Three doctors warn that Health Canada’s guidelines are forcing physicians to present euthanasia as a normal ‘treatment’ option to vulnerable patients, contradicting earlier promises.
(LifeSiteNews) — Canadian doctors are warning that Health Canada’s push for euthanasia is forcing doctors to suggest assisted suicide to patients.
In a November 6 video by Christian filmmaker Frank Panico, three Canadian doctors, Will Johnston of Vancouver, David D’Souza of Toronto, and Catherine Ferrier of Montreal, revealed that physicians are forced to discuss euthanasia or so-called “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) with vulnerable patients according to Health Canada protocol.
“If a physician is suggesting euthanasia as an option or a treatment option for their pain or their suffering, then that is a very serious thing,” D’Souza, a family physician and a pain specialist in Ontario, warned.
“As a patient is more likely to take this option given that a health professional has suggested it,” he continued. “I think it does severe harm to the doctor patient relationship when physicians are now allowed and even suggesting euthanasia as a means to end their suffering.”
D’Souza’s concerns are in response to 2023 guidelines by Health Canada, titled “Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Dying to Ensure Consistent and Safe Practice in Canada.” The document mandates that doctors and nurses must tell a patient about the assisted suicide options available to them while discussing medical care.
“[Physicians/Nurse Practitioners] must take reasonable steps to ensure persons are informed of the full range of treatment options available to relieve suffering,” subsection 6.1 notes, falsely presenting suicide as “treatment.”
Echoing D’Souza’s warning, Johnston, a Vancouver family physician and head of B.C.’s Euthanasia Resistance Coalition, explained that the regulations contradict previous promises that medical personnel would not be forced to participate in the practice.
“Promises were made that no doctor would ever be coerced to participate in euthanasia, no doctor or nurse would ever lose their job because they wouldn’t cooperate with euthanasia,” he declared.
“No hospital would have to do it. No nursing home, no palliative care unit would be forced to host doctors killing patients who wanted to die. All of that was a complete fiction. All of those things have now happened,” Johnston lamented.
Similarly, Ferrier of the Division of Geriatric Medicine at McGill University Health Centre recalled doctors pushing assisted suicide on a family member who had brain cancer.
According to Ferrier, when the first doctor assessed the man, he immediately presented only two options: euthanasia or palliative sedation. He offered no other alternatives, such as psychological or social support that could help restore his will to live.
The doctor eventually referred him to a psychiatrist, but Ferrier felt that the psychiatrist’s only focus was determining whether the patient was mentally competent to choose euthanasia – not on exploring ways to relieve his suffering while helping him continue living.
“These two doctors were guys his age, and I’m convinced that they looked at him and said: ‘I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes so he’s better off dead, and he is competent to make this decision,’” Ferrier recalled.
The doctors’ warnings come just a week after Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr revealed that many disabled Canadians are being pressured to end their lives with euthanasia during routine medical appointments.
Carr’s statement supports internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of allegedly terminal illness.
In one case, an Ontario doctor revealed that a middle-aged worker, whose ankle and back injuries had left him unable to work, felt that the government’s insufficient support was “leaving (him) with no choice but to pursue” euthanasia.
Other cases included an obese woman who described herself as a “useless body taking up space,” which one doctor argued met the requirements for assisted suicide because obesity is “a medical condition which is indeed grievous and irremediable.”
At the same time, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world.
Currently, wait times to receive actual health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for euthanasia instead of waiting for assistance. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.
The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.
Asked why it was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.
According to Health Canada, 13,241 Canadians died by euthanasia lethal injections in 2022, accounting for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country that year, a 31.2 percent increase from 2021.