that level today.
Some states that have okayed the practice have subsequently passed additional legislation making it even easier to end one’s life.