11 ms·

Former paralympian tells MPs veterans department offered her assisted death

53 points by lzooz 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
paulgb 4y ago
The Independent article is a but blogspammy (little by way of original reporting, and more than half the page is ads). This CBC article is one of its sources and I found it more informative: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted-death-macaulay-1.6671721 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...
- defrost 4y ago
  It has the key paragraph: > Veterans Minister Lawrence MacAulay revealed last week in testimony before the same committee that four — perhaps five — cases of Canadian military veterans being given the MAID option by a now-suspended veterans service agent have been referred to the RCMP. As another HN comment here noted, it does seem like employee misconduct more than standard policy action.
  - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
    It's easy to blame a single bad actor in individual cases, but there still exists the very serious issue that it is even possible for single bad actors to advocate for killing their patients. Add to that the bureaucratic capture, and it's all but inevitable that we will see more, and more disturbing cases. After all, as soon as euthanasia is a profession, there will be people who will need to perform that role. They will want to be good at their job and get promoted. They may take great pride in being the best at it. There will be training courses on how to best euthanize a human. There will be departments dedicated to performing the act and they will have budgets and administrators. And those administrators, wanting to secure their performance bonuses, will seek to expand their department and demonstrate value. Perhaps through growth, perhaps through efficiency. Likewise, ICU care is very expensive. If euthanasia is an option, hospital administrators, being conscious of budget constraints and wanting to best serve the most people, may look to euthanizing seriously injured patients. They may even convince themselves it is in the patient's best interest - we're putting them out of their misery after all. My point is, this sort of undertaking quickly and inevitably becomes an ethical minefield. The only winning move is not to play.
    - defrost 4y ago
      > The only winning move is not to play. That's not a winning move for those that sought the right of voluntary euthanasia (that to which the subject consents). As for your argument we can see it in action expressed via the number of firefighters that start fires to keep themselves employed and I take your point that the only defence is to eliminate fire departments.
      - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
        If you think that the edge case (killing people) outweighs the normal case (treating people), then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm not arguing against the idea that a small number of people have suffering so severe that they may seek suicide to alleviate it. I'm arguing that the normalisation of such "treatment" is fraught with unintended consequences and perverse incentives. And people may (will) be killed who otherwise would not have been as a result.
        defrost 4y ago
        And your plan to deal with unintended consequences is what? To avoid any legal assisted dying at all under any circumstances?
        0xbadc0de5 4y ago
        To prevent innocent people from being killed as a result, yes. That does seem like the more ethical choice. This is not about my opinion of whether an individual should be allowed to end their own life - which I'm agnostic of. This is about the normalisation and institutionalisation of such practice as inherently risky and devaluing of human life. When you allow the state to end a life under any circumstances, you open the door to allowing the state to end a life under any circumstances. (aka - the slippery slope argument)
        tehwebguy 4y ago
        Right, you are arguing a strawman
andrewclunn 4y ago
[flagged]
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  I'll bet Canada hasn't run out of chair lifts.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    While I would also make this bet, there's a reason why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science" — the resources that went into making a stairlift (and proportional share of the factory) could, in principle, have instead been used to build enough mosquito nets to save approximately one life, while also improving the quality of life for another thousand. Even if you're not being as much of a colossal arse as the headline of this story, which do you think is a better thing for money to be spent on?
    - sgtnoodle 4y ago
      If you think the solution to a disabled veteran's difficulty getting up stairs is to kill her, then it follows that the solution to mosquito bites is to let folk die from malaria. It seems like you're attacking a straw man. Some people can make chair lifts and other people can make mosquito nets. We can and do have both. I also doubt that significantly increasing global mosquito net manufacturing capacity would make much of a difference. In this case, it's better for Canada to spend their tax money on chair lifts for their disabled veterans than on mosquito nets. Just doing a quick Google search on the subject, it seems like mosquito nets are generally available in places where they're useful. Many people either choose not to use them, use them improperly, or repurpose free ones for other things.
      - Spooky23 4y ago
        Of course these issues are straw man generators. Everyone is a tough guy for issues like this until they or a loved one need care. Nobody is ranting about communists in a waiting room.
croes 4y ago
Sounds more like employee misconduct. From the title, it sounded like Canada's official position
dazzawazza 4y ago
Well that escalated quickly.
- vermilingua 4y ago
  This (still) isn’t Reddit.
jtbayly 4y ago
Sad but unsurprising story. How do you reach your targeted cost per user without implementing death panels? “Sympathetic” agents will feel this pressure more and more, but there is a way to avoid this solution that is even more insidious. No need to preemptively offer to help kill somebody. Just make their life so miserable that they ask for it. Refusing them the medical care they need to not be miserable will go a long way toward that goal. Edit: plot twist: I just realized this could be the official way that death panels are implemented. A “black spot” is placed on the person’s record indicating that no more treatment is to be paid for, unless they ask for somebody to kill them. Agents are, of course, forbidden from telling the person with the black spot. So this agent would indeed have been trying to skirt the rules by clueing the person in to their status. Thus, the agent clandestinely fighting death panels would be fired. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility to me that this truly might have been an agent fighting an active death panel.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Just wait until you hear about insurance companies.
  - knewter 4y ago
    Yeah when it's the entity with a monopoly on force it's more insidious
tomohawk 4y ago
While this is likely not due to an official policy, it is certainly due to a conflict of interest. Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care. Euthanists should be a separate thing, if they exist at all. Euthanasia is about death, not life. No one should go to the doctor for medical care and be provided death. Such a situation destroys trust.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  >Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care. Speaking as an American who's talked to a lot of Canadians and made many trips there, one issue is that pallative care can bleed into euthanasia due to tolerances around opiates... what happens when you give someone enough medication to cure their pain, and they overdose? Or if you give them enough in a bottle to do so on their own? That's how you get to a point that people are handed nothing but Tylenol and an offer of a suicide booth or whatever... that is. Then again, to reiterate: I'm not Canadian, I'm American, so I can only comment on my own experiences. For example, after I tried pretty much every antidepressant on the market, my psychiatrist told me my depression was not chemical based but a rightful reaction to life's circumstances, that I had CPTSD on top of my autism from the previous interventions I'd had tried (some of which I detailed in an anonymous essay that triggered a congressional investigation), gave me a reoccurring prescription for alaprazolam and suggested I take up a sport like target shooting or basket weaving. Apparently it scared folks when my response to the above was to go down to the gun range adjacent to the local military base, rent a handgun, and practiced unloading the clip into a target at twenty yards like I'd done back on Pearl Harbor day in high school with my dad. The woman working the range kind of narrowed her eyes when she saw my ID. "Bloomington? Have you even shot a gun before" she rightfully asked. (I suspect they had people show up and try to shoot their nine like a rap video and have to be removed from the range -- part of why I never bought one in 412 is the range nearest me had no rangemaster and had issues with folks who wouldn't follow the four rules... and might follow you to your car if you asked them to.) "Oh yes. I've shot a bolt action twenty two, a 357 magnum, and a Colt 1911. The last two are too much kick, do you have anything in the forty caliber range, and can you show me the safety -- I've only shot an automatic one." Around the same time they'd threatened to cancel the undergrad's paper if they reported on a string of suicides, and I later found out there were some severe sexual assault issues where kids who were on athletic scholarships were straight up told they had to go through the informal judicial process if they wanted to continue playing the sport that paid for their education. The above is why I originally worked hard to attend a school that doesn't have a strong athletics program instead of where I ended up doing my aborted PhD, and why I think sports should be separate from the university as is done in the EU, UK, and many other more functional democracies, why I believe in a personal right to firearms ownership, and why I worry greatly about so called democracies that institute things like universal health care without respecting responsible firearms ownership... it creates a lot of issues when you disarm people, abuse them, then tell them suicide is an option. They might decide to not just kill themselves. In fact, I suspect that meta level thought pattern: "Why would I end my life, instead of the abuser making me suicidal" is the source of many of the lower body count spree killings you see in the media. (The ones where they stop after a clip rather than try to make it into the record books -- the latter types should not have their names repeated when possible.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wisnoskij 4y ago
As a Canadian I want to point out this article is quite misleading. The issue is far more systemic than this article claims. In Canada MAID is the 6th leading cause of death, and is rising so fast it is basically guaranteed to be the 3rd cause by 2025. Doctors that will not back the MAID initiative are fired, every year they expand the criteria under which you can be euthanize, right now they want to expand it to include poverty.Their are reports of children and confused elderly being tricked into euthanasia without their families knowledge. And we get reports on how much all this is saving the government.
- hungryforcodes 4y ago
  > Their are reports of children and confused elderly being tricked into euthanasia without their families knowledge Interesting, can you provide links to these reports? It's a pretty serious assertion.
  - wisnoskij 4y ago
    A quick google search did not return anything, mainstream media does not cover stories like this, and I cannot remember where I read these stories. I know the last one I read was about a family suing the government to stop the euthanasia of their son(I believe). And I have read articles similar to this one of the elderly going to the hospital and being offered euthanasia instead of medical care. I did find this forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2022/08/15/canadas-new-euthanasia-laws-carry-upsetting-nazi-era-echoes-warns-expert/?sh=4e3456fec7b8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2022/08/15/canadas-n...) that talked about a troubling case I had not heard or and included lots of details about the whole system. But when all you need is a nurse practitioner and a signature from someone with dementia or other mentally crippling disease, of course things like this will happen. Agree or disagree with how some European countries do it, this is not that same thing. The people pushing this are the doctors and nurses you go to to get medial treatment from, and the oversight is non-existent.
    - postalrat 4y ago
      From where I sit it seems like your perception on this topic is quite different then the reality.
kthejoker2 4y ago
This whole article and comment thread is a strawman, in that it presents a single case in spmething that simply should not be adjudicated on a case by case basis. Euthanasia, death panels, palliative care management, healthcare budgets, transparency or lack thereof ... These are all (full stop) system level decisions. Show us all the data, all the decisions, all the controls, all the dollars. Then as a society we decide the parameters, the gray areas, and then each case fits in one area or another.

53 points by lzooz 4y ago

[dead]

The Independent article is a but blogspammy (little by way of original reporting, and more than half the page is ads). This CBC article is one of its sources and I found it more informative: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted-death-macaulay-1.6671721 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...

defrost 4y ago
It has the key paragraph: > Veterans Minister Lawrence MacAulay revealed last week in testimony before the same committee that four — perhaps five — cases of Canadian military veterans being given the MAID option by a now-suspended veterans service agent have been referred to the RCMP. As another HN comment here noted, it does seem like employee misconduct more than standard policy action.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  It's easy to blame a single bad actor in individual cases, but there still exists the very serious issue that it is even possible for single bad actors to advocate for killing their patients. Add to that the bureaucratic capture, and it's all but inevitable that we will see more, and more disturbing cases. After all, as soon as euthanasia is a profession, there will be people who will need to perform that role. They will want to be good at their job and get promoted. They may take great pride in being the best at it. There will be training courses on how to best euthanize a human. There will be departments dedicated to performing the act and they will have budgets and administrators. And those administrators, wanting to secure their performance bonuses, will seek to expand their department and demonstrate value. Perhaps through growth, perhaps through efficiency. Likewise, ICU care is very expensive. If euthanasia is an option, hospital administrators, being conscious of budget constraints and wanting to best serve the most people, may look to euthanizing seriously injured patients. They may even convince themselves it is in the patient's best interest - we're putting them out of their misery after all. My point is, this sort of undertaking quickly and inevitably becomes an ethical minefield. The only winning move is not to play.
  - defrost 4y ago
    > The only winning move is not to play. That's not a winning move for those that sought the right of voluntary euthanasia (that to which the subject consents). As for your argument we can see it in action expressed via the number of firefighters that start fires to keep themselves employed and I take your point that the only defence is to eliminate fire departments.
    - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
      If you think that the edge case (killing people) outweighs the normal case (treating people), then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm not arguing against the idea that a small number of people have suffering so severe that they may seek suicide to alleviate it. I'm arguing that the normalisation of such "treatment" is fraught with unintended consequences and perverse incentives. And people may (will) be killed who otherwise would not have been as a result.
      - defrost 4y ago
        And your plan to deal with unintended consequences is what? To avoid any legal assisted dying at all under any circumstances?
        0xbadc0de5 4y ago
        To prevent innocent people from being killed as a result, yes. That does seem like the more ethical choice. This is not about my opinion of whether an individual should be allowed to end their own life - which I'm agnostic of. This is about the normalisation and institutionalisation of such practice as inherently risky and devaluing of human life. When you allow the state to end a life under any circumstances, you open the door to allowing the state to end a life under any circumstances. (aka - the slippery slope argument)
      - tehwebguy 4y ago
        Right, you are arguing a strawman

andrewclunn 4y ago

[flagged]

sgtnoodle 4y ago
I'll bet Canada hasn't run out of chair lifts.
- ben_w 4y ago
  While I would also make this bet, there's a reason why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science" — the resources that went into making a stairlift (and proportional share of the factory) could, in principle, have instead been used to build enough mosquito nets to save approximately one life, while also improving the quality of life for another thousand. Even if you're not being as much of a colossal arse as the headline of this story, which do you think is a better thing for money to be spent on?
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    If you think the solution to a disabled veteran's difficulty getting up stairs is to kill her, then it follows that the solution to mosquito bites is to let folk die from malaria. It seems like you're attacking a straw man. Some people can make chair lifts and other people can make mosquito nets. We can and do have both. I also doubt that significantly increasing global mosquito net manufacturing capacity would make much of a difference. In this case, it's better for Canada to spend their tax money on chair lifts for their disabled veterans than on mosquito nets. Just doing a quick Google search on the subject, it seems like mosquito nets are generally available in places where they're useful. Many people either choose not to use them, use them improperly, or repurpose free ones for other things.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      Of course these issues are straw man generators. Everyone is a tough guy for issues like this until they or a loved one need care. Nobody is ranting about communists in a waiting room.

croes 4y ago

Sounds more like employee misconduct. From the title, it sounded like Canada's official position

dazzawazza 4y ago

Well that escalated quickly.

vermilingua 4y ago
This (still) isn’t Reddit.

jtbayly 4y ago

Sad but unsurprising story. How do you reach your targeted cost per user without implementing death panels? “Sympathetic” agents will feel this pressure more and more, but there is a way to avoid this solution that is even more insidious. No need to preemptively offer to help kill somebody. Just make their life so miserable that they ask for it. Refusing them the medical care they need to not be miserable will go a long way toward that goal. Edit: plot twist: I just realized this could be the official way that death panels are implemented. A “black spot” is placed on the person’s record indicating that no more treatment is to be paid for, unless they ask for somebody to kill them. Agents are, of course, forbidden from telling the person with the black spot. So this agent would indeed have been trying to skirt the rules by clueing the person in to their status. Thus, the agent clandestinely fighting death panels would be fired. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility to me that this truly might have been an agent fighting an active death panel.

bigmattystyles 4y ago
Just wait until you hear about insurance companies.
- knewter 4y ago
  Yeah when it's the entity with a monopoly on force it's more insidious

tomohawk 4y ago

While this is likely not due to an official policy, it is certainly due to a conflict of interest. Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care. Euthanists should be a separate thing, if they exist at all. Euthanasia is about death, not life. No one should go to the doctor for medical care and be provided death. Such a situation destroys trust.

dontbenebby 4y ago
>Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care. Speaking as an American who's talked to a lot of Canadians and made many trips there, one issue is that pallative care can bleed into euthanasia due to tolerances around opiates... what happens when you give someone enough medication to cure their pain, and they overdose? Or if you give them enough in a bottle to do so on their own? That's how you get to a point that people are handed nothing but Tylenol and an offer of a suicide booth or whatever... that is. Then again, to reiterate: I'm not Canadian, I'm American, so I can only comment on my own experiences. For example, after I tried pretty much every antidepressant on the market, my psychiatrist told me my depression was not chemical based but a rightful reaction to life's circumstances, that I had CPTSD on top of my autism from the previous interventions I'd had tried (some of which I detailed in an anonymous essay that triggered a congressional investigation), gave me a reoccurring prescription for alaprazolam and suggested I take up a sport like target shooting or basket weaving. Apparently it scared folks when my response to the above was to go down to the gun range adjacent to the local military base, rent a handgun, and practiced unloading the clip into a target at twenty yards like I'd done back on Pearl Harbor day in high school with my dad. The woman working the range kind of narrowed her eyes when she saw my ID. "Bloomington? Have you even shot a gun before" she rightfully asked. (I suspect they had people show up and try to shoot their nine like a rap video and have to be removed from the range -- part of why I never bought one in 412 is the range nearest me had no rangemaster and had issues with folks who wouldn't follow the four rules... and might follow you to your car if you asked them to.) "Oh yes. I've shot a bolt action twenty two, a 357 magnum, and a Colt 1911. The last two are too much kick, do you have anything in the forty caliber range, and can you show me the safety -- I've only shot an automatic one." Around the same time they'd threatened to cancel the undergrad's paper if they reported on a string of suicides, and I later found out there were some severe sexual assault issues where kids who were on athletic scholarships were straight up told they had to go through the informal judicial process if they wanted to continue playing the sport that paid for their education. The above is why I originally worked hard to attend a school that doesn't have a strong athletics program instead of where I ended up doing my aborted PhD, and why I think sports should be separate from the university as is done in the EU, UK, and many other more functional democracies, why I believe in a personal right to firearms ownership, and why I worry greatly about so called democracies that institute things like universal health care without respecting responsible firearms ownership... it creates a lot of issues when you disarm people, abuse them, then tell them suicide is an option. They might decide to not just kill themselves. In fact, I suspect that meta level thought pattern: "Why would I end my life, instead of the abuser making me suicidal" is the source of many of the lower body count spree killings you see in the media. (The ones where they stop after a clip rather than try to make it into the record books -- the latter types should not have their names repeated when possible.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wisnoskij 4y ago

As a Canadian I want to point out this article is quite misleading. The issue is far more systemic than this article claims. In Canada MAID is the 6th leading cause of death, and is rising so fast it is basically guaranteed to be the 3rd cause by 2025. Doctors that will not back the MAID initiative are fired, every year they expand the criteria under which you can be euthanize, right now they want to expand it to include poverty.Their are reports of children and confused elderly being tricked into euthanasia without their families knowledge. And we get reports on how much all this is saving the government.

hungryforcodes 4y ago
> Their are reports of children and confused elderly being tricked into euthanasia without their families knowledge Interesting, can you provide links to these reports? It's a pretty serious assertion.
- wisnoskij 4y ago
  A quick google search did not return anything, mainstream media does not cover stories like this, and I cannot remember where I read these stories. I know the last one I read was about a family suing the government to stop the euthanasia of their son(I believe). And I have read articles similar to this one of the elderly going to the hospital and being offered euthanasia instead of medical care. I did find this forbes article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2022/08/15/canadas-new-euthanasia-laws-carry-upsetting-nazi-era-echoes-warns-expert/?sh=4e3456fec7b8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2022/08/15/canadas-n...) that talked about a troubling case I had not heard or and included lots of details about the whole system. But when all you need is a nurse practitioner and a signature from someone with dementia or other mentally crippling disease, of course things like this will happen. Agree or disagree with how some European countries do it, this is not that same thing. The people pushing this are the doctors and nurses you go to to get medial treatment from, and the oversight is non-existent.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    From where I sit it seems like your perception on this topic is quite different then the reality.

kthejoker2 4y ago

This whole article and comment thread is a strawman, in that it presents a single case in spmething that simply should not be adjudicated on a case by case basis. Euthanasia, death panels, palliative care management, healthcare budgets, transparency or lack thereof ... These are all (full stop) system level decisions. Show us all the data, all the decisions, all the controls, all the dollars. Then as a society we decide the parameters, the gray areas, and then each case fits in one area or another.