Introduced in 2016, Canada’s euthanasia programme initially served only terminally ill patients but soon expanded to adults with non-fatal serious illnesses or disabilities. Lionel Shriver in UnHerd believes the programme has overstepped its bounds. Here’s an excerpt:
While the strongest candidates for a gentle, legal assisted death are patients with agonising terminal illnesses, any respectable libertarian would maintain that outfits such as Dignitas in Switzerland simply provide a service, of which consumers in any medical condition should be free to avail themselves. And for lack of a better word, I’m a libertarian.
I gained an appreciation for how being alive could simply fail a clinical cost-benefit analysis in the summer of 2020. For five days, I was in such blinding pain from a nerve in my spine that I awoke each morning screaming at my poor husband: “I would rather be dead!” I wasn’t being histrionic. Well, okay, I was – but I was also brutally sincere. Had remaining alive been conditioned on such intense and unrelenting suffering forever more, for the first time I could see a persuasive case for calling it quits. During the blackest periods of those days, on which I took half an hour to descend a single flight of stairs, I was incapable of pleasure, humour or love. The sole thought in my head was that I would do anything to get the pain to stop.
Canada has an unusually liberal programme called Medical Assistance in Dying, or Maid – although this acronym doesn’t tidy your flat but sponges your existence from the known universe. The Great White North should, therefore, represent my perverse version of Valhalla. Instead, Maid’s lax protocols make me queasy. In theory, maybe everyone has a right to die if they want to. In practice, maybe the state needs to keep a tight regulatory reign on whom it graciously provides a one-way ticket to nowhere.
Introduced in 2016, Canada’s Government-sanctioned euthanasia by medically administered lethal injection and legalisation of assisted suicide (there’s a difference; the latter usually entails patients themselves swallowing fatal tablets prescribed by a doctor) were initially intended to put the terminally ill who’d had enough out of their misery. Yet sister programmes in the seven other countries that permit euthanasia generally restrict the pool of applicants to people destined to die naturally within six months. Maid initially codified no such limitation, merely citing vaguely that death should be “reasonably foreseeable”, as it is for all us mortals. Hypothetically, then, even the programme as originally conceived could have been open to people whose ailments would only kill them many years hence. Yet, bolstering its critics’ “slippery slope” argument, the programme soon radically loosened its restrictions. Assisted dying is now available in Canada to all adults with a serious illness or disability, regardless of whether the source of their torment would be fatal over time.
Most controversially, the Government is considering the offer of lethal injection to “mature minors” – whatever that means. The programme is also set to extend to Canadians who are mentally ill. That said, the start date of state-sponsored death for the psychologically unwell (which on one day or another would probably include us all) has been pushed back to March 2024, indicating a degree of bureaucratic anxiety. …
Maid is popular in Canada. In a recent Research Co. poll, 73% of Canadians approved of the regime in its current form, while only 16% opposed it. Moreover, a goodly measure of Canadians would be happy for the programme to expand further: 27% claimed Maid should be an option even for people whose only affliction was ‘poverty’; 28% would offer state-sponsored oblivion to the homeless. A fifth of respondents would provide Maid to anybody for any reason. Sean Tagert’s was one of several cases of Canadians finally choosing death after years of struggling to obtain sufficient health care, and a hefty 51% of poll respondents believed that “inability to receive medical treatment” should qualify applicants for the needle.
Worth reading in full.
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Interesting that the ‘reasons’ given by DT for not buying fail to address macro-issues completely, and fail to include the child death-and-maiming toll in Congo in and down the Chinese cobalt mines.
Who remembers the public outrages vented against clothing retailers’ that bought from child-labour manufacturers? Today’s ‘EVil-car’ buyer cares not one jot about the back story.
Because it’s not about science or rationale. This is religion now.
It will flip. Don’t know when exactly. Probably when the deluded reactionary class have forgotten they thought EVs were powered by unicorn juice and rainbow dust and turn on the whole thing. And when the grifters realise there’s more grift to be had elsewhere.
I give it five to ten years.
I remember having a conversation with an acquaintance about electric cars. She had a Tesla which always had to be parked on the other side of the car park as far away as possible from all the other nasty petrol cars. Anyway two of us in the group raised the idea that over a lifetime, an electric car might not actually be that much “better for the environment” than a petrol car. The look of horror on her face – but she could not produce any sort of evidence or statistics to disprove us other than repeating “But electric cars HAVE to be better for the environment. I mean, they MUST be. They absolutely ARE” over and over.
Environmentalists are exempt from blame for the considerable damage, injury, deaths they cause to the environment, people, flora and fauna because they are doing it for righteous reasons.
The worst of all evil and evil-doers is when evil is done in the name of good.
The BBC says the science is settled (and they are arbiters of truth) – so 30,000 lost jobs and the runiation of thousands of families is a small price to pay to reduce global temperatures by **0.02 degree (or whatever). /sarc
** NB – as I don’t buy into the theory that CO2 is the primary driver of climate – I don’t think think this will have any affect on global temperatutres.
It doesn’t. 0.04% of the atmosphere is co2. It is not the cause. And it is plant food.
And if we managed to reduce it to 0.02%
All plant life will begin to die, fact!
and even if CO2 did affect world temperatures. Suppose there was a sudden cooling, would greenies then be demanding we burn as much coal as possible to reverse that? Ask any greeny. Would they agree? I think not. So using CO2 levels to control temperature is not really what they believe in.
Well, I guess sales can always be boosted by banning all the alternatives.
Nope.
Why buy a new EV when you can get a better second hand ICEV cheaper?
And when petrol stations are banned/taxed out of existence?
Then the economy will collapse and those responsible will find that they don’t like pitchforks, torches and piano wire.
Piano wire makes such beautiful music when strung betwixt lamp post and politician!
Black market hydrocarbons.
They can try. But people who can’t afford to buy one; can’t charge it at home; can’t afford to pay the extortionate insurance and need something more practical (ie range) won’t buy one.
“NO” is a very powerful word. And “NO” could completely destroy the European car manufacturing sector.
I’m not sure the Germans want to destroy VW, Audi, BMW and Mercedes.
… you can lead a horse to water…
Ideology meets reality. Sadly I suspect we still have have a decade of this economic vandalism left.
I’m afraid that you may well be right. By then the the capability to produce ICE cars in any meaningful volumes will be lost for good as production lines are closed, component suppliers disappear and the knowledge and expertise built up over decades is eroded away.
Whilst you may be right for the European ICE industry, I rather suspect that much transport across Africa will continue to be done courtesy of ICE trucks like the Toyota Hilux etc.
Well, unless African countries are allowed to create an efficient electricity grid powered by reliable energy I can’t see the Hilux being replaced with EVs.
That said, Hilux ownership is the preserve of the elite or warlords in many less developed parts of the world. That’s what we’re heading for in the UK (elites only owning/running privately owned vehicles) – unless we do something about it.
Not a decade. Target date 2030 as in Agenda 2030.
”You were only supposed to blow the ****** doors off”
All this shows how much politicians and global technocrats simply cannot manipulate markets as precisely as they think. Many of us have come to the conclusion that there always was an underlying desire to cut back on private motoring but not this much, not this quickly. Not to the extent of a rapid end to the European motoring industry which could well threaten to ‘blow the doors off” the whole European economy!
They are well and truly hoisted on their own petard, they cannot row back because of the fierceness of the net-zero, eco lobby but if they do nothing it will have a huge impact on European economies.
If they’re faced with losing their seat on the gravy train I reckon they’ll find a way to row back – all while denying the U turn. War is Peace
Good news in a way. The sooner people begin to hurt the sooner they may react and DO something about the Nut Zeros.
“It warned that the “continual downward trajectory” of the European electric car market leaves manufacturers at risk of multibillion-euro fines.”
What happens if the manufacturers bandy together and tell the EU and their targets to get lost? Genuine question..
Exactly , why are the Car manufacturers taking it up the proverbial ? Just tell the EU Chunts to F off , team up with fuel distributors & maybe sell ice vehicles at petrol stations ,also why is the oil industry listening to this eco toss pottyness ! ??
Cos the people at the top of those orgs and those who fund them are in on the long term plan – nothing else matters
“Misinformation” is one of the buzz words of the moment. But most reasonable people will conclude that “misinformation” applies only to views, opinions and facts that are NOT the government’s or others with an agenda, like environmentalists etc.
—–Yesterday eg on the Martin Daubney Programme on GB News we were told that sales of EV’s had dropped dramatically. Just as we sse here in this article Yet on comes the rabid climate activist Donnachadh Mccarthy to say the very opposite. So which view is the “misinformation”? But let’s look at the next claim he made “Just look at all the floods in Europe”. He is implying that no matter the cost or inconvenience of electric cars that because he has decided that some floods are all caused by man made climate change that it is ok to say the opposite, all for the greater good seemingly. —-But he is wrong both times since there is no evidence that floods globally are getting more frequent or worse, and the same applies to droughts, and any number of other claims by these people who see every single thing that happens in the world through a prism of climate activism, and when you do that you are indulging in what can only be described as Government Approved Information and Truth
Good. Germany has been screwing up Europe again. First was 1864 Danish Prussia war, then the 1870 Franco Prussian war, then ww1 then ww2, and then the EUSSR. Germany is Europe’s biggest problem.
It’s nice now and then for a DS article to bring cheer.