A Canadian Paralympian athlete has laid bare the disturbing reality of Canada’s permissive assisted suicide regime in a startling address before MPs.
Christine Gauthier is a 52-year-old retired corporal who competed in the 2016 Paralympics held in Rio De Janeiro. She told MPs that when she wrote to Canada’s Veterans Affairs Office recently to request a wheelchair lift be installed at her home to make life that bit easier, she was offered a medically-assisted suicide kit to help her end her life instead.
Killing herself, it was implied by the VA official, might be the easier option.
“I have a letter saying that if you’re so desperate, madam, we can offer you… medical assistance in dying,” Gauthier told a Canadian veterans affairs committee last week, igniting proportional alarm and horror, and laying bare in harrowing detail the reality of the country’s euthanasia regime.
While the case officer who suggested assisted suicide as the appropriate response remains unnamed, the same individual reportedly made similar offers to at least three other veterans, The Independent reports.
Amid considerable upset and the garnering of international attention around the case, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been forced to come out in condemnation of the Veterans Affairs Office.
Trudeau said in a statement:
“We are following up with investigations and we are changing protocols to ensure what should seem obvious to all of us: that it is not the place of Veterans Affairs Canada, who are supposed to be there to support those people who stepped up to serve their country, to offer them medical assistance in dying”.
Of course, though, it won’t be lost on most people that the PM is a one of the country’s most visible cheerleaders of assisted dying. In 2016, it was none other than Trudeau who introduced legislation to legalise physician-assisted suicide for Canadians with a “serious and incurable illness,” which had brought them “enduring physical or psychological suffering”.
And it was Trudeau and other advocates of the life-ending practice who actively sought to gaslight those who expressed deep, genuine concern about what legalising assisted dying would mean for the nation.
Warnings about how, once euthanasia became legal, its scope would rapidly widen to include those who were not terminally ill, as had happened in virtually every other country where it had been legalised, were loftily ignored, and opponents were accused of peddling a “slippery slope” fallacy.
Alas, Canada’s criminal prohibition on assisting suicide was confined to the history books by the Canadian Supreme Court in 2015, with the practise legalised the following year.
Fast forward six short years, and there are now quiet discussions within the Canadian parliament about whether disabled children could be candidates for euthanasia. Infanticide, in other words. And, as predicted, from next year mental illness will become grounds to be euthanized. “Mature” minors are also expected to be able to qualify for the practice.
Statistics show that 10,000 people a year are now euthanized in Canada, while social media has facilitated dystopian, devastating conversations among depressed teenagers who say they look forward to applying to die once they turn 18.
Gauthier’s story comes to the surface just weeks after a Canadian fashion company promoted the ‘beauty’ of assisted suicide in a TV advertisement. The ad alludes to the loosening of the parameters around assisted suicide in the country, which have expanded to include not only those facing imminent death but also citizens who have a disability or suffer from some form of pain.
The video from Canadian fashion company La Maison Simons, commonly known as Simons, tells the unspeakably sad story and last days of 37-year-old Jennyfer Hatch, referring to her decision to opt for assisted suicide as “the most beautiful exit”.
It has since emerged that the terminally ill poster girl for assisted dying featured in the commercial, gave an interview in June admitting that she wanted to live, but couldn’t afford care in Canada to improve her quality of life.
She subsequently came to the conclusion that it was “easier to let go than keep fighting” after she described “falling through the cracks” in efforts made to successfully grapple with a ‘broken’ health system to get appropriate treatment for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a rare and painful condition that can be managed with support from professionals like physiotherapists.
“I feel like I’m falling through the cracks so if I’m not able to access health care am I then able to access death care?’ Hatch said under a pseudonym in the CTV interview just months prior.
The context behind her decision to end her life was not mentioned in the glamorous, pro-euthanasia advert. Her unsuccessful quest to secure appropriate treatment, and her will to live, as told by close friends, did not feature – with the advert selectively highlighting the “hard beauty” of assisted suicide. The film, featuring images of Hatch holding a Tofino beach party mere days before her scheduled death, has since been removed by Simons from its online channels, after backlash swept across social media with many voicing claims the ad was romanticising Canada’s euphemistically named MAID regime.
There are endless horrifying, hair-raising tales of people caught up in the Canadian state’s euthanasia regime. One sad article published in the Associated Press in August, told the story of 61-year-old Alan Nicols. Nichols, who had a history of depression and hearing loss, was, according to his own brother, unlawfully “put to death” by the state in 2019. His family said a lack of oversight and gross negligence on behalf of doctors treating him were to blame for his untimely death. No criminal charges were ever brought.
In August of this year, in a story which strongly parallels Gauthier’s, a Canadian armed forces veteran suffering from a traumatic brain injury and PTSD was also offered assisted suicide, unprompted, by an employee of Veterans Affairs Canada.
The VAC released an apologetic statement at the time, saying that assisted suicide had been “discussed inappropriately” with the veteran, who expressed anger and shock at the suggestion, according to Global News. He had been making good progress in his physical and mental rehabilitation, and felt betrayed and let down by an agency which was meant to be helping him. Fellow veteran Gauthier’s experience just several months later shows it was not an isolated incident.
In Ireland, the discussion around physician-assisted suicide is never too far away. While the establishment media are quick to platform conversations with advocates of introducing euthanasia and assisted suicide, there appears to be less discussion of the horrifying things happening in Canada — and Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of which have permissive laws on the practise.
Are we to simply dismiss the Canadian experience as something alien and abnormal? Their own assisted suicide regime as something so monstrous it could never possibly happen here?
That would be a mistake. Canada must serve as a warning for Ireland. A cautionary tale to which we ought to pay close attention.
We should not believe that these horrifying things will not happen in Ireland if we give the green light to ‘dying with dignity’. After all, our culture is not miles away from Canada’s; we share a similarly ageing population and an also overstretched health service. This campaign from Life Institute highlighted those dangers several years ago – but the situation in Canada has further deteriorated since then:
Moreover, at what point does the ‘right to die’ become an obligation to die? We have been told time and time again not to fear the ‘slippery slope’. We have been conditioned to believe it’s a fallacy, a smokescreen.
But the experience of Canada — proposals to euthanise the young because of depression, people being offered MAID instead of the supports they need, the droves of people taking their own lives because of mental illness — is sure proof that assisted suicide is perhaps the slipperiest slope of all. Because if it were not, these things would not be happening.
We must listen to the legitimate horror stories and pay close attention to attempts to rewrite the definition of ‘dying with dignity’. The Canadian experience shows us what that looks like in truth, that in spite of the euphemisms and the glamourisation and the nauseating romanticisation — the truth remains: it’s far from dignified.