Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party voted down a bill Wednesday that would have barred the state from euthanizing mentally ill Canadians. There is little now standing in the way of those with mental disorders, including the depressed whose suicidal ideation is likely a symptom, having the state put them down starting March 17, 2024.
Conservative lawmaker Ed Fast's private members bill C-314 would have amended Canada's Criminal Code to "provide that a mental disorder is not a grievous and irremediable medical condition for which a person could receive medical assistance in dying."
Fast stressed in the preamble to his bill that vulnerable citizens should receive suicide prevention counseling rather than be exterminated by the state, adding that "Canada's medical assistance in dying regime risks normalizing assisted dying as a solution for those suffering from a mental disorder."
Seeking to preserve this "solution," Trudeau and most of his fellow Liberals who last month unwittingly applauded a veteran Waffen-SS Nazi joined the Bloc Quebecois in defeating the bill in a vote of 167 to 150.
Despite being pressured to toe the line, the following eight Liberal Party members took a stand and voted for C-314: Julie Dzerowicz; Chad Collins; Emmanuella Lambropoulos; Joel Lightbound; Wayne Long; Ken McDonald; Marcus Powlowski; and John McKay.
Every Conservative parliamentarian voted in favor of sparing the lives of the mentally ill. Although the socialistic New Democrat Party — whose founder was the eugenicist behind the country's current socialized health care system — customarily buttresses the LPC, going so far as to protect that party from a snap election, its members also unanimously supported C-314.
The bill was supported by the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention and the Society of Canadian Psychiatry.
Th CASP stated late last month that it felt "strongly that extreme caution needs to be taken with [Medical Assistance in Dying] and a thought-out, failproof, measured system of safeguards needs to be in place so that those most vulnerable will be protected from a medically assisted premature death that could be avoided by adequate treatment and care," adding that the government had failed to deliver on promises that such safeguards would be implemented.
Besides noting that there are alternative treatments for mental illness besides death, critics have questioned whether mentally and emotionally compromised patients can legally provide consent for euthanasia.
Montreal lawyer Natalia Manole posed this question to a special commission concerning end-of-life care in August 2021, "So how can we legalize medical aid in dying for people with mental illness, knowing that the desire to die is in most cases a symptom of mental illness? In other words, consent would be vitiated in most cases."
The Board of the Society of Canadian Psychiatry recommended Friday that "the planned 2024 MAID for mental illness expansion be paused indefinitely, without qualification and presupposition that such implementation can safely be introduced at any arbitrary predetermined date."
K. Sonu Gaind, the chief of psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital and a professor at the University of Toronto, noted in an article for the Hamilton Spectator that the defeat of C-314 would "cast an indelible stain we will not easily recover from."
"At heart of the issue is whether death by MAID for mental illness would be provided for the reasons it is claimed to be for," wrote Gaind. "Regardless of one’s ideology, the inescapable answer is that it would not be. Instead we would be providing death under false pretences to many struggling with mental illness — from which they could recover — fuelled by social inequities like poverty and housing insecurity.
"Expansion activists have claimed it would be discrimination to not provide MAID for mental illness. This appropriates the word 'discrimination' while ignoring the meaning of it," continued Gaind. "The real discrimination is providing death under false pretences to suicidal individuals who could improve, based on unscientific assessments of zealous MAID assessors wrongly predicting that person will not get better."
Jeff Gunnarson, president of the Campaign Life Coalition, said, "MAiD, which is really about permitting the strong and healthy to kill the weak and sick under the veneer of autonomy, has now been expanded to include those who are not dying but are living with disabilities, including those living with mental illness. There is now talk in Federal committees of expanding this service to 'mature minor' children, and even infants."
CLC director of political operations Jack Fonseca said, "By publicizing their voting record on C-314, CLC will ensure that come next election, voters will remember which MPs refused to stop Nazi-style medical eugenics. MPs who refused to stop Dr. Mengele-inspired 'medicine' to eliminate people no longer deemed 'useful' will have to wear it on their record."
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, stated, "This is not a 'settled' issue. We will not be silent in the face of killing."
An Angus Reid poll conducted earlier this year found that 31% of Canadians supported the concept of offering MAID for irremediable mental illness; 51% opposed the idea.
Blaze News previously reported that in 2022, 7% of all deaths in the province of Quebec — touted as the world's "euthanasia capital" — were the result of euthanasia.
The commission that monitors the practice of state-administered euthanasia in Quebec revealed that between spring 2021 and spring 2022, at least 15 out of 3,663 state-facilitated suicides were reportedly not in accordance with the law.
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