ncregister | Canadian food bank clients and disabled retirees facing financial insecurity are now considering doctor-assisted suicide to avoid living in poverty, several sources have reported.
“Based on the definitions in the Canadian law, nearly anyone with a chronic medical condition, such as people with disabilities, can be approved for euthanasia,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told CNA Dec. 12.
“Therefore people with disabilities are requesting euthanasia based on poverty, homelessness, or an inability to receive needed medical treatment, but they are approved for euthanasia based on their disability,” he added.
Meghan Nicholls, CEO of the Mississauga Food Bank in Mississauga, an Ontario city west of Toronto, said demand has increased by 60% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her food bank network now serves 30,000 people per year, she reported in a Nov. 30 commentary for the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.
For the first time, according to Nicholls, beneficiaries are reporting that the cost of food has put them into financial insolvency.
“We’re at the point where clients on these programs are telling us they’re considering medically assisted death or suicide because they can’t live in grinding poverty anymore,” she said in the Maclean’s report. “A client in our Food Bank 2 Home delivery program told one of our staff that they’re considering suicide because they’re so tired of suffering through poverty. Another client asked if we knew how to apply for MAID (medical assistance in dying) for the same reasons.”
“We can’t underestimate the effect that poverty has on someone’s mental health. Our clients live with constant worry and cut corners on needed items like medication, fresh food, or warm clothes — constantly living under that stress takes its toll mentally, emotionally, and physically,” Nicholls said.
“When people start telling us they’re going to end their life because they can’t live in poverty anymore, it’s clear that we’ve failed them,” she added.
Nicholls told Canada’s The Catholic Register that leaders of other food banks in Canada have not heard clients speak of plans to take their own lives.
“I don’t know if that’s a bit of an anomaly or if it’s just because we operate this home delivery program. We do have a chance to connect with clients directly, and that kind of relationship might open us up for people to share a little bit more vulnerably than perhaps some other food banks.”
Schadenberg said assisted suicide has become very easy to access in Canada.
“We need to understand that many people with disabilities live in poverty and find themselves having difficulty receiving necessary medical treatment and yet according to the law they have no difficulty being approved for death by euthanasia,” he told CNA. “Clearly this has led to an epidemic of death, of despair, in Canada. Deaths based on cultural abandonment but sold to the population under the false guise of freedom.”
In 2021, over 10,000 Canadians died by euthanasia, also called medical aid in dying or doctor-assisted suicide. This is 10 times the number who died by euthanasia in 2016, when the procedure was first legalized.
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