Amir Farsoud — whose sad story I shared with you in 2022 — won't have to choose between going homeless or being euthanized by the Canadian government. This is what passes for good news some days.
A CityNews video report from November of that year covered Farsood's financial troubles and was headlined, “MAID As an Alternative to Poverty,” and that pretty much sums it up. Farsood had been homeless before and, while only just disabled enough to qualify for the "Medical Assistance in Dying" law's tender mercies, he considered a homeless winter to be a death sentence worse than euthanasia.
“I don’t want to die," Farsood said, "but I don’t want to be homeless more than I want to die.” He had put himself on the 90-day dying waiting list — Ontario's list for housing assistance is 10 years long — when his story got people to donate enough money to get him back on his feet.
Recently, Farsood was featured on a BBC documentary called “Better Off Dead?” He said in the documentary that he made it clear to medical professionals that the only reason he was choosing MAID was due to his housing situation.
"I did tell my doctor right off the bat that while I qualify for medical reasons, the reason I’m asking is my socio-economic position at the moment."
They put him on the death list anyway. He wasn't suffering from a terminal illness. He wasn't a quadriplegic, trapped in a hospital bed for years. He didn't suffer from "grievous and irremediable medical conditions,” as the law originally required. He was just suffering from chronic back pain and he was broke.
Left unsaid: Canada would rather kill you than treat you.
As I wrote back then, Canada's MAID law had just been expanded to cover euthanasia for almost anyone who wanted it. In force only since 2016, MAID originally provided the option of suicide to terminally ill adults. Since then, the law has been amended to allow those suffering from mental illnesses to have the government shove them off this mortal coil, starting in 2024.
But the guardrails are basically gone — as intended? — as this story from 2023 about a young woman named Kathrin Mentler showed.
Mentler tried to check herself into a Vancouver hospital in June to get help with “debilitating feelings of hopelessness and suicidality,” according to the Daily Mail. What she received instead was notice from a clinician that Canada’s “broken” healthcare system had created a shortage of psychiatrists.
“Have you considered MAID?” instead, the clinician asked.
Mentler later said she'd gone to the clinic "because I didn’t want to get into a situation where I would think about taking an overdose of medication." Instead, the clinician explained how MAID would be more “comfortable” than a solo suicide that might not even work. With MAID, Mentler could enjoy “sedating benzodiazepines among other drugs.”
This happened before MAID's provisions for the mentally ill kicked in. And now MAID covers people with drug and alcohol addictions, too. Twelve-step programs are hard but suicide is painless.
As I said, the guardrails seem to be gone.
Remember when Canada had a reputation for being nice? That seems like a long time ago.
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