Jane Stannus
Spectator Australia, Feb. 14, 2023
“… with the support for euthanasia comes the insidious pseudo-religious pressure to take one’s own life as a noble act of self-immolation on the altar of society.”
Two cheers for a brief hiatus in the Canadian stampede towards suicide for all. Earlier this month, David Lametti, Justin Trudeau’s justice minister, announced that legalization of euthanasia for the mentally ill will be delayed by one year. This, he said, will give the health system and regulatory bodies more time to prepare. Mentally ill adults will now become eligible for euthanasia in March 2024.
Sadly, it’s a mere hiatus. Despite the international wave of horror in recent months pushing back against Canada’s sickeningly casual euthanasia regime, the government clearly has no intention of walking back its plans to make death on demand available to the most psychologically fragile. It simply intends to wait until public outrage wanes and interest shifts elsewhere — a strategy that relies cynically, and perhaps correctly, on fickle newsrooms and goldfish-like attention spans.
When Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre pointed out in The House of Commons that government should not encourage people who are depressed to end their lives, Trudeau’s minister of mental health and addictions, Carolyn Bennett, got to her feet in shock and called him irresponsible. “All of the assessors and providers for MAiD [Medical Assistance in Dying] are purposely trained to eliminate people that are suicidal,” she asserted.
An unfortunate choice of words, to say the least! It was promptly seized upon by her opponents as a Freudian slip — especially since some suspect the entire euthanasia program is a convenient way to rid society of those perceived as burdens. …Source