A recently filed Charter of Rights lawsuit by a coalition of disability rights organizations challenging provisions of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (commonly referred to as MAID) characterizes those provisions as an “abandonment” of people with disabilities. The coalition behind the challenge includes Inclusion Canada, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, Indigenous Disability Canada and the Disabled Women’s Network of Canada—it also includes two individual plaintiffs.
According to the notice of application filed by the disability coalition, track two of the MAID law is resulting in premature deaths among some people with disabilities who are seeking death due to social deprivation, poverty and a lack of essential supports.
The coalition’s lawsuit maintains that “a law that allows people with disabilities to access state-funded death in circumstances where they cannot access state-funded supports they need to make their suffering tolerable is grossly disproportionate.” The coalition’s filing in Ontario’s Superior Court takes aim at the federal government going on to note that, “There is no deprivation that is more serious and more irrevocable than causing someone who is not otherwise dying to die.”
Supposedly, MAID is in place for those who are facing a terminal illness and suffering, but the provisions in the law are allegedly being accessed by individuals who are not facing a terminal illness, but rather are facing intolerable living conditions because our society is not stepping up to provide supports and relief.
Can there be a greater shame for one of the world’s wealthiest nations? Are we as a nation so inured to the scourge of poverty? Make no mistake, it is primarily the poor and marginalized who find themselves so bereft of hope that a government-funded suicide is the only option they can see to alleviate their suffering.
While the lawsuit is aimed at a provision of federal law, the underlying causes of this trend fall squarely on the shoulders of our second-tier governments—the provinces. It is the provinces that are constitutionally charged with the realm of health and the alleviation of the worst scourges of poverty.
Here in Ontario, the provincial government is spending billions of our tax dollars to make alcohol more accessible (one of the leading causes of health issues it should also be noted) and to build dubious traffic alleviations (fossil fuel pollution being yet another serious health issue).
Premier Doug Ford promised to end hallway medicine, yet there are just as abundant a number of stories each and every day of surgery patients languishing on gurneys in emergency room hallways because there are no “funded” beds in hospital rooms as there were before.
With ongoing shortages of health care professionals forcing emergency room closures across the North and patients in all parts of the province unable to secure a family doctor, the situation has only gotten worse under the current regime. On the bright side, Premier Ford, having provided the largest provincial budget in history, including a massive deficit, and despite taking office with essentially balance books, is offering up the politically motivated prospect of $200 cheques.
Challenged, the Ford government responds with a flurry of nice sounding numbers, millions spent on hiring new health care workers, billions spent on hospital infrastructure, billions spent on education. But those numbers fall far short of the need. Premier Ford’s apparent strategy is for municipalities, health organizations, the disabled, the poor and seniors to “find efficiencies.”
School boards across the province are emptying their reserve coffers in order to provide a decent education to our children, municipalities are facing massive property tax increases and the mentally ill and those addicted to drugs (including alcohol) face waiting lists that defy imagination. For our beleaguered long-term care homes, struggling under the weight of “privatization by stealth” agency costs, Premier Ford offers up a host of untrained and unskilled staff.
While bloat may be a perennial favourite target of conservatives, the true cost to our nation of perennial underfunding of social services is the spiralling failure of our social safety nets—and a rising number of people seeking to prematurely end their lives is a result.
“Death should not be a solution for disabled people who experience intolerable suffering but are otherwise not at the end of their lives,” notes the disability coalition. While the coalition’s aim is set squarely on the track two provisions of the MAID, as they say those provisions are specifically in place for the disabled, the true culprit is a shamefully “efficient” system of social supports for those facing an intolerable reality.
While those receiving Premier Ford’s $200 election cheques will now be able to buy a couple of more cases of beer at the corner store, that pittance will do little for those living hand to mouth, without any realistic hope of succor on the horizon.
Premier Ford likes to tout the economic success of Canada’s largest province, but when it comes to our social success in meeting the needs of those whose plight comes at no fault of their own, Ontario’s story takes a decidedly dark turn. Provincial premiers like to foist the blame on the federal government, but Ontario’s contribution to health care continues to fail to match increases in federal transfers each year.
We, as a nation, as a province, can and must do better. That will not happen as long as we, the electorate, turn a blind eye.
