It is. What I was trying to communicate is that it’s callous public policy to legalize assisted dying before making damn sure that the systems are set up for dignified living. And if they did that - people with disabilities would be living longer (which should be a given in an accessible and legitimately caring society). There would be no imperative to rush through MAiD and it’s expansion with poor consultation with disability rights experts who were unanimously opposed (disability rights are human rights). Disabled people (including terminally ill ones who want to live out their days) are a protected human rights group of people and a dignified life is a priority according to those rights - which are in the charter and internationally recognized - Canada signed the UNCRPD - but the govt flipped the priority upside down which was a breach of those rights and spun it as compassion so they didn’t have to invest in long term and palliative care as a first priority, nor things like accessible and affordable housing. They singled out disabled people to volunteer to “go” (death by attrition).Leaving disabled people who can’t afford to pay for private care and necessities backed into a corner with no imperative to change that. And the public mentality is so ableist they didn’t even notice or care that it was a human rights breach.
If they had improved access to good quality dignified care first lots of people would still be alive today and wouldn’t have given up. But the public now by in large believes that disabled people opting for MAiD is a compassionate way out of the suffering of disabled people - they have recoined deadly eugenics as a medical treatment for disability -caused by lack of care and broken systems, and affirmed for an already ableist mainstream public that the options disabled people have to live their lives matters less. If you replaced “disabled” with any other word to describe any other marginalized protected class it would be an outrage but it is by design that they want to get rid of disabled people by attrition to cut costs and have the public feel that not only is there nothing wrong with that, but that’s it’s a good thing. It’s easy to get the public to affirm that our lived lives don’t matter because they already feel that way on a subconscious level - and that is how this policy was allowed to happen underhandedly, and expand.
Also, the benchmark case for C7 expansion in Quebec lower court, involved one of two parties - a man with cerebral palsy named Jean Truchon who was 51. He could not afford home care so he said he wanted MAiD rather than live in the miserable conditions of a provincially run nursing home. He was in exactly the predicament
@ChemGal is arguing is not common. But the euthenasia lobby and their shrewd lawyers knew full well it was common for people to be backed into a corner like that. More common than not, considering that disabled people are statistically far more likely to be poor - that’s why they used him as one of the two parties. They certainly didn’t go into it without knowing that - nobody can be naive enough to believe that expensive lawyers for a landmark case for the most expansive assisted dying law in the world would not know that and know exactly who they were using to represent the case and how they would present it.
The other party was Nicole Gladu, a woman with post polio syndrome from a well off and educated background who had a nice home and all the supports she needed. She wanted the option to have medically assisted suicide at the time of her choosing.
It was previously establishd with the earlier Bill C14 - that suicide is legal and disabled people can’t do it themselves so they made it a human rights imperative that disabled people were not excluded from their freedom to commit suicide. But, this was, they said seven years ago, about including terminally ill people to have this right, on the same as non disabled terminally ill people. There were to be safeguards to protect disabled people who were not terminally ill on the same basis as there are safeguards to protect non disabled people who are not terminally ill. It was still a crime for doctors to facilitate the death of someone who was not dying, and an ethical imperative to provide suicide intervention.
So, (skipping over the lack of oversight and problematic cases not being reviewed for negligence in the Bill C14 period of time since MAiD became legally applicable), fast forward to Bill C7. Nicole Gladu was not dying but she was to be a relatable legal example for expanding the law to “include” disabled people generally. A priveleged, well dressed, well off, educated, retired career woman in her 70’s who always knew what she wanted for herself and seemed in control of her own choices. That was her image. Truchon’s image was of someone in an unenviable position to be pitied, and released from a horrible predicament that nobody wants. (In thinking about it - I think they made deliberate choices in representatives - they were careful to include two white people and to choose a woman to be making the more ‘liberated’ choice.)
Since the case was won by using both parties as examples - it set a legal precedent for it to be okay to choose MAiD due to a broken system and lack of adequate supports. We can’t say it wasn’t intended or deliberate. Already, several cases have been reported in the news of just that scenario. And those are only the ones who came forward. It cannot be dismissed as a few people choosing it for those reasons without recognizing that those few people were people who were failed by the system and killed by the state - because the state allowed that precedent to be set and for it to be normalized.
The AG after Jody Wilson Raybould (who argued for strong safeguards and was hesitant about expansion) was fired for calling out federal government corruption involving Quebec - is David Lametti, from Quebec. He refused to challenge Bill C7 in the Supreme Court claiming that the suffering of disabled people was too great to tie it up in the Supreme Court, but has not said a word in relation, about the conditions of care homes and the failed systems leading people like Truchon to choose MAiD. They have done an economic cost benefit analysis on this. It’s callous and underhanded.
