Medically assisted death ‘about compassion’
Re: The great con: How Pierre Trudeau duped Canadians into taking pride in their substandard health-care system, Conrad Black; and Report confirms our healthcare system is sick, Rupa Subramanya, both Aug. 7 Conrad Black suggests that Canada’s assisted dying law was developed to slowly and casually replace palliative care at end-of-life. He suggests connivance of the courts, elected and unelected government representatives, physicians and nurse practitioners across Canada to orchestrate a plan to reduce health-care costs by encouraging medical assistance in dying (MAID) for the infirm and elderly. To be clear, there is no evidence to support this misinformation. In fact, the evidence we do have from Health Canada’s Second Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying tells us that MAID accounted for 2.5 per cent of all deaths in Canada last year, and that of the people who chose MAID as their end-of-life option, 83 per cent of them received palliative care.
As we heard loud and clear during the debate on Bill C-7 (which expanded Canada’s MAID law because that’s what most Canadians wanted), the real issue is the quality of the palliative care received. Dying With Dignity Canada agrees, and we repeat our call for the federal government to make the required investments to ensure all Canadians have access to high quality palliative care, regardless of their means. What Black chose to exclude from his article is why MAID was made law in Canada when the prohibitions on assisted death were challenged in Carter v. Canada. MAID, which is supported by 87 per cent of Canadians, is about compassion and an end to intolerable suffering for a small group of Canadians. It is also a personal choice made by people who have explored all options to relieve their suffering and who choose MAID on their own terms.
Puneet Luthra, Director of Government and Stakeholder Relations, Dying With Dignity Canada
Kudos to Conrad Black and Rupa Subramanya for daring to expose the mangled body of Canada’s sacred cow, our health-care system. Gross waste and inequality is the inevitable result of having people with a lust for power, each working in an isolated silo — with no view of the whole system and no accountability for outcomes — decide how to spend huge sums of money they did not earn themselves. It is only because of the many dedicated health-care workers, who have been willing to work ever harder with fewer resources, that the system has not yet completely imploded, but this situation cannot go on much longer. The decision of our political leaders to solve our health-care crisis by convincing the Canadian public that murdering our most expensive citizens — the old, the disabled and the chronically ill — is the sign of an enlightened, compassionate society, is beyond egregious. It not only signals the impending collapse of our health-care system but heralds the moral collapse of our society as a whole.
Ellen Warner, MD, Toronto
The report on Canada’s health-care system cited by Rupa Subramanya is far from the only one to criticize both its cost and outcomes. If anything, the reports do not come close to describing the chaos of our hospital emergency departments. Indeed, any entry into an emergency department in Ottawa will immediately reveal a new linguistic oxymoron: hospital emergency.
The ongoing crisis has been caused by the near complete shutdown of non-emergency care because of COVID-19. Emergency units have become a holding tank for a health-care system that appears to be unmanaged and increasingly unmanageable. It is a situation that has been well known for a very long time and growing worse. Yet the provincial and territorial leaders’ request for the federal government to contribute an additional $28 billion in health-care funding has gone unheeded in a budget projecting another $100 billion in unneeded economic stimulus despite the vast amounts of COVID relief money already distributed across Canada. Meanwhile, health care in Canada continues to limp along in a propaganda victory against those countries who do much better in both costs and outcomes.
Raymond Foote, Ottawa