The cold truth of Canadian lives not worth living

Canada’s implementation of medical assistance shows that a society considers some lives not worth living.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

A IV drip bag hangs from a medical stand.

Marcelo Leal on Unsplash.

Alan Nichols’ application for euthanasia mentions only one health condition as the reason for his request: hearing loss. “Alan was basically put to death,” according to his brother. He was hospitalized after being found dehydrated and malnourished in his house. He asked his brother to “bust him out” of the hospital as soon as possible. A month after being admitting, he was euthanized through MAID (medical assistance in dying), despite the desperate objections of his family and his primary health practitioner. They were informed of the procedure over the phone only four days before it took place. They have since reported Alan’s case to the police; they argue he was not in a fit state of mind to understand the procedure or make decisions for himself. He had no life-threatening conditions. He was vulnerable.

Canada’s relaxed laws around MAID came to international attention when CTV News reported that a fifty-one-year-old woman chose MAID after failing for two years to find housing that would allow her to manage her multiple chemical sensitivities. Despite the best efforts of friends and even her doctors to get her suitable housing in Toronto, letters left behind documented her desperate yet fruitless search for help. She begged officials at all layers of government to help find an apartment free from the chemicals and cigarette and marijuana smoke that worsened her symptoms. “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a**,” she said in a video days before her death.

These are only some of the terrible stories that have been reported after Canada became the first Commonwealth country to legalise assisted suicide and euthanasia. Advocates of MAID will point to how comfortable Canadians are with it. As a recent poll revealed, MAID is supported by 73 per cent of Canadians, with 27 per cent supporting MAID even if the only affliction is poverty, 28 per cent for homelessness, and 20 per cent for any reason whatsoever. Those numbers may shift as disability activists and medical professionals continue to raise the alarm over the consequences of growing numbers choosing MAID, from 2,838 deaths in 2017 to 10,064 in 2021.

MAID was introduced in 2016... Only those suffering from incurable diseases whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” were eligible, initially.

There are two reasons why the Canadian example teaches us to remain firmly opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in the UK.

The first is that the slippery slope in this case is real. Campaigners for Dignity in Dying claim they want only the legalisation of assisted suicide, not of euthanasia. The latter involves a doctor directly administering lethal drugs, without requiring the patient’s participation. (MAID permits both, although euthanasia is the method used in 99 per cent of cases.) They argue there is no evidence that legalising assisted suicide in the UK would lead to a loosening of laws over time. But this is contradicted by the timeline of events in Canada.

MAID was introduced in 2016 following the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in 2015 that the criminalisation of assisted suicide violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Only those suffering from incurable diseases whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” were eligible, initially. But the MAID evangelists did not wait long before complaining that this was too restrictive. The courts obliged, and in 2019 the court of Quebec found the “reasonably foreseeable” condition to contravene the Charter. In 2021 the laws were changed to allow MAID for those whose natural death was not foreseeable, but who have a condition considered intolerable by the applicant. Those suffering only from mental illnesses will be eligible for MAID in March 2024.

The slope becomes more slippery still: the government is considering further expansion to allow “mature minors”, vaguely defined as children mature enough to make their own treatment decisions, to ask to be killed, even against a parent’s wishes.

A society that kills those who ask to be killed has already made a choice to consider some lives not worth living,

The second lesson is about what kind of society we want to be. For a doctor to present the option of being killed, which Canadian doctors are now obliged to do whenever “medically relevant”, even if the patient does not bring it up first, does not expand patients’ freedom. It is rather an invitation to despair. This is frequently forgotten when some think that denying patients the choice to seek death is “imposing Christian values” as one cleric of the Anglican Church of Canada said. Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and others have opposed MAID because a society that kills those who ask to be killed has already made a choice to consider some lives not worth living, and to invite those already made vulnerable by their pain and distress to see themselves as a burden to others. Not to mention the perverse incentives created to reduce medical and palliative care.

We can and should support those who are frail and in need of care at the end of their lives to die with dignity, without hastening their deaths, without deeming their lives no longer worth living. Dame Cicely Saunders and other pioneers of the hospice movement have shown us what an alternative to assisted suicide and euthanasia would look like. Hospices put into practice the parable of the Good Samaritan, who responded with pity to the man beaten by robbers, bandaging his wounds and giving him a place to rest and receive care. Jesus tells the parable to show what it means to be a good neighbour to someone and how to react with compassion to suffering. What would have been the message of the parable if the Samaritan had instead reacted to the sight of the suffering man by reaching for his dagger?

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Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.