Canada is fast transforming into a full-fledged, banshee-shrieking, culture of death.
That requires authoritarian measure, and so efforts are underway to punish provinces that don’t ensure access to euthanasia. From the Ottawa Citizen story:
Provinces that refuse to offer right-to-die medical services should have federal health care subsidies slashed to discourage a repeat of the jurisdictional patchwork that limits legal access to abortion in parts of the country, parliamentarians heard Monday.
NDP MP and health critic Murray Rankin, at a hearing of the special joint House-Senate committee on assisted dying, pressed witnesses Abby Hoffman, assistant deputy minister at Health Canada, on whether the government would withhold heath-care transfer payments from provinces and territories that chose not to make physician-assisted death services available.
“The last line of defence is withholding funding,” responded Hoffman. But, “there would be a lot of conversation with that jurisdiction long before the point of withholding funds. It is a very long process to turn an alleged violation of a principle into a situation where there are financial penalties.”
So, if ready access to medicalized killing isn’t guaranteed by a province, the federal government will punish that area’s sick by restricting its share of the provinces health care costs.
This goes past mere legalization to creating a positive right to access becoming dead. And that requires authoritarian coercion of doctors–and in a socialized system–local government entities.
Canada is throwing away the right to call itself free–or moral.