Violence on the global and individual scales clamours for attention these days from wars in Gaza and Ukraine to assassinations of political figures and random deadly attacks on those deemed symbols in various causes.

Perhaps because of mainstream and social media obsession with the world as a grand guignol – if it bleeds, the chatter about it instantly becomes incessant – Canadians are apparently oblivious to what might be called a “stealth violence” in which we now lead the world.

Last week, the Montreal Gazette’s Aaron Derfel reported that 1,400 Quebecers have signed on for illegal “advanced directives” to have themselves euthanized in the event they develop dementia. Derfel notes the very future-orientation of the directives means no credible statistics exist on the number of people killed by them since the Quebec government illegitimately approved the practice last year.

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Given the cheerleading of the province’s death cult devotees for those of sound mind to sign their own death warrants as “insurance” against incapacitation, it is a sure bet that the advanced directives have swollen the toll of Quebec’s MAID victims.

As Derfel reports, the number of dead because the province opened the charnel house door to medicalized lethal injection in 2014 has risen to 26,000 souls – the most of any province and an outlier even by world standards.

By any measure, the advent of the advanced directives compounds MAID’s violence on a multiplicity of levels.

It is a direct assault on Canadian criminal law, which still prohibits (however fecklessly) MAID unless the individual awaiting the needle full of poison consents injection after being informed of alternatives such as palliative care. That, in itself, is a shredding of the original “safeguards” emerging from the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2015 Carter decision, which mandated foreseeable death in the throes of irremediable suffering. 

As in the initial phase of forcing medical non-culpable homicide upon public health care, Quebec has again defied the Criminal Code by, in essence, taunting the federal government to try prosecuting the crime when any decision on proceeding with prosecution rests with the provincial attorney general.

Beyond statute violation, such defiance constitutes an evisceration of Canada’s constitutional separation of powers that vest criminal law in the federal government in order to ensure equality before the law across the country.

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Quebec’s pro-death lobby acknowledges as much since it has now begun agitating for Ottawa to change the Criminal Code so there are no inhibitors, legal or otherwise, for consenting to be killed long before death even looms. 

“It is essential that access to advance requests be permitted for all Canadian citizens and by all levels of government,” a spokesperson for the Association québécoise pour le droit de mourir dans la dignité (AQDMD) told Derfel.

The spokesperson argues Ottawa’s refusal to amend the Criminal Code “hinders” more people from giving the State permission to fatally inject them. The AQDMD even demands removal of Quebec’s bare bones stipulation that “advanced directives” may be overridden by health care professionals, Derfel reports.

In other words, let us bring on wholesale medically-sanctioned slaughter through a sketchy legal means that even most Dutch doctors, whose country pioneered health care homicide, refuse to adopt. 

Yet Dr. Catherine Ferrier, an assistant professor of family medicine at McGill University who works with dementia patients, and is a board member of Living With Dignity, points out that those for whom she provides care often positively change their conception of quality of life.

Ferrier, in an interview with Derfel, zeroes in on the violation advanced directives (and MAID itself) inflict on our very understanding of what it means to be human. 

“(C)onsenting to your own death is beyond what most people can conceive of when it’s not immediate,” she says.

Which is precisely why some of us still grasp that any suicide, whether sanitized, clinically-approved MAID or old school jumping off a bridge, constitutes an act of violence against being human. It is why, until the previous decade, we worked conscientiously to prevent self-annihilation. It’s the reason we used the Criminal Code to sanction those who abetted it.

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How we, as a society, as a culture, so rapidly abandoned our integral conscience is a tale of intellectual duplicity and moral perversion to make the Father of Lies grin maliciously.

Our first step beyond telling the tale, as with any account of recovery, is to acknowledge the problem. It starts with advancing the recognition that MAID is stealth violence we can safely and humanely do without.