Editors at National Review Online assess Canada’s experience with government-sanctioned assisted suicide.
Encouraging doctors to get involved in people killing themselves in a society with socialized medicine and declining religiosity has ghastly consequences. Who knew? Canadians can’t say that nobody warned them.
Social conservatives are often accused of being overwrought in predicting a parade of horribles from each step down the proverbial slippery slope of social “progress.” By the time those horribles materialize — and in most cases, sooner or later, they do — we are on to the next cause, or we’re told that people are just accustomed to this now.
After all, who wants to settle for slow progress when one can enjoy the swift forward momentum of jumping out the window?
The antiseptic acronym MAID, for Medical Aid in Dying, is almost too perfect in how it evokes the modern nanny state: a nice lady who just tidies things up for you. It was sold, as it has been sold in nations such as Britain and American states such as Oregon and New York, as compassion for those suffering terribly at the very end from incurable ailments that robbed them of their minds, their movements, and their dignity.
That was the teaser rate. Now, the real bill is due. As has happened in other jurisdictions, Canada started with strict criteria in 2016 and then loosened them in 2021 to apply to anyone considered to be suffering gravely, whether or not they were close to the grave. On a per capita basis, Canadians today are more likely to die of MAID than Americans are to die of gun violence.
Now, MAID in Canada has its own poster boy: Dr. James MacLean. If MacLean’s case is not as sensationally grisly as, say, that of Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic or as flamboyant as the euthanasia crusading of Jack Kevorkian, it nonetheless underlines the banality of evil at work in Canada.
