Paul Tuns:
The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition launched a postcard and petition campaign demanding the complete review of Canada’s euthanasia law, a project it launched with the Delta Hospice Society.
Gordon Friesen, president of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said announcing the campaign, that the federal government vowed to conduct a thorough review after five years when it legalized euthanasia in 2016.
Friesen said, “events have unfolded in a completely unexpected and alarming fashion; that current policy has little to do with its originally stated intent; that such policy is in fact leading us on a horrific course that no one consciously chose (or very few) but which is now evolving under its own anti-human economic logic and impetus.”
He said, “that very few people could have suspected that a supposedly limited access to voluntary euthanasia might ever devolve into the scale of industrial destruction, of human life, to which we are now witness.”
Friesen added, “Even we, in the organized resistance to euthanasia, have been taken unawares, while our rhetoric has been roughly overtaken by the facts.” He cited as an example they understood “that legal euthanasia threatens the safety of specific lives,” but “What we did not understand is just how many lives that would be.”
There have been more than 60,000 euthanasia deaths since 2016.
Friesen said, “the ‘most vulnerable’ narrative assumes that disputed benefits actually exist; that people are generally able to access appropriate services; that only certain groups (defined perhaps by economic, racial, gender, or ability criteria) are not.” He said, “truly life-affirming care, free of the pressure to accept euthanasia– is no longer available.”
He said that “good and decent doctors and nurses do exist” but “our chances of being treated properly as patients should not be dependent upon the personal moral compass of individual professionals who are now forced to operate as dissidents within a hostile system.”
Friesen condemned the current health care system’s seemingly pro-euthanasia bent. “The true calamity we are now experiencing involves nothing less than the cynical replacement of that time-honoured medical ideal, with a radical, euthanasia-based, veterinary-style system of population management,” he said. The system is now “actively steering individuals” toward euthanasia.
Friesen said that only those capable of escaping Canada’s publicly funded system can guarantee being targeted for euthanasia, as currently “service deprivation is now the norm, not the exception.”
The rational in the public health system seems to be to shepherd patients who are unlikely to provide a “return on investment” in health care spending by returning to “productive” work, threatens all Canadians, not just those labeled “vulnerable.”
For those reasons, Friesen said, “we are calling for a complete review of Canada’s euthanasia policy.”
The petition states, “We are demanding a complete review by the federal and provincial government out of concern with the direction of Canada’s MAID law,” because signatories “oppose killing people” and “oppose MAiD being considered a form of medical treatment.” It stated “a complete review requires input from all perspectives without prejudice.”
Friesen said, “We demand a full review, as originally promised in law but never delivered: an open and unfiltered scrutiny of current practice, accompanied at each stage by the severe questioning of past decisions made. Everything must be on the table.”
The request for a thorough review is being made to federal and provincial parliaments.
