Canada’s Culture of Death: Euthanasia and government-funded drug consumption sites
Curing suffering by ending life, or prolonging both misery and death
This week, the Ontario government announced the closure of ten of the 17 provincially funded supervised drug consumption sites. The sites are the source of increases in assaults and violent crime, with significant disruptive behaviour, gang activity, open drug-dealing, discarded needles. A mother died in a shootout between drug dealers when she was struck by a stray bullet near a supervised consumption site in Toronto. Why these sites were allowed to open in previously quiet residential neighbourhoods is not clear. What is clear is that free ‘safe’ drugs, often hydromorphone, given out at these facilities are routinely sold for cash to dealers, enabling addicts to buy opioids. Essentially, supervised, or ‘safe’, consumption sites operate as drug dens.
Instead of supervised consumption sites, the province will open 19 new homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs offering health care, mental health services, addiction care and support, social services and employment support, shelter and transition beds, supportive housing, and other supplies and services like naloxone, onsite showers, and food.
So-called harm reduction advocates, have long championed supervised consumption sites as a way to help mitigate opioid-related deaths. The usual chorus of voices would have us believe that closure of the sites will push drug use onto the streets and increase drug overdose deaths. There will be more overdoses; people will die, we are told. Surprisingly, the same voices are not keen on treatment. Instead of steering addicts into treatment, we should instead destigmatise addiction, they claim.
Meanwhile, a study1 released earlier this month shows how euthanasia has become the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada. Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)2, as we in Canada refer to it, is the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying programme.
When it was first legalised in 2016, MAiD was intended for only exceptional situations. It was meant to be a stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions for very rare instances of intolerable suffering of the terminally ill, whose death was foreseeable. MAiD was expanded in 2021 to capable, consenting adults not suffering from a terminal illness but who consider that their physical suffering is intolerable to them. MAiD was to be expanded in 2024 to those suffering only from mental illness, but this has been deferred to 2027. MAiD for mature minors is currently being considered.
MAiD is now tied with cerebrovascular diseases as the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Only deaths from cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, and accidents exceed the number of deaths from MAiD. It appears that MAiD assessors and providers do not treat it as a last resort. The percentage of MAiD requests that are denied continues to decline (currently it is 3.5 percent). MAiD requests can be assessed and provided in a single day.
Canada has seen cases of people seeking MAiD owing to a lack of disability support, inadequate housing, fears of homelessness, or feeling that they are a burden on family or caregivers. Veterans have reported feeling pressured to consider MAiD.
While doctor-assisted suicide flourishes, Canada’s federal government, in conjunction with provincial governments, has adopted a new national suicide prevention action plan. Its vision, in tortured bureaucratese: “Fewer lives are lost to suicide and people and communities in Canada are supported in their wellbeing through life promotion and evidence-based suicide prevention approaches.”
Despite such efforts to save lives, MAiD enjoys widespread support among Canadians. A 2023 poll3 found that six in 10 Canadians support MAiD in its current form, and one in three support allowing people to seek MAiD purely based on mental illness.
Anecdotally, I was commiserating with friends about a young relative who is on disability insurance because of a brain tumour. The tumour is fortunately benign, but causes severe migraines, persistent pain and other symptoms that have made it impossible for my relative to continue working. Surgery is risky because the tumour is wrapped around an optical nerve. I was speechless when one friend, in all seriousness, asked whether my relative had considered MAiD.
Canada’s MAiD legislation is a response to Supreme Court of Canada rulings which overturned previous laws prohibiting physician-assisted dying and re-framed doctor-assisted suicide as a human right. One national advocacy group, Dying With Dignity, bills itself as a human-rights charity. Its goal: to defend human rights by advocating for assisted dying.
Canada has perhaps reached the final human rights frontier: death—not life—is a human right. Broadly speaking, the consensus opinion of Canadians sees euthanasia as a legitimate way to cure suffering by ending life. MAiD has become the ultimate remedy for a diminished quality of life, sought by individuals determined to exert, until the bitter end, agency and personal control.
Supporters of supervised injection sites, on the other hand, seek to preserve the life of those whom addiction has robbed of both agency and quality of life. But without recovery from addiction, misery is extended and people are condemned to a living death.
MAiD is euthanasia, whereby doctors administer drugs that cause death. In assisted dying, doctors prescribe drugs that patients themselves take to hasten their death. In Canada, the terms MAiD, doctor-assisted suicide and doctor-assisted death are used interchangeably.