An official Island Health report shows that Vancouver Island has a rate of assisted suicide and euthanasia five times higher than the national average. David Robertson, Island Health’s executive medical director for medical assistance in dying, co-authored the report with Rosanne Beuthin, and they found that in the first two years of legal euthanasia, 3.6 per cent of all deaths on the [...]
Ontario’s Liberal government is backing the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in its attack on doctors’ religious and conscience rights. The Liberal government has intervened on behalf of the CPSO in a lawsuit launched by five Christian doctors, who argue that the College’s Professional Obligation and Human Rights Policy violates their Charter rights of religious freedom and conscience. The CPSO [...]
Terminally ill patients seek access to unapproved drugs A group of Canadians with terminal illness is asking for the right to try unapproved drugs or treatments for their conditions. “We have the law that allows us to kill ourselves. We just don’t have the law to do something else,” said Jeff Pereault, one of the founders of the Right to Try campaign, [...]
Light is Right Joe Campbell "Well, they’ve done it,” Dingwall said. “Done what?” I asked. “Removed the stigma from suicide,” he replied. “By letting doctors help patients kill themselves, the Supreme Court transformed a calamity into a cure.” “Some think the ruling is very restrictive,” I said, “requiring intolerable suffering, among other conditions.” “Maybe for now,” he said. “However, the [...]
How sad it is that the Netherlands, a country which heroically resisted the Nazi euthanasia program, is now saddled with a government so steeped in the culture of death that it plans to extend legalized assisted suicide to any healthy elderly person who has voluntarily resolved that he or she has simply had a “completed life” (voltooid leven) and wants to die. [...]
After the short-lived but excitable volleys between the House of Commons and the Senate, our parliamentarians voted in both houses to enact a fairly broad license for what is euphemistically being called medical aid in dying (MAID). The ink was barely dry before some of the more radical members of the Liberal caucus and senate contingent were calling for the law to [...]
Alex Schadenberg Alex Schadenbeg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, was presented the Archbishop Adam Exner Award for Catholic Excellence in Public Life at the Catholic Civil Rights League’s annual dinner in Toronto June 2. Schadenberg thanked his mother Mary van Veen and his deceased father Harry for “instilling pro-life beliefs and values” in him, saying that “Mary van [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman For nearly 50 years now, Canadians have lived with a perverse legal regime that allows some hospital-based physicians to engage in the mass slaughter of perfectly healthy babies in the womb, while mandating other physicians in these same hospitals to do whatever they can to save the lives of the frailest and most vulnerable of human [...]
Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party railed against the Harper government for hiding from debate in the House of Commons and resorting to procedural trickery to ram through the Conservative agenda. Yet now that Trudeau holds the reins of power, he is quick to cut short debate on the most important topic in a generation being debated in Parliament: euthanasia and assisted-suicide [...]
Liberal House Leader Dominic LeBlanc cut short debate on C-14. The government has had trouble getting their “Medical assistance in dying” bill passed before June 6 following long debates, opposition from both sides of the debate, and Liberal Senators who say they will return the bill to the House of Commons if it does not include amendments broadening the euthanasia [...]
An Ontario medical doctor providing palliative care for the sick and the elderly over the past three years has decided to forego renewing her license due to a new regulatory policy that forces doctors unwilling to euthanize patients to refer them to a doctor who will. “I’m not going to be told what my moral conscience should be,” physician Nancy Naylor told [...]
“The federal government casts a wide net in its list of lives that are not worth living, including people with a serious and incurable disease, condition or disability, those losing autonomy and those with persistent physical or psychological suffering Aubert Martin of Living with Dignity and Catherine Ferrier of Physicians’ Alliance against Euthanasia “How dare we ask our doctors and nurses to [...]
Advocates on both sides unhappy Justice MinisterJody Wilson-Raybould (left )and Health Minister Jane Philpott (right). On April 14, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Health Minister Jane Philpott, held a press conference in Ottawa to announce the contents of the government’s proposed “medical assistance in dying” bill, C-14. The bill, formerly known as “An Act to amend the Criminal Code and [...]
The government introduced its assisted-suicide legislation, C-14, and immediately made both sides unhappy. The pro-life and disabilities communities are concerned that doctors are going to become assassins, abandoning their mission to heal in order to kill. The pro-euthanasia side does not like that there are restrictions on who can be killed, wanting a broader law with fewer restrictions. National Post columnist Robyn [...]
“The federal government casts a wide net in its list of lives that are not worth living, including people with a serious and incurable disease, condition or disability, those losing autonomy and those with persistent physical or psychological suffering Aubert Martin of Living with Dignity and Catherine Ferrier of Physicians’ Alliance against Euthanasia “How dare we ask our doctors and nurses to [...]