If you are not familiar with the Canadian regime’s egregious MAiD law, MAiD is their lovely acronym for “Medical Assistance in Dying.”
In this post I am sharing supplemental information further to Vanessa Beeley’s brilliant article, Canada's expanding euthanasia laws: Making the unthinkable thinkable again regardingCanada’s dystopian MAiD euthanasia law. This includes the reason why 37 year old Jennyfer appears to not have had any choice but state approved euthanasia as a result of the failing taxpayer funded health care system in Canada which had abandoned her.
As you are probably aware, Jennyfer’s death by euthanasia was made into a beautiful yet deeply disturbing short film by one of Canada’s best-known fashion retailers, Québec-based La Maison Simons as part of its “All is Beauty” marketing strategy.
If you haven’t already, please watch this copy of the original Simons video, “The Most Beautiful Exit” which glamourises assisted suicide.
The video is very unsettling. La Maison Simons is treating euthanasia as performance art – a brilliant collage of photography, dance, puppetry, music, and sand art on a beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in the province of British Columbia. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it was released shortly before Halloween, as some of the scenes are reminiscent of a witches’ coven.
Jennyfer does not identify her illness but at the very least she is lucid and able to interact with her friends. She doesn’t seem to be disabled by pain or terminally ill — although you don’t have to be terminally ill to request euthanasia in Canada. But is it ethical for a company to use her death as the centrepiece for a major marketing campaign to sell its products? The glittering video can’t quite hide the ghoulish side of this stunt.
This video was not cheap; dozens of friends and actors were involved in filming it over two days just before Thanksgiving. The Canadian advertising company must have worked frantically to edit the film by October 27. Peter Simons’s personal interest and investment must have made it all but impossible for Jennyfer to change her mind about dying. Does he really think that it is ethical to ask her to die according to an advertiser’s timetable?
While Mr Simons and Jennyfer applaud euthanasia as a beautiful choice, stories are beginning to appear in the Canadian media about marginalised people who feel forced to access MAiD because they have only one choice — and it’s ugly.
Thirty-one-year old Denise has Multiple Chemical Sensitivities and has applied for MAiD because she cannot find housing where she will not be exposed to cigarette smoke and air fresheners.
Forty-year-old Mitchell Tremblay suffers from severe depression, anxiety, alcoholism, personality disorders and continual thoughts of suicide. He is unemployed and poor. He can’t wait to become eligible for MAiD. “You know what your life is worth to you. And mine is worthless,” he told CTV News.
Fifty-four-year-old Amir Farsoud is applying for MAiD because he is homeless. “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. “I know, in my present health condition, I wouldn’t survive it anyway. It wouldn’t be at all dignified waiting, so if that becomes my two options, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”
Euthanasia as performance art is the prerogative of the well-to-do, the well-connected and the privileged. Euthanasia as social injustice will be the lot of the down-and-outs, the abandoned, and the marginalised. If La Maison Simons really valued “community, connection, and compassion”, it would be subsidising housing and medical care for people like this. Instead it is exploiting the death of a young artist to burnish its brand as a champion of progressive values.
On 9th December, Michael Cook followed up with this article about Jennyfer’s truly tragic situation. All was certainly not in the realm of beauty.
Photo: Jennyfer Hatch (in wheelchair) with friends
Every day doctors kill about 40 Canadians. The government euphemism for this is “Medical Assistance in Dying”. Under Canada’s euthanasia legislation MAiD is open to anyone who is experiencing “unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable”.
A Vancouver woman named Jennyfer Hatch died on October 23 at the hands of a MAiD doctor. She was suffering from a rare disease, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, which gave her constant pain. There is no cure for EDS; the best doctors can do is manage the symptoms and check for complications.
Before she died, Jennyfer was the protagonist of a very artistic short film, “The Most Beautiful Exit”, about the hard “beauty” of dying through MAiD. It was part of a marketing campaign for a Quebec-based upscale fashion chain, La Maison Simons. As we reported last month, “the glittering video can’t quite hide the ghoulish side of this stunt”.
Speaking at a memorial service organised by Vancouver Unitarians, her friend Tama Recker said tearfully: “She was such a fierce advocate for her own health and she was let down over and over and over again.”
“What she hoped that it would do is push the envelope that people could understand that it was her choice,” Ms Recker later told CTVNews. “Our (health-care) system is very broken and part of what Jennyfer wanted to do is get people talking.”
In fact, Jennyfer wanted to live. Back in June, she spoke to CTVNews under a pseudonym. This is how she described her predicament.
“I thought, ‘Goodness, I feel like I’m falling through the cracks so if I’m not able to access health care am I then able to access death care?’ And that’s what led me to look into MAID and I applied last year”. She went on to say that she had hoped to access palliative care or other means of support. However, she said, her “suffering was validated to the extent of being approved for MAID, but no additional resource has opened up.”
Jennyfer was, by the way, well connected. She worked with Lumara, an organisation which provided grief and bereavement counselling. If she could not squeeze compassionate support out of the health bureaucracy, what chance do others have? [Emphasis mine.]
A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit described Vancouver as the fifth most livable city in the world. In health care it had a perfect score. The Economist obviously didn’t ask Jennyfer.
Jennyfer was a chronically ill Canadian woman who was intelligent and well-connected and lived in a city which boasts some of the best health care in the world.
But she still felt compelled to choose euthanasia.
More and more Jennyfers are becoming eligible for euthanasia in Canada. Like her, they don’t need to be in unbearable pain. Like her, their illness need not be terminal. And last year a bill permitting people with mental illness to request euthanasia sailed through parliament.
What they were really voting for is a system which tells chronically ill patients that they are better off dead. I don’t know how Canadian parliamentarians can bear to look at themselves in the mirror.
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Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He lives in Sydney, Australia. More by Michael Cook
I am also sharing this article which provides an overview of the Canadian Government’s apparent funding priorities in relation to health and social care .
“Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending”—so stated the headline of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News on January 23, 2017, six months after Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying/ MAID (a euphemism for physicians killing patients).
If that’s a justification of MAID (and for some it is), it’s sheer wickedness.
First, some perspective is in order. Here is the MAID casualty list for Canada thus far:
2016 – 1,018
2017 – 2,838
2018 – 4,480
2019 – 5,661
2020 – 7,603
2021 – 10,064
2022 – Number is yet to be calculated, but the trend is dark.
I should note that I wonder about the accuracy of this report. I suspect the numbers may be higher. Why? Because, according to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario: “When completing the death certificate physicians: a. must list the illness, disease, or disability leading to the request for MAID as the cause of death; and b. must not make any reference to MAID or the drugs administered on the death certificate.”
This erodes trust in at least some (a lot?) of Canada’s doctors.
But trust in Canada’s federal government (lead by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) is also eroding.
Canada’s federal government supports MAID and, in recent years, has been making MAID accessible to more and more people by loosening restrictions. At first MAID was only supposed to end the suffering of the terminally ill. But now reasonably foreseeable death is no longer a requirement.
In fact, in March 2022 restrictions were broadened so people with disabilities or people struggling with pain could access MAID, even if not close to death. And in March 2023 the procedure will be available to the mentally ill. And now there is discussion about offering MAID to “mature minors.”
This brings me to my main point, which is hugely significant: Canada’s federal government supports the “choice” for medically-assisted suicide before ensuring Canadians actually have real options.
It turns out that the vast majority of Canadians don’t have access to good palliative care (palliative care is care that optimizes quality of life and mitigates suffering). Also, Canadian veterans (at least six so far) have been offered MAID to deal with their suffering instead of actually helping them (one veteran was offered MAID as an alternative to a wheelchair ramp/elevator). And there has been a case in which a disabled man successfully began the application process for MAID because he had trouble paying his bills and was afraid of becoming homeless.
This last case caught the attention of local news and, happily, a kind stranger set up a GoFundMe page for the disabled man and he subsequently changed his mind about accessing MAID (at least for now).
The GoFundMe case is heart-warming—and revealing. It sheds much-needed light onto Canada’s dismal and dark dismissal of life.
Surely it is an evil to offer a “choice” between suffering and death which neglects the option of actual assistance in living.
My suggested solution: Instead of justifying or encouraging suicide in terms of saving health care dollars, Canadians should demand their government cut frivolous spending—and redirect it to people who actually need it to live.
Think of the actual help that could be given to people if Canada’s government stopped squandering taxpayers’ dollars on things like the following:
our prime minister’s C$1.6 million family trip to India (complete with personal celebrity chef)
our federal government’s $8.1 million temporary hockey rink in front of Ottawa’s parliament buildings (on which only relatively few skated)
our prime minister’s $610 million waste of calling a not-needed federal election during a pandemic
government officials flying across the ocean to climate conferences in fuel-guzzling jets
a government official staying in a $6,000 per night hotel for five nights
funding a boat-sized rubber duck
etc., etc.
And maybe Canada should say yes to some pipelines that would generate huge revenues and increase tax-dollar funding (billions?) for, say, hospitals, ICUs, palliative care, hospices, mental health services, and life-enhancing help for people with disabilities.
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Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor who lives in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada. Hendrik is author of the book Untangling... More by Hendrik van der Breggen
Does Canada meet the moral test of government as set forth by Hubert H. Humphrey the 38th Vice President of the United States? Does the UK? Does the U.S., EU, Australia, New Zealand and other countries?
"It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped." –Hubert H. Humphrey (1911- 1978)
A resounding No would be my answer.
Sadly, the heath and care “systems” in their current for-profit business model forms which have been captured by Big Pharma, the WHO and other entities, do not provide adequate medical nor psycho-social, palliative and other care for those who require it.
The not so hidden hands have other priorities which are Malthusian in nature. “Better off dead” as Michael Cook put it.
We need to create our own independent networks of humane support and care to ensure that people are not set a drift such that it comes down to a desperate choice between living on the streets or giving into the “medical assistance in dying” murder pathway. This is a heinous situation which we must address in our communities to help prevent.
When you add the situation with Baby Will and so many others experiencing dire situations medical and otherwise into the tsunami of worldwide strife, along with the war mongers stirring things up wherever they can, it’s all a warning to humanity that we ignore at our peril.
These are all signs of the end times in my opinion.
We must honour our differences and come together to focus upon our common goals and needs to survive as we create new ways of being.
If you haven’t already, please read Vanessa’s fantastic blog and share it with others.
I liked the article. I hate what my country has become. I wont be living there in the devils playground.