Satire site The Babylon Bee recently ran the headline, ‘Canadian Healthcare System Introduces Punch Card Where On Your 10th Visit You Get Free Suicide.’ Sadly, the joke isn’t too far off from reality.
Earlier this year, I posted a meme on Facebook that brutally skewered Canada’s euthanasia regime. It showed an American doctor telling a patient his stitches would cost $58,000; a British doctor that the waitlist for stitches was 38 months; and a Canadian doctor solicitously inquiring: “Have you considered killing yourself?” (Another variation of the same meme has the doctor bluntly stating: “Kill yourself”—that’s because in Canada, we have the waitlistand the suicide.)
Facebook pulled the image and restricted my account. It violated their rules on the promotion of suicide. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), however, operates freely on Facebook despite the fact that facilitating suicide is their entire job.
I’ve noted before in this space that Canada’s euthanasia regime has turned us into an international cautionary tale—a country where we can, as it turns out, have the worst of all worlds. We can have a woke government that talks constantly about helping the poor, but implements euthanasia policies that victimize them (leading to headlines in the international press such as: “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?”) The steady conveyer belt of horror stories as disabled, sick, and desperate Canadians seek lethal injections—often the only “treatment” they’re eligible for in our broken system—makes the old Mitchell and Webb sketch seem plausible:
Consider that in the midst of all of this, the Trudeau government is—for the moment—still hellbent on expanding assisted suicide to the mentally ill in March, despite desperate calls to halt these plans from the psychiatric community, Canadian medical schools, suicide prevention experts, the disability community, and virtually everyone but the suicide enthusiasts at Dying with Dignity. It actually boggles the mind—the prime minister’s own mother has written several memoirs describing her own struggled with mental illness which would, come March, make her eligible to die under the regime her son has introduced.
As Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) system continues to alleviate the pain of patients and the financial strain on the nation’s healthcare system, a recent innovation is expected to further improve results: Parliament just announced a punch card that allows patients to receive a free suicide after 10 doctor visits.
‘From a small-scale maple syrup overdose to a full-blown moose attack, you receive a punch on your card every time you are admitted for an injury or sickness.’ The Canadian Healthcare website published a blog this week outlining the new program.
‘Filling out your punch card is mandatory, for data tracking purposes. No one sick person can be allowed to drain more than their share of the taxpayer’s dollars!’
Trudeau praised the new initiative, positioning it as a way to better engage citizens and prevent any one citizen from becoming a burden on the system. ‘Canadians are team players,’ said Trudeau. ‘It’s important for every citizen to make sure he’s not wasting taxpayer money to sustain a life that’s not worth living. And now with this punch card, they know that with each hospital visit they’re one step closer to the end!’
For anyone offended by this, I would remind them that Canadians right across the country have been pro-actively offered assisted suicide by doctors—including military veterans suffering from PTSD. Cancer patients have been told that treatment that might save their lives is not available—but assisted suicide is. A disabled man in a hospital in London recorded an ethicist telling him that he should consider assisted suicide because his care was costing the system so much money. One Canadian doctor told me that his colleagues feel obligated to present “MAiD” as an option—and that increasingly, sick and vulnerable Canadians will feel obligated to take it.
More from The Bee:
Critics have contended that the new approach preys on disabled and impoverished Canadians who may see assisted suicide as their only option, but the criticism has already been quieted since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of anyone who spoke out against his regime’s policies in the comments section of the healthcare website’s blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere. At publishing time, the burden on Canada’s healthcare system was further alleviated when Parliament announced that the policy would retroactively apply to people who had already been admitted for 10 prior hospital visits.
That sort of thing provokes what they call a “painful chuckle.” The truth is that, as Ross Douthat noted in the New York Times, Canada has already entered a truly dystopian period—when over 4% of recorded deaths are Canadians being lethally injected by doctors, we’re all the way down the slope and there’s a huge pile of corpses at the bottom. I really wish that article was more satirical than it is.
Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.
He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.
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Steven Guilbeault, a Quebec MP who had formerly served as Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Environment, said he was leaving the Cabinet because his ‘climate’ policies were being abandoned.
One of Canada’s most radical environmentalist politicians has resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Cabinet.
Steven Guilbeault, until recently the Culture Minister, quit his position after the federal government struck a deal with the province of Alberta that relaxes environmental regulations and allows the construction of a new oil pipeline.
On Thursday, November 27, Guilbeault, a Quebec MP who had served as former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Environment, said he was stepping down because his “climate” policies were being abandoned.
“This afternoon, it is with great sadness that I submitted my resignation to the Prime Minister as Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages, Minister of Nature and Parks Canada, as well as his Lieutenant in Quebec,” he said in a statement.
“When I entered politics, it was because I had a deep conviction that I could make a difference in fighting climate change and protecting our environment. My commitment to leaving a better world for the future of our children and our planet remains unchanged.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed on Thursday a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which will let Alberta build an oil pipeline to the coast of British Columbia. It also lessens tanker restrictions and allows Albertan oil to be sold on Asian markets. The pipeline still faces opposition from British Columbia’s ruling New Democratic Party government.
The MOU agreement changes a host of other green-related initiatives that Guilbeault had a hand in, such as imposing an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and new Clean Electricity Regulations. Under the deal, Alberta will be exempt from these radical environmental regulations.
Premier Smith has been battling Guilbeault over his extreme climate change policies for years now. She said of the recent MOU that, although it’s a “massive win for Alberta and Canada, we will still hold the federal government accountable for keeping their end of the bargain.”
“There’s a lot of work left to do so let’s roll up our sleeves and get the job done, Alberta!” she stated.
Smith has repeatedly defended Alberta from Trudeau-era climate regulations and asserted Alberta’s right to control its power grid, also promising the province will not be “transitioning away” from oil and natural gas. She had called on the then-prime minster to replace Guilbeault because he was too “extreme.” Last year, Smith blasted the Minister after he said the federal government would no longer fund road construction projects and instead funnel the savings to “climate change” projects.
Alberta does have support from the Supreme Court, however, which recently sided in favor of provincial autonomy when it comes to natural resources. The Supreme Court ruled that Trudeau’s law, C-69, dubbed the “no-more pipelines” bill, is “mostly unconstitutional.” This was a huge win for Alberta and Saskatchewan, who challenged the law in court. The decision returned authority over the pipelines to provincial governments, meaning oil and gas projects headed up by the provinces should be allowed to proceed without federal intrusion.
Guilbeault’s extreme eco-activist past
Guilbeault, under Trudeau’s watch, pushed a radical environmental agenda similar to the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” and the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.”
He was as extreme as they come for an environment minister, and his background shows a history of breaking the law for ideological aims. In 1997, he joined Greenpeace and served for a time as a director and then campaign manager of its Quebec chapter for a decade.
He was arrested many times for environmental protests, the most famous arrest coming after an incident in 2001 when he climbed Toronto’s CN Tower with British activist Chris Holden. The pair hung a banner saying “Canada and Bush — Climate Killers.”
Greenpeace is a group that advocates for population control in addition to calling for an end to all oil and gas.
His extreme ideals continued in his role as environment minister. He threatened Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who said that his province would no longer collect a federally imposed carbon tax on electric heat in addition to natural gas, with arrest and jail.
While Minister of Environment, Guilbeault was hoped to create a new “global’ carbon tax applied to all goods shipped internationally that could further drive-up prices for families already struggling with inflated costs.
The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet have been involved.
The reality of Trudeau’s, and then Carney’s push, for so-called renewable energy showed itself just over a month ago when Alberta’s power grid faced near certain collapse due to a failure of wind and solar power.
John Kerry, one of the grandest and most persistent climate scolds of the 21stcentury, lurched back into the news this week when he was knighted by Britain’s King Charles, a prominent climate scold in his own right.
In fact, their shared efforts involving flying off on carbon-spewing private jets to lecture the masses to live smaller, more costly lives in the name of fighting climate change was the motivation for the award, as the King thanked Kerry for his “services to tackling climate change.” That seems to be a bit of a grammatical error, but when royalty is involved, no one really cares, do they?
“King Charles and I share the same point of view — that there’s an urgency to doing things,” Kerry told the Globe in an interview. “He’s been ahead of most folks on this from the time I can remember… He always had a commitment to nature.”
Unfortunately for the U.K.’s citizens, the Labour government’s “commitment to nature” mainly appears to involve covering thousands of acres of bucolic British farmland with massive solar arrays and felling thousands of forest trees to make home to big wind installations these days.
Projects like those – frequently forced by the central government on objecting rural communities – form the centerpiece of Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband’s program to deindustrialize the formerly formidable British economy.
That program – based on the shared philosophy of King Charles and Kerry – has sent the U.K.’s utility rates skyrocketing to the highest on earth. It has also rendered the former global power dependent on imports from foreign nations for its energy security, with China the most prominent among them.
Such are the fruits of the King Charles/Kerry “point of view.” Most would agree with Kerry’s statement that “there’s an urgency to doing things.” The problem is that pretty much everything he and the King have been doing in this realm across the first quarter of the 21st century leads inevitably to serfdom to the Chinese Communist Party.
In an interview with the Financial Times the same day, Kerry repeated much of the tiresome dogma of his alarmist religion, in the process excoriating President Donald Trump as a “denier” and calling U.S. corporate leaders cowards for straying from the narrative he and the King prefer. “It is not that they don’t believe [in climate change] or they don’t want to move forward. They are just scared,” Kerry said of the corporate CEOs, adding, “The process of Donald Trump in the last months, coupled with the justice department, coupled with his vengeance programs, has scared… a lot of people.”
But a more believable alternative explanation for the shift away from the twin manias of ESG and DEI by many companies in recent years is that these corporate leaders have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns on capital to their investors. The problem for Kerry and his disciples is that the preferred alternatives they have advanced too often devolved into unprofitable boondoggles that fail to satisfy that duty. Kerry wants to place the entire blame on Trump – who, ironically, was recently honored by King Charles himself with an unprecedented second state dinner. But the truth is that shift started in earnest in 2023, when Joe Biden’s autopen was still in charge of the ship of American state.
That shift has certainly accelerated this year, as companies have been freed from the incessant hectoring of the Biden government and are now being denied access to the ruinous green subsidies from the IRA that so radically distorted energy markets. This has little to do with climate denialism or cowardice and much to do with sound business practice and CEOs properly carrying out the mandates of their high positions. No amount of hyperbolic talking points from Kerry or the King can change that reality.
In the end, Kerry’s remarks come off as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Now in the twilight of his career, he has become a relic, a totem of a fading global religion whose end cannot come soon enough.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
