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Great Reset

Assisted suicide activists should not be running our MAID program

Published

12 months ago

6 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Shawn Whatley

We should keep the right-to-die foxes out of the regulatory henhouse

The federal government chose a right-to-die advocacy group to help implement its medical assistance in dying legislation. It’s a classic case of regulatory capture, otherwise known as letting the foxes guard the henhouse.

In the “Fourth annual report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2022,” the federal government devoted several paragraphs of praising to the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP).

“Since its inception in 2017, (CAMAP) has been and continues to be an important venue for information sharing among health-care professionals and other stakeholders involved in MAID,” reads the report.

With $3.3 million in federal funding, “CAMAP has been integral in creating a MAID assessor/provider community of practice, hosts an annual conference to discuss emerging issues related to the delivery of MAID and has developed several guidance materials for health-care professionals.”

Six clinicians in British Columbia formed CAMAP, a national non-profit association, in October 2016. These six right-to-die advocates published clinical guidelines for MAID in 2017, without seriously consulting other physician organizations.

The guidelines educate clinicians on their “professional obligation to (bring) up MAID as a care option for patients, when it is medically relevant and they are likely eligible for MAID.” CAMAP’s guidelines apply to Canada’s 96,000 physicians, 312,000 nurses and the broader health-care workforce of two-million Canadians, wherever patients are involved.

The rise of CAMAP overlaps with right-to-die advocacy work in Canada. According to Sandra Martin, writing in the Globe and Mail, CAMAP “follow(ed) in the steps of Dying with Dignity,” an advocacy organization started in the 1980s, and “became both a public voice and a de facto tutoring service for doctors, organizing information-swapping and self-help sessions for members.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tapped this “tutoring service” to lead the MAID program. CAMAP appears to follow the steps of Dying with Dignity, because the same people lead both groups. For example, Shanaaz Gokool, a current director of CAMAP, served as CEO of Dying with Dignity from 2016 to 2019.

A founding member and current chair of the board of directors of CAMAP is also a member of Dying with Dignity’s clinician advisory council. One of the advisory council’s co-chairs is also a member of Dying with Dignity’s board of directors, as well as a moderator of the CAMAP MAID Providers Forum. The other advisory council co-chair served on both the boards of CAMAP and Dying with Dignity at the same time.

Overlap between CAMAP and Dying with Dignity includes CAMAP founders, board members (past and present), moderators, research directors and more, showing that a small right-to-die advocacy group birthed a tiny clinical group, which now leads the MAID agenda in Canada. This is a problem because it means that a small group of activists exert outsized control over a program that has serious implications for many Canadians.

George Stigler, a Noble-winning economist, described regulatory capture in the 1960s, showing how government agencies can be captured to serve special interests.

Instead of serving citizens, focused interests can shape governments to serve narrow and select ends. Pharmaceutical companies work hard to write the rules that regulate their industry. Doctors demand government regulations — couched in the name of patient safety — to decrease competition. The list is endless.

Debates about social issues can blind us to basic governance. Anyone who criticizes MAID governance is seen as being opposed to assisted death and is shut out of the debate. At the same time, the world is watching Canada and trying to figure out what is going on with MAID and why we are so different than other jurisdictions offering assisted suicide.

Canada moved from physician assisted suicide being illegal to becoming a world leader in organ donation after assisted death in the space of just six years.

In 2021, Quebec surpassed the Netherlands to lead the world in per capita deaths by assisted suicide, with 5.1 per cent of deaths due to MAID in Quebec, 4.8 per cent in the Netherlands and 2.3 per cent in Belgium. In 2022, Canada extended its lead: MAID now represents 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada.

How did this happen so fast? Some point to patients choosing MAID instead of facing Canada’s world-famous wait times for care. Others note a lack of social services. No doubt many factors fuel our passion for MAID, but none of these fully explain the phenomenon. In truth, Canada became world-famous for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide because we put right-to-die advocates in charge of assisted death.

Regardless of one’s stance on MAID, regulatory capture is a well-known form of corruption. We should expect governments to avoid obvious conflicts of interest. Assuming Canadians want robust and ready access to MAID (which might itself assume too much), at least we should keep the right-to-die foxes out of the regulatory henhouse.

Shawn Whatley is a physician, a Munk senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and author of “When Politics Comes Before Patients: Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing.”

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MAiD

Nearly half of non-terminally ill Canadians who choose euthanasia say they are lonely

Published on December 19, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Of the 662 people who were not in danger of death but succumbed to medical assistance in dying last year, 47.1 percent cited as reasons for wanting to die ‘isolation or loneliness.’

Official government data shows that about half of Canadians who are not terminally ill yet wanted to end their lives via state-sanctioned assisted suicide did so last year because they said they were lonely.

According to data published by Health Canada on December 11 in its fifth annual report on medical assistance in dying (MAID), 15,342 people were approved for and died by euthanasia in 2023.

A total of 14,721 of these deaths were in cases where illness or disability were likely down the road or considered “reasonably foreseeable.” These are called Track 1 MAiD deaths.

However, 662 deaths were people who were not dying. Of these Track 2 deaths, 47.1 percent cited as reasons for wanting to die “isolation or loneliness.” By comparison, about 21.1 percent of Track 1 deaths reported the same feelings for wanting to die by doctor-led suicide.

The report stated that “social isolation and loneliness are shown to have a serious impact on physical and mental health, quality of life, and longevity.”

Of the Track 2 deaths, 35.7 percent lived alone, compared with 30.2 percent of Track 1 deaths. Of Track 1 deaths, the average age was 77.7 years. The average age of Track 2 deaths was 75.

Of note is that this year’s Health Canada report on MAiD is the first to include so-called “verbal” requests from individuals as official. Previously, those who wanted to die via assisted suicide had to submit a form to Health Canada in order to be officially recorded as a request to die by suicide.

Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal government legalized MAiD in 2016, the deadly program has continued to relax its rules on who is eligible for death.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, 1 in 20 Canadian deaths in 2023 came from assisted suicide.

Last week, LifeSiteNews reported how a senior Canadian couple said that a hospice care center presented euthanasia to one of them as an option because they could not afford increased care costs on their fixed income.

Canadian pro-life leaders have criticized the Trudeau government’s continued push for expanding MAiD.

Indeed, most Canadians fear the nation’s euthanasia regime unfairly targets those who are financially and socially vulnerable while still supporting the immoral practice in general.

In 2021, the program expanded from killing only terminally ill patients to allowing the chronically ill to qualify. Since then, the government has sought to include those suffering solely from mental illness.

The number of Canadians killed by lethal injection under the nation’s MAiD program since 2016 stands at close to 65,000, with an estimated 16,000 deaths in 2023 alone. Many fear that because the official statistics are manipulated the number may be even higher.

Canada had approximately 15,280 euthanasia deaths in 2023.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UNESCO launches course aimed at ‘training’ social media influencers to ‘report hate speech’

Published on December 13, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

UNESCO’s bills its new ‘training’ initiative as empowering participants to be more credible and resilient while simply turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism launch training courses, e-books, and surveys on disinformation and hate speech for influencers and content creators, big and small.

Last month, UNESCO published the results of a survey called “Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators” that concluded that among 500 content creators in 45 countries that had a minimum of 1,000 followers, 62 percent said they did “not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking of information prior to sharing it,” while 73 percent expressed “the wish to be trained to do so.”

And lo and behold! UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a re-education course to brainwash independent creators into thinking like unelected globalists and the legacy media, whose credibility are at an all-time low:

The journalism industry is on high alert as news audiences continue to migrate away from legacy media to social media, and many young people place more trust in TikTokers than journalists working at storied news outlets

“Respondents to the survey expressed interest in taking UNESCO’s free online course designed to equip participants with media and information literacy skills and knowledge,” the report states.

To get an idea of the make-up of those 500 content creators that were surveyed in the UNESCO study:

  • 68 percent were nano-influencers – those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
  • 25 percent were micro-influencers – those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers
  • 4 percent were macro-influencers – those with 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers
  • 6 percent were mega-influencers – those with over 1,000,000 followers

Only 12.2 percent of the 500 people surveyed produced content under the category of “current affairs/politics and economy” while the majority covered “fashion/lifestyle” (39.3 percent), “beauty” (34 percent), “travel and food” (30 percent), and “gaming” (29 percent).

Equip yourself to combat online misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and harmful AI content. Collaborate with fellow journalists and content creators to promote transparency and accountability on digital platforms, empowering your audience with the media and information literacy skills they need to navigate today’s information landscape.

In addition to the survey and the online course called “Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to Be a Trusted Voice Online,” UNESCO and the Knight Center also published an e-book in October called “Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age.”

This pyramid of propaganda is billed as empowering influencers to be more credible and resilient, but these efforts are also aimed at turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

 

Despite their expanding outreach, many digital content creators who work independently face significant challenges including the lack of institutional support, guidance, and recognition. — UNESCO, Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators, November 2024

How can an independent content creator remain independent if he or she needs institutional support, guidance, and recognition?

This is an attempt by the United Nations to take independence away from the equation, so that its messaging becomes indistinguishable from mainstream, establishment narratives.

And between the survey and the e-book, there is not one, single, solitary example of disinformation or hate speech – save perhaps the claim that denying official climate change narratives is considered disinformation, but that’s highly debatable.

Threats to collective climate action are often perpetuated not only by individual creators but by industries, like fossil fuels, that actively shape public discourse to their advantage.

Speaking of climate change, the e-book contains a lengthy chapter called “Content Creators and Climate Change” that is entirely dedicated to pushing climate activism while claiming climate change disinformation is often perpetuated by coordinated campaigns from fossil fuel industries.

The UNESCO documents place heavy emphasis on disclosing who’s funding content creators while ignoring its partner, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP), and its alleged influence over UNESCO:

The Chinese Communist Party uses UNESCO to “rewrite history” and to “legitimize the party’s rule over regions with large ethnic minorities.”

When held to a mirror, UNESCO comes off as little more than hypocritical with massive conflicts of interests of its own:

One of the biggest ethical questions is knowing from where content creators derive their income.

 

At the same time, UNESCO points readers towards organizations like factcheck.org, which itself is funded by the likes of the U.S. State Department and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the latter of which holds approximately $2 billion of stock in COVID vaccine manufacturer J&J, according to U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie.

In January 2021, UNESCO, the WHO, UNDP, EU, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas ran a similar type of propaganda campaign for so-called COVID vaccine disinformation training for journalists as they are now doing for so-called climate change disinformation for content creators.

Another goal of UNESCO and the Knight Center is to create an environment where content creators snitch on one another under the guise of “hate speech”:

Among those targeted by hate speech, most chose to ignore it (31.5%). Only one-fifth (20.4%) reported it to social media platforms. This indicates an area where UNESCO and its partners could provide valuable training for digital content creators on how to effectively address and report hate speech.

In other words, the U.N. is partnering with journalists to teach influencers how to become victims that need protection.

Hey! Content creators. Were you aware that any criticism against the propaganda that we’ve planted within you means that you were a victim of hate speech? No? Well, climb on board and let’s “effectively address and report hate speech!”

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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