There were over 10,000 medically assisted deaths in Canada in 2019, an increase of 32.4% from last year and representing 3.3% of all deaths in 2021. While for some, medical assistance in dying (MAID) helps ease intractable suffering, the way it has been implemented in Canada has led to a disturbing number of people turning to MAID due to poverty, debt, homelessness or poor living conditions — a far cry from “dying with dignity.”
Let’s go more in depth into specific cases to get a better idea of the situation. In November of 2020, a man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that “the hospital ethicist and nurses were trying to coerce [him] into an assisted death by threatening to charge [him] $1,800 per day or force-discharge [him] without the care [he] needed to live,” and by withholding water from him for 20 days.
Around the same time, another woman requested medical assistance in dying (MAID) because she has dietary restrictions and no access to food banks. “An increase [in income support] is the only thing that could save my life. I have no other reason to want to apply for assisted suicide, other than I simply cannot afford to keep on living,” she told Maclean’s. Early that year, a woman with high debt who couldn’t afford treatment for her disabilities also requested MAID. She told CityNews that she doesn’t want to die, but her monthly income is not enough to keep her in a pain threshold that is bearable.
In a disturbing case from early 2021, the family of a 35-year-old disabled man who resorted to MAID encountered extremely unsanitary living conditions at the care facility where he stayed, including urine and feces on the bed and floor. In a more recent case in April 2022, a woman chose MAID after being unable to access suitable housing — in a country with over five times more empty houses than homeless people.
In yet another case, according to a report from AP, a 61-year-old Canadian who had a history of depression and other non-life-threatening medical issues, was hospitalized in June 2019 over fears he might be suicidal. Within a month, he submitted a request to be euthanized that was granted, despite concerns raised by his family and a nurse practitioner. His application for euthanasia listed only one health condition, hearing loss, as the reason for his request.
In October 2022, a man in Ontario applied for MAID because he was in danger of losing housing. “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” he told CityNews. “In my case, the problem is not really the disability, it is the poverty. It’s the quality of life,” said Les Landry, interviewed by Global News in October 2022. “I am not against MAID. What I am against is the expansion of MAID without the improvement of benefits or quality of life.” As well, Chatelaine reported in July 2022 on the case of a woman who has amassed $40,000 in debt attempting to treat myalgic encephalomyelitis and other ailments. She said that when her money runs out, a medically assisted death may be her only option.
It is beyond sickening that in what is supposedly the most developed and illustrious part of the world, people have to suffer like this. Meanwhile, in Cuba, a small island country that has been illegally blockaded for decades by the United States, there is no homelessness whatsoever. Indeed, the facts here are damning as even the CEO of Dying With Dignity, the main organization in Canada that has been lobbying for these laws, told CityNews that “the fact that people are feeling compelled to apply for MAID or even ask about MAID because they can’t get the basic fundamentals to live a life is just shameful.”
In principle, there is not necessarily a problem with MAID in itself, as it should be a matter of individual choice. But what we see is the opposite of individual autonomy. Rather, we see workers who are so immiserated by the hell of capitalism that they feel that they have no choice but to end their own lives to prevent further suffering. This arrangement is convenient for the federal and provincial governments, as it saves over $100 million per year in healthcare costs, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office.
Furthermore, such callousness is not so surprising considering Canada’s history with eugenics. From 1928 to 1972, Alberta had the Sexual Sterilization Act in place, which allowed the sterilization of mentally disabled people. B.C. had a similar law but it required the consent of the patient. However, in Alberta, sterilization could be done without the patient’s consent or knowledge from 1938 onward. In total, over 4,000 people were sterilized, and the law disproportionately targeted immigrants and Indigenous women. Just between 1971 and 1974, at least 580 sterilizations took place at federally operated hospitals in the prairie provinces, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Ontario, with Indigenous women making up 95% of those sterilizations. There are cases as recent as 2018 in Saskatchewan.
What Canada is doing now with Bill C-7 is in some ways a continuation of eugenics, especially when one considers the specific cases examined earlier. Not only do patients in Canada not need to have exhausted all alternatives before euthanasia, but it is also sometimes proactively proposed to them as an option by healthcare practitioners. Bill C-7, which was passed last year, will allow those suffering solely from mental illnesses to be eligible for MAID as of March 2023, and minors are also being proposed for eligibility.
This is all at a time of rising depression and anxiety, where most people are pessimistic about the future and struggle to find meaning in their lives. They are thrust into a world rife with contradictions, full of inequalities, injustices, war, poverty, imperialism. In 2021, the top 20% of households held more than two-thirds of all net worth in Canada, while the bottom 40% held 2.8%. CEOs in Canada are paid 202 times as much as the average worker. Worldwide, billionaires gained $3.9 trillion during the pandemic while workers lost $3.7 trillion, and six billionaires own as much wealth as half of the world’s population.
Workers are exploited and told to love their exploitation. They are alienated from nature and from their own labour. Superficial consumerist society instills self-loathing, telling us we are not complete until we buy the next best thing, yet when we do we only feel more empty. Humanity is set against one another as enemies, to the extent that they see nothing of themselves in one another but an adversary, the misanthropic nature of capitalism necessitates man to be as cruel as possible to his fellow man lest he be crushed himself.
One might not even think to ask why someone must die due to a lack of money. Money has no intrinsic value, rather it is the universal commodity which signifies the exchange value of other commodities. The answer then, is that under capitalism you are a commodity. In the words of Karl Marx, “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production.” So when one cannot produce surplus value, cannot sell their labour power on the market, then they are useless to capital and their life has no meaning. This is why no effort is given to help the people looked at earlier and why instead they were only left with the prospect of death.
But the world does not need to be this way. Unlike what many reactionary so-called intellectuals may claim, capitalism is not eternal. Capitalism is the result of definite material and historical processes and it has embedded within it its own internal contradictions, which will lead to its downfall. The object of this analysis was one of those contradictions, the impoverishment and alienation of the worker at the same time as the increase in productive forces. Simply repealing Bill C-7, as many conservatives have promoted, is not a solution to the problem. The real despair that leads people to MAID does not vanish by making it illegal again. The root of the problem, as has been shown, is capitalism — so the solution must be socialism. Yet, that does not mean that there is nothing that can be immediately done to address the problem. Indeed, the Communist Party has consistently campaigned for expanded healthcare, for better workers’ rights, higher wages, and lower costs of living. These are not idle pipe dreams. They are real possibilities before us, and it is imperative upon us to fight for them so we do not live in a country where people are forced to kill themselves to avoid life in poverty!