Hope already seemed on life support in what have become the killing fields of Canada’s public health-care system.

Now the government of Quebec, playing to type as the heavy breathing Dark Lord of Confederation, appears to have pinched off what little oxygen is available with unlawful approval of advanced directives for medical aid in dying (MAiD).

As of Oct. 30, Quebec medical professionals can violate Canada’s Criminal Code with impunity (and exclusivity!) by offing patients who can no longer consent before receiving fatal injections. The current legal requirement to affirm a death wish before the poison needle strikes will be waived. The one caveat is that a bureaucratic directive has to have been filled out agreeing to doctor-provided homicide. If you signed, even years before, and are no longer mentally capable of expressing a change of mind, say sayonara!

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Quebec, which seems Hell bent on medically extinguishing the very population its draconian language laws are meant to preserve, will proceed with the unilateral change despite Ottawa’s refusal to permit it. Stinging from political embarrassment over their bungled attempt to make killing the mentally ill part of health care, the federal Liberals sat on their hands when Quebec City demanded yet another Criminal Code expansion of MAiD. 

No matter. La Belle Province has run out of patience with the delay in dispatching more patients. It will direct its Crown prosecutors to disregard what the law says and cease bringing charges where a Quebec-only advanced directive exists. The edict furthers the efficient easing of more Alzheimer’s patients, for example, off the planet. More, it is also a step on the road to sovereigntist Heaven, according to Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette.

“It is a necessary step to ensure the collective choices of the Quebec nation are respected,” Jolin-Barrette said in announcing the Oct. 30 date to begin ignoring federal law.

The somewhat paradoxically named minister of seniors, Sonia Belanger, had previously advanced the case for advanced directives by insisting it was all about loving care and had nothing to do with shuffling off the long-term care seniors clogging up Quebec’s disgracefully dysfunctional health-care system.

“MAiD is an end-of-life care, and I emphasize the word ‘care,’” Belanger has said.

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That such “care” deliberately produces a corpse by eliminating the oxygen in the blood of a living person appears to have escaped her linguistic attention. It has, however, attracted notice beyond the borders of MAiD-mad Quebec and, indeed, Canada itself. The world has recently turned in shock toward our health care charnel houses, wondering aloud what on earth is driving those once nice northern people to deal out so much death.

“Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now,” reads the headline over a Sept. 2 column in the Wall Street Journal written by senior staffer Nicholas Tomaino.

“Canada has undergone a crash course in what the country calls ‘medical assistance in dying’ or MAiD,” Tomaino writes. “The message (is): If you want to die, you needn’t wait.”

The column’s first concern is with the toxic spread of such thanatocratic ideology to U.S. states currently considering euthanasia/assisted suicide measures of their own. 

But Tomaino expresses genuine concern for what Canada is doing to itself. He draws on the recent study by Alexander Raikin to show how and how far we have gone off the rails.

For starters, all the supposed “safeguards” enshrined in the 2016 legislation sanctifying MAiD have one by one collapsed under the weight of their own illogic. In hindsight, or even the foresight of those who fought the legislation eight years ago, it was self-evident that what was “meant to be exceptional” would sooner rather than later “become routine.”

Citing Raikin, Tomaino notes that “in 2022 more than 81 per cent of (MAiD requests) resulted in death, including for ‘vision or hearing loss’ and ‘diabetes.’ (The) percentage of denied written requests has been falling for years from eight per cent in 2019 to 3.5 per cent in 2022 even as the number of applications has increased.”

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The upshot is 44,958 MAiD deaths between 2016 and 2022 making it, by Raikin’s estimate, the fifth leading cause of mortality in Canada. Grim? Brace for grimmer as Quebec’s advance directive legal defiance spreads like wildfire through the medical care killing fields.

Yet as Catholics, we must believe the ensuing loss of hope can only be apparent, never real. For as long as there is real prayer, we have a political prayer. It is God, not the State, who gives us life-giving oxygen.