Today, Canadians are experiencing a three-word addition to what Ronald Reagan called the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you kill yourself.”
Soon after the announcement that Canada would expand its medically assisted suicide program to include those with mental illness, the popular Canadian department store chain Simons issued a new advertisement celebrating the policy. The video features a woman saying, “Last breaths are sacred; you just have to be brave enough to see it,” over a montage of her being wheeled to places of natural wonder. The department store’s logo is featured prominently at the end of the commercial.
Amid global outrage over the video and the policy, the Canadian government has announced it will delay the program’s expansion, but the battle is far from over, as the underlying issues driving the policy remain unchanged. Having produced a fantasy health care system that ultimately deprives Canadians of basic physical and mental health services, the Canadian left now offers medically assisted suicide as the compassionate and fiscally responsible solution to their failure.
In 1984, the Canadian left slapped together a single-payer health care scheme by which citizens would pay into a provincially administered, federally and provincially funded health-care system that provides access to most health services at no extra cost, with a mission to “protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers.”
But maintaining a low-cost, easy-access, government-run health-care program in a large, democratic country with a growing dependent-to-workforce ratio just isn’t working out for Canada. Low pay for medical professionals, who still have to pay for college and medical school, has created an acute shortage of doctors in a country that once boasted one of the best doctor-to-population ratios in the world.
Doctors can only bill the government $31 per patient; they can only see a maximum of 50 patients per day; and they can’t bill for time-consuming tasks like checking labs, writing referrals, and conducting physical exams. Because raising taxes to pay for more doctors is democratically unpopular and obliterates the promised cost savings from government-run health care, growing health-care expenses are deducted from the general budget, which leaves less money for every other program and results in more government borrowing.
As a result, federal debt has exploded, inflation has shot to record highs, and Canadians now must wait half a year to see specific physicians, by which point they’re either feeling better already, suffering greatly from lack of treatment, or dead. In this grim situation, reconciling leftist goals of providing no-extra-cost care for all with fiscal reality requires a shocking technocratic solution: eliminating the excess population to relieve them of the suffering inflicted by progressive utopianists.
This isn’t an over-exaggeration. According to the National Post, the woman in the advertisement, the now-deceased 37-year-old Jennyfer Hatch, “only opted for assisted suicide after her years-long attempts to secure proper health care failed.” For ten years, Jennyfer was bounced from specialist to specialist, and when she could even see one none had a background in Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, the genetic but manageable illness from which she suffered.
Before her death, Jennyfer took to Canadian television, saying, “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.”
As Canada’s health-care system experiences more challenges and its suicide program expands over time, cases like Jennyfer’s will tragically become even more widespread. Given that one out of five Canadians experiences mental illness in a given year, that means eight million Canadians could be eligible for suicide; anyone experiencing depression from losing his job due to Covid vaccine mandates or being unable to find affordable housing due to increased demand from recent immigrants paired with a shortage of skilled construction workers and progressive-driven building labyrinths will soon be encouraged to put themselves out of state-induced misery.
Medically assisted suicide may soon become more prevalent in the United States as prominent members of the Democratic Party are moving ahead with promoting a universal health care morass of their own. If the widespread adoption of assisted suicide in countries with universal government health care is any indication, there’s little doubt the “Medicare for All” plan supported by leftist luminaries like Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren would soon include “Suicide for All.”
Indeed, medically assisted suicide is a Democrat-supported issue and has been adopted in 10 Democrat states and is being pushed for in more. Should Democrats gain enough votes to pass universal health care in Congress, they’ll have enough votes to approve assisted suicide.
To save millions of our citizens from the humiliation of health care shortages and suicide, Democrats’ universal health care fantasy must be helped to its end.
Kenneth Schrupp is a Young Voices contributor writing on the intersection of business, politics, and media. He’s a public affairs consultant and serves as editor in chief of the California Review, an independent political journal.
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