It is less than two months since I posted an essay entitled “Death
and Doctors” that discussed how in the depravity of modern progressive
liberalism those who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to healing
disease and injury, alleviating pain and suffering, and saving lives are now
expected to take the lives of the vulnerable at either end of the lifecycle
through abortion or physician assisted suicide. As I pointed out in that essay, both of
these practices were against the law throughout most of Canadian history and
the latter practice was only legalized quite recently. It was in 2014 that Lower Canada – Quebec to
those who are vulgarly up-to-date – became the first province to legalize physician
assisted suicide and in February of 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada once
again flexed the shiny new muscle that Pierre Trudeau had given them in 1982 by
striking down the law against physician assisted suicide in its Carter ruling. The Court placed a one year delay on this
ruling coming into effect in order to give Parliament time to fix the issues
with the law which the Court considered to be constitutionally problematic. The Liberals, however, won a majority
government in the Dominion election that year and so passed Bill C-14 instead,
which completely legalized the practice and, indeed, allowed for physicians
under certain circumstances, to go beyond assisting in suicide and actively terminate
the lives themselves. Note that while I
would like to think that had Harper’s Conservatives remained in power the
outcome would have been different, I am not so naïve as to be certain of that. Indeed, the week after the Carter ruling, I
had discussed how the Conservatives appeared to be preparing to capitulate on
this issue in “Stephen
Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada’s New Right”.
Now, one might be tempted to think that with regards to the
issue of physician assisted suicide there is not much further in the wrong
direction that our government could have gone than Bill C-14. One would be very wrong in thinking so,
however, as the government has just demonstrated.
On February 24th of last year, a few weeks before
the World Health Organization hit the panic button because a new virus that is significantly
dangerous only to the very sorts of people most likely to be on the receiving
end of euthanasia had escaped from China and was making the rounds of the
world, Captain Airhead’s Liberals introduced Bill C-7 in the House of Commons. David Lametti, who became Justice Minister and
Attorney General after Jody Wilson-Raybould was removed from this position for
refusing to go along with the Prime Minister’s corruption, was the
sponsor. The aim of the bill was to
make it easier for those who wanted what they are now calling “Medical Assistance
In Dying” or MAID – in my opinion the acronym produced by the old convention of
leaving out words of three letters or less would be more apt - but were not
already on death’s door to obtain it.
As bad as the original draft of Bill C-7 was, it has
undergone revisions over the course of the year since its first reading that
make it much worse. The most controversial
revision is the one that includes a provision that is set to come into effect
two years after the bill passes into law and which would allow access to the procedure
to those who are neither at death’s door nor experiencing extreme physical pain
and suffering but only have severe mental or psychological conditions. Since it could be easily argued that
wanting to terminate one’s own life constitutes such a condition – I suspect
the vast majority of people would see it as such – the revised version of Bill
C-7 looks suspiciously like it is saying that eventually everyone who wants a
physician’s assistance in committing suicide for whatever reason will be
entitled to that assistance.
Last week the revised bill passed the House of Commons after
the Grits, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, invoked closure on the debate
and forced a vote. Since the bill will eventually make euthanasia
available to those with merely psychological problems, why exactly the Bloc
would support a bill with the potential to drastically reduce the numbers of
their voters remains a mystery. Jimmy Dhaliwal, or rather Jagmeet Singh to
call him by his post-transition name as we would hate to mis-whatever anyone,
announced that the NDP would not support the bill. This should not be mistaken for an example
of principled opposition to physician assisted suicide for the mentally ill, it
was rather an example of voting the right way for the wrong reason – Singh’s
rabid hatred of Canada’s traditional constitution. In
my last essay I pointed out how he, in marked contrast with the more
popular and sane man who led his party ten years ago, has taken aim against the
office of Her Majesty the Queen and wishes to turn the country into some sort
of lousy people’s republic. Here it is
his problem with the Upper Chamber of Parliament that is relevant. He did not like that some of the revisions
were introduced in the Senate rather than the House of Commons. As
for that august body, the Senate passed the bill yesterday, by a vote of 60-25
with five abstentions. This is easily enough
explained. Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, and even
though the Senate is the chamber of sober
second thought, its members were probably drunk. The only mystery here is, with apologies to the
Irish Rovers, whether it was the whiskey, the gin, or the three-or-four six
packs.
A little under a year before Bill C-7 was introduced, it was
announced in the federal budget that that the Dominion government would be
spending $25 million dollars over a five year period to develop a nation-wide
suicide prevention service. In the fall
of last year, after the information began to come out about just how badly the
insane and unsuccessful experiment in locking down society to prevent the
spread of a virus had affected the mental health of Canadians driving suicide
rates through the roof, the government announced that it would be investing
$11.5 million towards suicide prevention for “marginalized communities” that
had been disproportionately affected by this mental health crisis, which they,
of course, blamed on the virus rather than on their own tyrannical suspension
of everyone’s basic rights, freedoms, and social lives. Apparently the government cannot see any
contradiction between prioritizing suicide prevention and providing easily
available assistance in taking one’s own life.
By funding suicide prevention programs the government would
seem to be taking the side in the ancient ethical debate that says that suicide
is a bad thing and that it is wrong to take your own life. The strongest version of this ethical
position has traditionally been that of Christian moral theology. Suicide, in Christian ethics, is not merely
a violation of the Sixth Commandment, as the Commandments are numbered by the
Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, but a particularly bad
violation of this Commandment because it leaves no room for earthly repentance
and is an expression of despair, the abandonment of faith and hope in God. In other traditions, suicide is generally
frowned upon but in a less absolute way.
In some traditions suicide brings shame upon the memory and family of
the person who commits it except under a specific set of circumstances in which
case it accomplishes the opposite of this by erasing shame that the individual
had already brought upon himself and his family through his disgraceful actions,
shame which could only be expunged in this manner. It is easier to reconcile these traditions
with each other – preserving one’s family honour is a very different motivation
from despair – than it is to reconcile either with physician assisted suicide. Physician assisted suicide in no way
resembles what would have been considered an honourable suicide in any pagan
tradition. In Christian ethics, since
taking your own life is so bad, getting someone else to help you do it or do it
for you is downright diabolical.
Perhaps the very worst thing about Bill C-7 is that gives
even more power to the medical profession.
The liberalization of the Criminal Code in 1969 and the Morgentaler decision from the Supreme
Court of Canada in 1988 gave doctors the power of life and death over the
unborn. This was already too much
power, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter
in 2015 and the passing of Bill C-14 the following year gave them similar power
over the elderly and infirm. Last year,
the Dominion government and every provincial government gave their top doctors dictatorial
power over all Canadians, allowing them to suspend all of the basic Common Law
rights and freedoms that are the traditional property of all of Her Majesty’s
subjects regardless of Charter protections, power which they proceeded to
disgracefully abuse as they gleefully and sadistically traded the serpentine
staff of Asclepius for the Orwellian symbol of a boot stamping on a human face
forever. Now, Bill C-7 is extending
their power of life and death even further in a most irresponsible way. Physician assisted suicide is the foot in
the door for outright euthanasia or “mercy killing”, extending the availability
of the former to people who are not already dying will lead inevitably to
doctors being allowed to perform the latter on those who are not already dying,
and since it is doctors who get to say what is and what is not illness, mental
or otherwise, the ultimate effect of this bill is to give the medical
profession total and unlimited power of life and death over every Canadian. Nobody should be trusted with that kind of
power, least of all the medical profession as their behaviour over the last
twelve months demonstrates. Indeed, the
disgrace they have brought upon their profession by their tyranny and their
callous disregard for the social, psychological, spiritual and economic harm
they have done with their universal quarantines, mask mandates and social
distancing is such, that even seppuku on the part of all non-dissenting
physicians may prove insufficient to restore their professional honour.
