Canadian doctor considers euthanasia the best work she has done.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

British actress, comedian and disability rights activist, Liz Carr, produced a BBC documentary titled - Better off Dead? that was first aired on May 14. Carr is best known for her role as Clarissa Mullery on the BBC series Silent Witness.

One of the scenes in the Better off Dead? documentary features Carr interviewing Canadian euthanasia doctor, Ellen Wiebe. (Link to the scene)

David Kraydon wrote an article that was published in The Post Millennial on October 9 concerning Carr's documentary. Carr asks her about euthanasia and Wiebe responds:

“I love my job. You know, I always loved being a doctor and I delivered over a thousand babies, and I took care of families, but this is the very best work I've ever done in the last seven years. And people ask me why? And I think, well, doctors like grateful patients, and nobody's more grateful than my patients now and their families.”

Ellen Wiebe laughing

Carr wonders if Wiebe is concerned that Canada’s euthanasia program will go too far. Kraydon writes that Wiebe shuts down that debate by stating:

“What you're saying is to protect what you consider vulnerable people. You are condemning others to unbearable suffering, unbearable suffering, and I am so glad, so glad that I'm Canadian and that we have this law so that people can choose that or not choose that, but to say that somebody has to suffer like that is simply cruel,”

Better off Dead? viewers were shocked when Wiebe giggled while talking about euthanasia.

Professor Christopher Lyon told National Post writer Sharon Kirkey that:

“Some providers have counts in the hundreds — this isn’t normal, for any occupation,” he said. “Even members of the military at war do not typically kill that frequently. I think that’s a question that we’ve not really ever asked.”

Lyon recently published an article concerning health-care serial killers and Canada's euthanasia law.

Ellen Wiebe may be Canada's most prolific euthanasia doctor having killed hundreds. 

Liz Carr's Better off Dead? is available for you to watch on youtube (youtube link).

Researcher argues health-care serial killer could take advantage of Canada's assisted dying program

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Christopher Lyon

Professor Christopher Lyon, who teaches at the University of York in the UK, recently published a research article concluding that Canada's (MAiD) euthanasia law enables healthcare serial killers (HSK).

(Read the research article with references (Link).

The National Post published an article by Sharon Kirkey on August 9, 2024. Kirkey interviews Lyon and tries to challenge his research.

Previous article: Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare serial killing? (Link).

 Kirkey introduces her article by stating:

“Canada’s MAID (medical assistance in dying) system is criticized as the most permissive or least safeguarded in the world, raising the question of whether it could protect patients who fit the clinical profile of adult victims of HSK (health-care serial killers) from a killer working as a MAID provider,” Christopher Lyon, a Canadian social scientist who teaches at the University of York in the United Kingdom, wrote in a newly published paper.

Insufficient vetting of staff, poor surveillance and oversight, and a failure by authorities to act on concerns raised by suspicious colleagues or witnesses have allowed health-care serial killers to go undetected for considerable periods, Lyon wrote in the journal HEC (HealthCare Ethics Committee) Forum, a partner journal of the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics.

Canada’s MAID regime “has similar features,” Lyon wrote, “with added opportunities for killing” afforded by broad Criminal Code exemptions from homicide and suicide offences “amid broad patient eligibility criteria.”

MAID’s oversight and delivery needs a “radical restructuring” to help mitigate the possibility of abuses, he said.

Kirkey gives some insight into Lyon's concerns. Kirkey writes:

Lyon’s 77-year-old father died by MAID in 2021 in a Victoria hospital room, over the family’s objections that he had not been properly assessed. He’d had bouts of depression and suicidal thinking, but was approved for MAID nonetheless. In essays, Lyon has described his father’s MAID provider as “Death.”

Lyon explains to Kirkey that he is not saying that there are criminally culpable homicides occurring within Canada's MAiD regime, but rather he is saying that based on the law it could happen because the MAiD regime protects homicidal personalities and enables them to legally kill.

Kirkey quotes Lyon as stating:

“I want to be clear: I’m not calling anybody out there a murderer or a serial killer in a culpable sense,” Lyon said in an interview. No police investigations or criminal charges are known.

Euthanasia “is fundamentally homicide by lethal injection,” he said. “Whatever one’s views are on MAID, it should be foremost in our minds that, at a basic level, we are empowering a privileged class of people to poison disabled and distressed people to death.

“A key reference point is health-care serial killers,” Lyon said. “Patient safety and ethical and rigorous medical practice demands that we be extremely careful about who we let do this, but I don’t see that happening in Canada.”

“Disabled people have been raising the risks of MAID being attractive to ‘angel of death’ characters for a very long time,” he added.

Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare serial killing.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Christopher Lyon

Professor Christopher Lyon, who teaches at the University of York in the UK, researches and concludes that Canada's (MAiD) euthanasia law enables healthcare serial killers (HSK).

Lyon's research was published by HEC Forum on August 2, 2024 under the title: Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying System can Enable Healthcare Serial Killing. 

(Read the research article with references (Link).

Healthcare serial killers (HSK) is not a new phenomenon. Lyon writes about several well known HSK's, and examines what enable them to remain undetected for long periods of time while killing their patients.

Lyon outlines his article by stating:

Criminal HSK appears globally. Offenders may kill fewer than ten to hundreds of people. They are often challenging to detect and stop due to job-related access to means of killing, responsibility for record-keeping, trusted role, professional insularity and protectionism, poor oversight, and victims whose deaths are less likely to attract suspicion due to age, illness, or existing likelihood of dying. Ambiguous or divergent legal and medical concepts and practices can make prosecuting HSK challenging.

He continues:

Canadian euthanasia doctor has killed hundreds.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Ellen Wiebe

Sharon Kirkey wrote a pro-euthanasia / pro-Ellen Wiebe article that was published in the National Post on Saturday July 6. 

Kirkey, who has written many pro-euthanasia articles, attempts to fix the perception of Wiebe after she was seen laughing in the film Better off Dead? by disability activist / actress Liz Carr while discussing euthanasia.

Elmira Tanatarova reported for the Daily Mail on May 15 that many of the viewers of the Better off Dead? documentary were uneasy with Wiebe as she giggled when discussing the number of her euthanasia deaths.

When asked by Kirkey about the number of euthanasia deaths Wiebe responds:

“I know the exact number,” the Vancouver doctor said, “but I don’t want to do that, no. It’s become a weird thing, people talking about their numbers, or criticizing people who talk about their numbers.”

“Hundreds is good,” she said. About 430 as of May 2022 alone, as she then testified before a special parliamentary committee on medical assistance in dying, or MAID.

When asked about laughing on camera during the filming of Better off Dead? Kirkey writes:

Wiebe can seem “oddly cheerful” when discussing MAID, viewers of the BBC documentary remarked. She grinned at peculiar moments during an interview with National Post, laughing as she described how, when getting final consent on the day of death, “I come in and say, ‘Are you sure this is what you want to do today?'”

Laughter can be a response to emotionally uncomfortable situations, like talking about death, said Helen Long, CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada. “You suddenly realize what you’re in the middle of discussing.”

“Laughing often is just part of my personality,” Wiebe told National Post.

I personally speak cheerfully about my work with the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition but I'm not killing people.

In response to her clients Kirkey reports Wiebe as stating:

“It’s hard to even be in the same room as somebody who’s suffering so severely,” Wiebe told the Post. “But then, of course, you know, I get to end that suffering, which is good.”

Wiebe misses the point. She is not ending suffering or even caring for the sufferer, she is killing the person.

Trudo Lemmens

Trudo Lemmens is bothered by the pseudo-spiritual language that euthanasia doctors apply to MAiD deaths. Kirkey reports:

But others like Trudo Lemmens are troubled by the small number of providers dominating the practice and the “pseudo-spiritual language” some use to describe doctor-administered death.

“When MAID was legalized, it was framed as a practice that was exceptionally required to ease the dying process or give some control at the end of life,” Lemmens, a University of Toronto professor of law and ethics, wrote in an email.

Christopher Lyon

Christopher Lyon, whose father died by MAiD in Victoria BC also reponds to Kirkey:

Others like Christopher Lyon, a Canadian social scientist at the University of York in the U.K. have remarked that pleasure from euthanasia is deeply disquieting, “because death is usually a deeply painful or difficult moment for the patients and their loved ones.”

Lyon’s 77-year-old father died by MAID in a Victoria hospital room in 2021, over the family’s objections. (Wiebe was not the provider.) His father had bouts of depression and suicidal thinking, but was approved for MAID nonetheless. Lyon wonders what draws some providers to MAID “and what happens to a person when killing becomes a daily or weekly event.”

“Some providers have counts in the hundreds — this isn’t normal, for any occupation,” he said. “Even members of the military at war do not typically kill that frequently. I think that’s a question that we’ve not really ever asked.”

Kirkey responds to criticisms of Wiebe by interviewing Dr James Downer, who was a founding doctor of the Physicians Advisory Council for Dying with Dignity. Downer who is introduced as a Ottawa palliative care and critical care specialist reportedly states:

“It’s absolutely not a celebration of the act of ending someone’s life. It’s a reflection of the intense emotional bond you form with families and patients.”

Kirkey also obtains a comment from Helen Long, the CEO of Dying with Dignity who said:

She’s also “warm and funny,” blunt and straightforward, a straight-shooter with a determined streak,

Wiebe when asked about natural death reportedly states:

“I know what the ends are like, and I’m not interested in that,” she told National Post. MAID means people can “skip out when you’re still you,” she said.

Wiebe expects that the law will expand to include children and the incompetent. Kirkey writes:

She fully anticipates that MAID will be extended to mature minors. “I’ve always been assuming for eight years that a 17-year-old with terminal cancer is going to say, ‘I have the right,’ and of course any judge in the country will say, ‘Yes, you do.’”

She also expects some form of advance requests for MAID in cases of dementia, which would allow a person to make a written request for euthanasia that could be honoured later, even if they lose their capacity to make medical decisions for themselves. Support for advance requests is strong, according to polls. But if someone is unable to express how they’re feeling, who decides if they are suffering unbearably — and what if they changed their minds? MAID doctors may be asked to “provide” for someone they have not met before, and with whom they will not be able to communicate, Wiebe said.

“That’s going to be hard for us as providers,” she said.

“This will be a new challenge. And I’m up for challenges.”

Much of this interview confirms the concerns that Trudo Lemmens has that there are a few insiders that are controlling the euthanasia practise and narrative in Canada.

Clearly this article is designed to improve the perception of Wiebe after the Better off Dead? film shows a crass and scary nature to Wiebe.

But, it doesn't matter where you stand on the issue, or on politics, Carr portrayed Wiebe for who she is in Better off Dead? Carr wasn't staging the interview and she wasn't using interviews with people who oppose euthanasia to make Wiebe look bad.

I will also challenge Sharon Kirkey who tries to sell herself as a neutral reporter. Clearly she tries to cover-up for the euthanasia lobby and seems committed to selling more euthanasia to Canadians.

Canada’s euthanasia programme flirting with eugenics

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Kevin Yuill

Kevin Yuill, former professor of American Studies at the University of Sunderland in the UK, was published by Spiked on October 25, 2023 about his concern that Canada's euthanasia program is eugenic.

Yuill, who recently visited Canada writes:

A few weeks ago, I accidentally toured one of the awful tent cities in Vancouver, Canada. At the corner of Main Street and Hastings Avenue, homeless drug addicts spread their few possessions out on blankets and cover the pavement for blocks on end. It is only a short distance from the restaurants and attractions of this fairly affluent city and is easy to stray into.

So long as they are not violent, homeless addicts are generally ignored across the city. Vancouverites, in that polite Canadian way, accept their presence and do what they can to be kind. Nonetheless, everyone I met spoke about the ‘crisis’ of addicts in Vancouver, where drugs have effectively been decriminalised.

Now, the Canadian authorities seem to have come up with a novel, frightening solution to the crisis: euthanasia.

Yuill explains: 

"Canadians are eligible for the medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme if they have a ‘grievous and irremediable medical condition’, such as a serious physical illness or disability. If their condition has put them in an advanced state of irreversible decline and caused enduring physical or psychological suffering, they may request to be allowed euthanasia."

Yuill states that this is horrific enough but in March 2024 "those suffering from mental illnesses – with no physical ailments necessary – will also be eligible for MAID. That includes people with substance-use disorders."

Yuill explains:

Last week, a framework for assessing people with substance-use disorders for MAID was discussed at the annual conference for the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine in British Columbia. Dr David Martell (ironically a winner of the Family Physician of the Year award) was one of the most vocal supporters of expanding MAID to drug addicts. Dr Martell declared that ‘it’s not fair to exclude people from eligibility purely because their mental disorder might either partly or in full be a substance-use disorder. It has to do with treating people equally.’

Dr Martell went on to explain that doctors will need to distinguish between somebody who has a ‘reasoned wish to die’ and someone who is merely suicidal. A person who is ‘thinking in a calm and measured way about wanting [their] suffering to end’, Martell said, might be considered for MAID. But he conceded that a person can exhibit signs of both suicidality and a calm and measured wish to die, and that it would be ‘fairly impossible’ to make the distinction if the person being assessed were intoxicated.

Yuill quotes from Christopher Lyons, whose suicidal father died by euthanasia, who stated:

The lines of informed consent are extremely blurred, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved.

Yuill explains that Canada's parliament recently defeated Bill C-314, a bill that would have reversed the law that will permit euthanasia for mental illness, even though a recent poll found that only 3 out of 10 Canadians support euthanasia for mental illness.

Yuill provides a history lesson on eugenics:

For instance, in the first few years of the 20th century, Dr Ella K Dearborn cheerfully called for ‘euthanasia for the incurably ill, insane, criminals and degenerates’. Similarly, in 1906, sociologist L Graham Crozier agreed with her medical compatriot: ‘I would personally rather administer chloroform to the poor, starving children of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other American cities, than to see them living as they must in squalor and misery.’

In an echo of today’s advocates for legalised assisted dying, Dr Dearborn once thundered: ‘Do not let sentiment or superstition retard the wheels of worldwide progress.’ In Canada, this so-called progress shows no sign of stopping. In the eight years since MAID was legalised for the terminally ill, it has been expanded to disabled people, homeless people and prisoners. And soon drug addicts will be next.

Yuill states that the most humane solution is to provide treatment for addicts, not death, and asks:

Is that really such an unreasonable thing to ask for?

Previous articles by Kevin Yuill: (Link to articles)

Kevorkian's ghost

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Christopher Lyons

Christopher Lyons has written an excellent commentary on a recent article by two bioethicists who argue that poverty, homelessness and having problems receiving medical treatment, should not hinder decisions for euthanasia.

Wiebe and Mullin's argument for radical autonomy with respect to (MAiD) euthanasia are deeply troubling in their implications and flawed in their considerations. 

Lyon's summarizes the argument by Wiebe and Mullin in the following manner:

In a nutshell, Wiebe and Mullin argue that MAiD can be a ‘harm-reducing’ embrace of individual autonomy to avoid prolonging suffering in oppressed people who cannot access adequate socioeconomic resources... They argue that even though a person may be poor or have limited options, they can still hold and express autonomy to request and receive death. Death, in their formulation, is the least bad option for people suffering social inequality in an unjust world.

Wiebe and Mullin are not making a new argument. In fact Kevorkian used it, too.

Thirty years ago, the American murderer Dr MJ ‘Jack’ Kevorkian, a euthanasia and assisted suicide advocate and illicit provider, expressed cruder versions of the same positions, claiming that ‘autonomy always, always should be respected, even if it is absolutely contrary, the decision is contrary to best medical advice and what the physician wants…’ and that a mere request for death is justification alone for provision, regardless of circumstance.

Kevorkian death van

Lyons continues:

It is also worth noting that Kevorkian disproportionately killed or assisted death for women, many of whom may not have had any physical illness and claimed ‘that only medical men should decide’ on MAiD. Aside from his blatant and lethal misogyny, his statements highlight a central but unacknowledged problem in Wiebe and Mullin and similar individualistic formulations of MAiD: the tension between the patient's autonomy, the clinician's autonomy, and society.

Wiebe and Mullin consider it paternalism to prevent killing.

Wiebe and Mullin, however, call it ‘paternalistic’ to prevent people from accessing MAiD but make no comment on the brutal paternalism of a privileged and empowered actor representing the state who judges someone’s eligibility for death and then may kill them. Why is clinician autonomy discounted? The privilege and power of assessors and providers is a major persistently unaddressed flaw in the reasoning of these kinds of patient autonomy-based arguments.

Wiebe and Mullin are asserting a radical autonomy that is obsolete.

... their definition of autonomy appears to be a repackaging of the obsolete ‘homo economicus’ model human actor from neoclassical economic theory, where people are understood to be ‘unswervingly rational, completely selfish, and can effortlessly solve even the most difficult optimization problem’. Research in neuroscience, biology, psychology, public health, sociology, and other disciplines has long since established that our relative autonomy and agency are products of myriad internal and external biophysical and social experiences, relationships, circumstances, and systems. None of us exists in hermetic vacuums of rational reason.

Lyon challenges Wiebe and Mullin on their view of autonomy.

By voiding a person’s relational context, the impact of their death on others, and the autonomy of the people who must assess and approve death from consideration, Wiebe and Mullin and their ideological colleagues idealise patient autonomy. Like Kevorkian, they construct euthanasia or assisted suicide (non-culpable homicide and suicide assistance under Canadian MAiD law) as virtuous though ‘tragic’ expressions of self-determination and ‘harm reduction’. Do they consider the harm to others from MAiD deaths as illegitimate or irrelevant?

How euthanasia may lead to eliminating people with disabilities and those who are poor.

Societies that find intellectual reasons to euthanise or kill the poor, sick, disabled, or socially oppressed groups commit atrocities. A former MAiD provider has even sounded this alarm in the wake of eligibility expansions. Despite claims that a lack of support for people is a ‘deep injustice’, the vision of society painted by Wiebe and Mullin is dystopian, where injustice may be morally permitted to flourish so long as others with greater autonomy judge oppressed people to have enough autonomy and ‘engaged hope’ to kill themselves or have themselves killed. Indeed, they even argue that medically provided death-for-oppression is a suitable and just response ‘to a world that currently does not exist and is unlikely to emerge in the near future’. Thus, in addition to MAiD for both chronic and terminal physical illness and disability, and official consideration or arguments for mental illness, children (‘mature minors’) and infants, we now see Kevorkian’s liberty-or-death mantra re-emerge as a new slip on the expansionist slope as an argument for MAiD for people whose sole condition is the experience of forms of deprived liberty. Wiebe and Mullin’s and allied proposals, hopefully unwittingly, thus serve the construction of an intellectual foundation for eliminating rather than emancipating the poor and oppressed by an empowered (medical) elite. MAiD, in this way, is ultimately a political, not a medical, project. We have seen versions of this before and we know how it ends.

Christopher Lyons, a Canadian academic in York, UK who writes about euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Complicated grief: When a family member dies by euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article by Erin Anderssen published by the Globe and Mail on January 18 concerns the experience of several families as they grieve the death of family members who died by euthanasia. Anderssen begins with the story of Gary Hertgers:

Gary Hertgers learned that his sister, Wilma, had received a medically assisted death when her apartment manager called to say that her body was being carried out into the street.

“You mean, my sister is dead?” he asked.

“I thought you knew,” the manager said. “She told me the family knew.”

But, in fact, none of her immediate family knew that Ms. Hertgers had been approved for medical assistance in dying, let alone set a date. Not her 88-year-old mother, whom she called twice a day. Not her older brother, who lived one town over. And not Mr. Hertgers, 61, who had only that Friday, after driving the four hours to Chilliwack, B.C., shared a pot of tea at Ms. Hertgers’s kitchen table.

Gary Hertgers

Anderssen continues:

They’d chatted as usual, mostly about Ms. Hertgers’s health; at 63, she experienced chronic pain, and wrestled with depression. She told him the location of her will. But she had done that before, so the clue didn’t register. They parted with a hug. See you soon, he said.

Two days later, in the same apartment, someone said a prayer at her side while she died. At least, that’s what Mr. Hertgers was later told by the doctor who delivered the fatal medication. The identity of that person is still a mystery, like many of the details around his sister’s death.

When Canadians receive MAID, families and caregivers are often with them, providing comfort along the way. But the situation becomes much more fraught, ethically and emotionally, when patients don’t want relatives and friends involved.

Anderssen explains that Canada's MAiD law does not require the person requesting death to inform their family and the euthanasia assessor is also not required to speak to family, making it difficult to accurately assess a person who is asking to be killed.

Hertgers feels at a loss.

“You feel like you’re taken for granted, like the relationship you’ve built over all these years is superseded by someone who has known her a few months, that your care has been for naught,” says Mr. Hertgers. “At the end of the day, did all that time and effort mean anything?”

I have published several articles on the grief related to death by euthanasia. In October 2018 I received a call from a grieving woman after her grand-father died by euthanasia (Link).

Anderssen reports that some experts say that the role of families needs to be clarified before MAID extends to patients with mental illness. 

In December, responding to concerns raised by doctors and health care organizations, the federal government announced it would ask Parliament to delay the MAID expansion, to allow more time to establish clear safeguards. Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the country’s largest psychiatric teaching hospital, has suggested that should include more consultation with patients and their families.

Anderssen shares the story of an Ontario woman who was approved for euthanasia in British Columbia without her family knowing.

In Ontario, for instance, a father learned this fall that his adult daughter was being assessed for MAID when she forwarded an e-mail from a B.C. doctor proposing that she travel west to complete the process. By then a plane ticket had already been booked for November. Her parents, who had been caring for her since she was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman, were distraught.

The father, whom The Globe and Mail is not identifying to protect his daughter’s privacy and his relationship with her, says he’d watched, over many months, as MAID consumed his daughter’s day; she pored over how-to information online.

His daughter’s life is not easy, he conceded in an interview. Her mental illness causes fearsome bouts of anger, she spends most of her time alone, and she is plagued by delusions that she is rotting inside from a terminal physical illness.

But certainly, he didn’t think she’d be eligible for an assisted death. While she has some physical health issues, he could not imagine they were serious enough to qualify for MAID....

So it was unfathomable, he says, that a physician was counselling his daughter, who suffers from psychosis, to travel alone halfway across the country. Or that two MAID assessors might approve her without insisting on input from her treating psychiatrist or family doctor. Yet the e-mail suggested an expeditious outcome: If she could get to B.C. – where ostensibly a physical illness might make her eligible – she could qualify within weeks.

The father doesn’t know what illness his daughter used to apply, and was not privy to all the discussions with the MAID clinician. But in the end, the parents managed to persuade their daughter to cancel the plane ticket.

It was likely the euthanasia clinic in Vancouver that was involved with this case. Dr Wiebe is reported to have approved euthanasia by Zoom and was willing to pick people up at the airport for being killed. 

Christopher Lyon

Anderssen then told the story of Dr Christopher Lyon father, who died by euthanasia in Victoria.

Before his father died, Dr. Lyon, an environmental social scientist, says his family tried to share what they consider to be important context for the MAID providers and assessors. When his father was first assessed for MAID, the family wrote up a detailed history of his physical ailments and mental health struggles, his alcohol use and personality quirks – and sent it to the office of the MAID co-ordinator. Dr. Lyon knew his father experienced bouts of depression, especially around negative events. Hospitalized after a fall, he now faced moving into an assisted-living apartment. He had been openly talking about suicide for months. The family expressed their opinion, however, that with time, social support and mental health care, their father would improve.

Even today, Dr. Lyon is not sure who read it. He doesn’t know the content of his father’s assessments, or what information was collected. He says the health authority has declined to release the full records, deeming it not to be in the “patient’s best interest.” A late-stage psychiatrist report that he has seen contained so many errors and omissions that he worries about what else was overlooked.

When the MAID provider phoned to give him 48 hours’ notice, it was the first time they had spoken. By then, Dr. Lyon and his family had been trying for weeks to find a solution to keep his 77-year-old father alive. They thought they had time; his chronic health conditions had qualified him for MAID as a non-terminal patient, which required a 90-day waiting period, and there was still a month to go. But his dad stopped eating a few days after moving, reluctantly, into the new apartment. He was admitted to hospital after another fall, and fast-tracked to receive an assisted death.

Dr. Lyon rushed to Victoria from Montreal, and on a sunny afternoon, he gathered at his father’s hospital bed with his two siblings, and his mother. He remembers that the MAID provider was running late. “We were just watching the clock tick down until someone was going to come and kill him, which is, you know, an excruciating, unbearable thing to experience.” Arriving, Dr. Lyon recalls, she said, “I hear it’s someone’s birthday,” as if joining a party; by awful chance, the procedure had been scheduled on a family member’s birthday. “Get me the hell out of here,” his father declared, giving his consent. He was dead 20 minutes later. His son still has nightmares about it.

“It was like some sick, dystopian Black Mirror or Squid Game,” Dr. Lyon says. “You, family member, have 90 days to convince a doctor, whose name you don’t know and cannot directly contact, to save your father’s life.” To pass on important information the patient might conceal. To scramble when the date is unexpectedly moved up. To make sure, before the lethal injection, that all options have been fully explored. It felt, he said, that “if we want to save our loved one’s life, we are actually in competition with the assessors and providers.

Duncan sisters

The article then tells the story of Donna Duncan who died by euthanasia in October 2021 after having a head injury from a car accident in 2020, that she didn't receive treatment for, due to Covid restrictions. The article states:

Christie Duncan, and her sister, Alicia, learned their mother, Donna, who lived near Abbotsford, B.C., was starting the MAID process when their mom’s husband texted them a link to a support group in October, 2021.

Their mom’s decline began after a car accident in early 2020, Christie says, and she was losing weight, without a clear diagnosis. But her daughters worried that the pandemic had made it hard to get treatment, and lockdowns had affected their mom’s mental health.

When they found out a MAID date had been set, the sisters successfully appealed to the courts for a delay. A few days later, Donna was admitted to hospital after cutting her wrist – an event her daughters hoped would postpone their mom’s assisted death indefinitely.

In the hospital, on Oct. 29, Christie says, “I hugged her goodbye, and I went home, thinking I will talk to my mom in the morning.” Donna was released a few hours later, and that night, her daughters received a text from her husband that their mom had received MAID, “as per her wishes.” (A police investigation, prompted after her daughters filed a complaint, did not find any evidence of criminality.)

The police investigation did not find evidence of criminality because Canada's euthanasia law makes it nearly impossible to prosecute any doctor or nurse practitioner for their role in a death. The law states that the doctor or nurse practitioner only need to be "of the opinion" that the person fits the criteria of the law. In all of these cases, the assessor was "of the opinion" that the person fit the criteria of the law.

Euthanasia is not a revocable decision once you are dead.

The grief associated with family members who have lost a loved one to euthanasia, is rarely discussed, but it is real. There have been many controversial euthanasia deaths in Canada that may have led to complicated grief. A study needs to be done concerning the grief associated with deaths by euthanasia.

Dying Indignity. Witnessing my father's medically assisted death.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

On November 26, Christopher Lyon shared an article on his site concerning the medically assisted death (euthanasia) of his father. I have republished parts of the story. Lyon begins his story this way:

My father was killed, in front of my family and me, by his Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) provider, a physician, in some numbered hospital room in Victoria, British Columbia, in the summer of 2021. Though he was mid-way through the 90-day assessment period required for Track 2 MAiD requests (non-foreseeable death), he was quickly moved from Track 2 to Track 1 (foreseeable death), having passed both required assessments.

One week before dying, he had moved into a newly renovated and appointed Assisted Living apartment and said the food was good and he was keen for the in-house barber shop. Two days later, he began refusing solid food. Two or three days after that, he fell, during a heat wave that overtaxed local ambulances and paramedics. As a result, he was left on the floor of his apartment for six or seven hours before an ambulance could reach him, and the staff had a ‘no lift’ policy. He was incensed. The first time my family and I heard from his MAiD Provider was at this time – forty-eight hours before death. My father indicated that his assessors could contact the family at any time, so it is unknown why we were not previously notified. We were told simply that Dad had been track-moved, and that we should get flights now if we wanted to attend his death in two days.

The provider told me that he was track-moved because a) he started refusing solid food (but not, as we discovered, caloric liquids), and b) that his elevated white blood cell count indicated an infection that he did not immediately want to investigate. Apparently, those fugitive choices were the basis for labelling his death as fixed and foreseeable. Yet it was never explained to me how either choice was irremediable or constituted imminent death or loss of capacity.

His father experienced several falls.

My family used his hospitalisations as an opportunity to convince social services to intervene and accelerate him into either assisted living or safe and sanitary accommodation. He had been very resistant to moving for several years and had a long history of suicidal expression that peaked during periods of change. Social services worked their wonders and managed to find him an urgent placement in a local assisted living residential facility.

He often appeared anxious about his move to assisted living and was fixated on the seventy percent deduction to his low, mostly Canada Pension Plan income ($1400/month as I recall) it would cost to reside there. He was never very skilled with money and would be left with barely enough to cover his mobile phone bill and living costs. Family help was always available. We offered to supplement his costs and had planned to buy him a mobility scooter before he was killed.

During one of our weekly calls, following his second-last hospitalisation, he claimed that he was bedridden and immobile and therefore needed MAiD. However, he was seated in a chair, got up to use the toilet, and was able to move about the room on his own. When we confronted him about this and other claims and inconsistencies, he would either become enraged and threaten to kill himself or, without explaining his decision, demand that we not question it.

His dad was suicidal.

In the months before he applied for MAiD, Dad was acutely suicidal. He cited the suicides of people like Robin Williams and Ernest Hemingway as inspirations – men who “just knew when it was their time to go”. He said he looked up ways to kill himself, online, such as starvation. Other times, he would say things like “ashes to ashes” and “we are dust in the wind,” as in previous bouts. When he said this, I arranged for the BC suicide hotline to phone him, and he had a conversation with them where he noted these deaths and claimed that he was not depressed.

...His suicidality became acute during involuntary upheavals in his life, such as the loss of his business, marital separation, and residential moves in ways that adversely impacted every member of my family. In my younger years, he threatened my mother with his suicide, an event in which I physically intervened. He also said he picked his MAiD provider because of her attractiveness to him, and declared her a second spouse or love, again suggestive of his romantic view of self-annihilation.

In his darkest moments, he used suicide to manipulate family members. In the weeks before MAiD, he said that when his family asked for an explanation or called him out on his inconsistencies or apparent dishonesty, it made him “want to do it more”. He threatened suicide if he was denied MAiD. While in the hospital, a family member asked him about his ideation, and he replied with a surly, “I’ll find a bit of cord”. He would back down from his threats when a family member very patiently walked him through how much of a burden and problem a suicide on their watch would create for the hospital staff doing their best to look after him. I believe the hospital staff was aware that he was suicidal.

The MAiD assessment.

During the period of his falls and hospitals, Bill C-7 passed and MAiD for Track 2, non-reasonably foreseeable natural death, became newly available. When he first told me he was looking at MAiD, weeks before he applied, he said that “a doctor” he spoke to in the hospital “told me I should have it”. I did not believe him due to his tendency for selective hearing and deferring responsibility. Yet I now have doubts, after learning that Vancouver Island hosts some of Canada’s most prolific and ideological MAiD assessors and providers, who favour vivisectional ideas of amputated autonomy and eligibility expansion, as well as the highest medically assisted death rate in the world. It is sickening to ponder.

His 90-day assessment period would have ended on his deceased mother’s birthday, and he took this as a ‘sign’ that he should proceed with MAiD. This echoed his later reaction when his assessment period was halved with his track-move and fell on the earliest day his chosen provider was available, also another family member’s birthday for whom he had often expressed a simmering resentment.

He wanted to make sure that his father's MAiD assessment was robust.

Within days of his application, I looked up and contacted a leading MAiD psychiatrist and expressed my concerns. I was advised to make a list of my family’s knowledge and worries about mental illness, suicide, and personality issues and to push hard to get it to his assessors to arrange a psychiatric evaluation. Unable to get the assessors' contact details, my family and I put together this information. I sent it to the local MAiD coordinator who said they would pass it on to his assessors.

When, at last, I heard from Provider before his death, I asked if she had received our list of concerns and received an evasive response. The provider seemed to want to hurry off the phone and appeared to be in a busy place, like a hospital corridor, as I could hear voices in the background. I therefore only had a few seconds to describe my father’s complex history. Provider also appeared to regard my father’s suicidal history and previous depression diagnosis as news. During that call, I also relayed, as had my other family members, that I had spoken to a MAiD psychiatrist who had advised me to push hard for a psychiatric assessment. Upon learning this, Provider reluctantly agreed to try to get a last-minute psychiatric evaluation but was unsure if a psychiatrist could be found so close to scheduled death.

A psychiatrist was found. Provider bluntly told me before my father’s evaluation that the psychiatrist would “just agree” and “provide cover” for her, yet also said he would be ineligible for MAiD if mental illness was found. However, “finding” mental illness would only be a comorbidity and not a sole diagnosis, given the approval and track move rationales, so this comment does not make sense to me. Despite my advisement that Dad had previously been diagnosed, the provider said she did not think he was depressed. I was very disturbed by Provider’s presumption of the outcome of the psychiatric assessment, which suggested to me the evaluation would lack independence and rigour.

The days approaching his father's death.

In his last days, under medical supervision, Dad drank juice, coffee, and wine with no reservations. He had hospital meals delivered, at which he poked, but disliked the food. He was drinking wine the evening and morning before he was killed. He may not have been sober for his final consent.

When my family arrived, my father or a clinical staff member informed us that he had “special permission” to drink alcohol. The evening before he died, he drank wine (about ½ bottle) after several days without solid food. At this point, my family managed to convince him to postpone his death so we could spend more time with him. The next morning, however, he appeared to have forgotten this conversation. He seemed confused and thought that day might also have been another assessment. I warned Provider about this, but she said only that she would “start from the beginning” and disappeared into his room alone. The provider later cancelled an early afternoon meeting with the family. My father drank coffee and wine that morning and fell asleep from about noon to two pm. I believe that this sleep could have been alcohol induced.

He also appeared confused during the previous weeks of his assessment period. He could not seem to differentiate between assessors and other clinicians who saw him. He may have been on (opioid) painkillers, as I recall him being offered, and possibly accepting them, by nursing staff before he died. In his earlier hospital stays he had demanded higher doses so that he could “feel” them, suggesting to me that he may have wanted their narcotic effect more than pain relief.

The day of his death was a family member’s birthday (not mine), and he declared this was his “special gift” after initially apologising that he had forgotten, but then decided otherwise. This family member witnessed the death and considered his choice a final act of malice or resentment. To my great distress, the Provider also knew about the birthday and made comments to that effect. In a moment alone together, I tried to deter my father, and explain why it was wrong, but he only reacted aggressively and dismissively.

No capacity assessment was done immediately before final consent was taken.

His father's death.

Provider was meant to arrive between three-thirty and four, but turned-up late, at about five past four, and voiced, callous and cheery, “I hear it’s someone’s birthday!” before proceeding to ‘obtain final consent’ for the suicide-homicide. My father declared his consent with a belligerent “Get me the hell out of here!” and Provider became Death.

Death tried one arm and then the other for an injection site, settling on his right side, and sat body-warm beside me on the small, smooth, clinical sofa. Death then delivered her long poison-parade of prepared syringes, fished out in order from a plastic toolbox - the chemicals, like the box, repurposed for something their makers did not intend. Adrift somewhere on the slow white river of propofol, flowing into him from three or four milk-bottle syringes, Dad disappeared. His warm face blanched and his head lolled where he was left propped upon the bed. It took him twenty minutes to die.

Death’s last words to me, just as she left a short time later, were a demand not to bring the concerns or issues I had raised “forward”.

He was 77.

Trying to find out why his father was approved for being killed.

My father’s Executor/Next-of-Kin and I later submitted a request for his MAiD records. The records officer denied us access to all records, except for the psychiatric evaluation report because it was not in the deceased patient’s interest to release them to us and enclosed a printout of the relevant legislation. However, we discovered that the psychiatric evaluation report is limited solely to ruling out depression, and no other mental illness. The report mostly claims the opposite of his medical history, stating: no suicidality, occasional drinker, and non-smoker (despite his lifelong tobacco use). It also records him as dwelling in assisted living for about a month, though he was there a mere five days before he fell and was hospitalised – a week before MAiD and death. Appropriately, no chronic clinical illnesses (mainly arthritis, diabetes, claudication) are listed as terminal. Yet the report does not mention any of the allegedly terminal conditions cited by Provider for the track move; rather, it only states that he had been moved. The information in this report is therefore largely wrong and inaccurate, indicating to me a gross failure of this final safeguard.

Some of the information Provider and the psychiatrist dismissed or got wrong would likely have been available in his normal GP medical records. I had passed this material on to the regional MAiD coordinator and told the provider before my father was killed. Because the Vancouver Island Health Authority did not release his full MAiD records, I do not know what information was accessed or used to approve his death.

I protested this in a text message (much contact with Provider was by text), stating that I was astounded that nothing was found, and reiterated my concerns. I asked if anyone in the process had tried to save his life. In response, the provider told me that due diligence had been done, and not to contact her again, as it was her private number and speaking on it was inappropriate. I read this as an implicit threat that I would be barred from the hospital if I kept pushing for answers. Provider had, however, initiated contact with me on her personal phone, which was the only means she used to contact my family and me.

Thank you Christopher Lyon for sharing the story of your father's death. It is not easy to share such a story but it is important for Canadians to know how cavalier the assessment and death of your father was treated by the "provider", the psychiatrist and the medical system.

Canadian Virtual Hospice promotes euthanasia book for children

 The Canadian Virtual Hospice (virtualhospice.ca) has published an "activity book" aimed at normalizing euthanasia (MAiD) for children.

A web-based resource launched in 2004 to be a “platform [that] could address some of the national gaps in palliative care,” the Canadian Virtual Hospice was the first attempt at connecting Canadians with an array of health specialists online to help them face the daunting task of accompanying their ill and dying loved ones at the end of their lives. As reported on its website, “visits to Virtual Hospice continue to climb – from 34,000 in 2004 to 2.3 million in 2020,” which bespeaks the desperate need to shore up this crucial yet often-overlooked segment in healthcare.

On July 26th, 2022, The Canadian Virtual Hospice, which gets funding from such organizations as the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, Health Canada, and Veteran Affaires Canada, announced its newest children's resource available on its website:

https://t.co/eZbZLrz4Bu is home to The Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Activity Book! Created for young people who have someone in their life who may have MAiD, this resources if available for free download. https://t.co/ugopiHYWus pic.twitter.com/um13rVqItL

— Canadian Virtual Hospice (@VirtualHospice) July 26, 2022

The activity book is replete with vibrant colours, graphics, and a juvenile font, and includes a section that explains the three "medicines" taken to kill a human being. On page 4, Step number 3 states:

The third medicine makes the person’s lungs stop breathing and then their heart stops beating. Because of the coma, the person does not notice this happening and it does not hurt. When their heart and lungs stop working, their body dies.

Meanwhile, some doctors have actually been frank in their admissions that they have no idea whether euthanasia “does not hurt,” since, as reported in a recent National Post article, during the euthanasia procedure: 

Monitors aren’t used. There are no monitors measuring brain waves or heart activity. Doctors say it would take away from the intimacy of the experience for the person and the family. 

This reassurance has also been challenged by Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor at Emory University School of Medicine who has studied how lethal injections impact prisoners' bodies; he has called both for autopsies to be done on MAiD deaths to see exactly how the poison impacted the body, and for paralyzing agents to not be used in the procedure in order to have a more realistic assessment of the MAiD recipient’s experience (link).

Christopher Lyon

While the activity book contains “helpful” exercises such as suggested questions the child can ask the would-be MAiD recipient and a feelings chart, Twitter user Dr. Christopher Lyon (@ChristophLyon) pointed out the inability of the activity book to address the fundamentally flawed premise behind assisted death – the fact that doctors cause a death instead of stopping it – and thus, it can't help the child process the trauma of a betrayal of their trust in healthcare providers:

However, kids who lose a parent or sibling to suicide can be deeply traumatised by the experience. What happens with children when doctors *help* the suicide instead of stop it? #MAiD https://t.co/VOQgbR9Irw

— Dr. Christopher Lyon (@ChristophLyon) July 26, 2022

Even more disturbing, the MAID to MAD initiative (@VulnerableC7) pointed out the similarity in branding between the “Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Activity book” and the “Me and My Illness” activity books that The Virtual Hospice provides, both aimed at children:

The branding and design continuity across these @VirtualHospice documents - both aimed at children - is striking. Wondering about associations being made in the minds of sick kids and #MAiD especially as #AMAD considers expanding MAiD to children (mature minors). pic.twitter.com/esjd550TMK

— MAID to MAD initiative AMM devient MAM (@VulnerablC7) July 28, 2022

If the message being sent with this colourful and engaging activity book is that euthanasia is a normal, innocuous act that *doesn’t hurt* and is appropriate for anyone who is in pain, how can a sick and/or suffering child escape the conclusion that it may be an appropriate solution for them - especially once MAiD is extended to mature minors?