The Suicide of Canada - American Reformer

The West Is Losing Its Will

With the exception of America, the West is unmistakably in decline. There are countless examples of the deterioration of civic life in Western nations, from the mountains of unsolved rape cases in the U.K. to the culture of countries like Ireland and France being changed almost overnight.

Perhaps topping the list is Canada’s open embrace of death. Rather than being overtaken by a foreign occupier, as happened to France in Michel Houellebecq’s famous novel Submission, Canada is succumbing to a spirit of nihilism in a different way. The Land of the Maple Leaf is killing its own citizens—and is finding increasing reasons to do so.

The country’s thirst for death is exposed in great detail in a feature essay at The Atlantic. Though its length is substantial (which should not be an issue for American Reformer readers), it must be read, pondered, and digested. The essay is a window into the nihilism that masquerades as liberal compassion, as it describes how mostly white, older upper-class citizens are seeking to avoid suffering through euthanizing themselves.

In the words of the essay’s author, Elaina Plott Calabro, what’s happening in Canada “is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic.” For Americans who have seen the devastation wrought by Roe and the transgender craze, this should be a very familiar story.

The subtitle of Calabro’s Atlantic feature speaks volumes: “The country gave its citizens the right to die. Doctors are struggling to keep up with demand.” She covers the booming business of euthanasia that was inaugurated in 2016, when Canada’s Parliament legalized assisted suicide in the wake of the country’s Supreme Court ruling in Carter v. Canada. The legal framework that was established is called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), an Orwellian-sounding legerdemain that allows eligible people to kill themselves with the assistance of medical practitioners.

The Orwellian-esque issues don’t stop there. Calabro interviews Stefanie Green, a Vancouver physician who co-founded the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, whose “decades of experience as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career.”

In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

According to Calabro, as of 2023 approximately 60,300 Canadians have died with the help of MAID. Currently, 1 in 20 deaths in Canada are due to legalized assisted suicide. In Quebec, 7% of all deaths are from MAID, which Calabro notes is “the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world.”

Shockingly, the number of deaths from Canada’s assisted suicide regime are “more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined,” Calabro writes, and surpasses “countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.” She relates a particularly eye-opening statistic: “It took Belgium more than 20 years to reach an assisted-death rate of 3 percent. Canada needed only five.”

As with the ongoing marijuana fiasco in America, legalization means legitimizing an action and sanctioning it as an unimpeachable right that should be available to all, even minors in some cases. And the law of fashion often acts in tandem as an additional accelerant. The strong forces of social opprobrium that used to be present are blunted and weakened, however barbaric the newly claimed right may be. Eventually, a nation’s people accept it as part of their way of life, forgetting that it was once admonished and deemed socially unacceptable.

Since the law is a teacher, it should be no surprise that eligibility requirements for MAID have gradually expanded since Canada’s legalization of assisted suicide. In 2021, a two-track system was made law. Track 1 patients, which include those whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable,” can now choose death on the day they’re approved for MAID. Meanwhile, Track 2 was created for individuals with chronic pain or disabilities—that is, cases where death is not imminent.

The inertia of legalizing assisted suicide is not hard to see. In 2027, MAID will be an option for those with mental illness, and the Canadian Parliament also wants to expand eligibility to include minors. Calabro points out that this is occurring amidst “concerns about whether it was possible to credibly distinguish between suicidal ideation and a desire for MAID.”

Already, there’s been a case where a patient in his 30s who had a treatable form of cancer chose instead to die by lethal injection. MAID advocates claimed that the legal definition of “incurable” could also include situations like this, where the patient deems all available treatment options as unacceptable. This is what happens when clinicians place the ethic of non-judgmentalism on a pedestal and protecting life—the most basic element of the Hippocratic Oath—in a canyon.

According to Calabro, the momentum almost seems to be pulling the politicians of Canada along, “as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding,” Calabro writes. And this is egged on by MAID advocates who “push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion.”

Underlying Canada’s open embrace of assisted suicide is the same principle behind transgenderism: a radical understanding of autonomy. Doctors are merely to follow patients’ wishes without much, if any, pushback, a deep irony in an age that purportedly values expertise. Calabro asks, “If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?” By this logic, there is no principled reason why a system of nearly universal eligibility shouldn’t be adopted.

If Americans do not pay attention, a similar euthanasia regime could establish itself here. Assisted suicide is already legal in 11 states plus Washington, D.C., with most of those states legalizing the practice over the past 10 years; Delaware legalized it earlier this year, though the law will not go into effect until 2026.

It’s also a warning that government-by-court is a disaster, as Canada’s Supreme Court opened the door to legalizing assisted suicide with its 2015 ruling. Though the U.S. Supreme Court should continue reversing the most disastrous decisions of the 20th century, as it did in the Dobbs case (as my colleague Timon Cline rightly argues, Everson needs to go as well), it also needs to be mindful of not overstepping its bounds. American citizens and their political representatives should have wide latitude to govern with a view toward the common good.

Wisdom, a familiarity with human nature, and a clear-eyed understanding of politics are necessary when adopting any policy that has potentially far-reaching consequences—especially those that will affect current and future generations. The libertarian bromides that still go for deep thought in some Reformed circles are no match for the serious and systematic political thinking that is needed to navigate our troubled times.

The West might be locked into a collision course it cannot pull out of, but that doesn’t mean America has to go down with it.

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