One Year Later, the reality of Medical Assistance in Dying

By Michael Swan June 9, 2017

http://www.catholicregister.org/item/25392-one-year-later-the-reality-of-medical-assistance-in-dying

Ontario doctors challenge policy forcing referrals for medically assisted dying

College's rules infringe on doctors' right to object on conscientious, religious grounds, groups argue

Amanda Pfeffer · CBC News

June 15, 2017

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/ottawa/medically-assisted-dying-ontario-college-1.4159660

CBC Ottawa Morning Radio Live:  June 15, 2017 with Hallie Cotnam - Interview with Dr. Sephora Tang and Dr. David Rouselle from the CPSO

http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/968056387630

Ottawa Citizen agrees to change policy regarding pro-life letters

I think it's time we insist that newspapers use the word "pro-life" to describe us. Newspapers usually call us "anti-abortion". I took issue with this policy last week when I wrote a letter to the Ottawa Citizen after they changed a letter I wrote where I used "pro-life" to "anti-abortion". 

I then contacted the Citizen and explained that I had a big problem with this change.

Then ensued a correspondence between myself and Christina Spencer, the editorial pages editor. She said they would review their policy of using the word "anti-abortion" instead of pro-life" after I explained how unfair this policy was to us, since we call ourselves "pro-life". And that, just like how editors call themselves editors and not "word-changers", we like to be called "pro-life" and not "anti-abortion".

In putting forth our position on calling ourselves "pro-life" I then explained:

"Cardinal Collins never used the word abortion in his homily. He used the words "Sanctity of Life", Gift of Life", "Cause of Life", "March for Life", etc. He also spoke about euthanasia and assisted suicide: our view is much broader than anti-abortion, it is about the sanctity of ALL life: 

"anti-abortion" is not what I wrote and definitely not what I meant. If it is the Citizens policy to use that word instead of the word we use ourselves--and the word I always use--the Citizen is manipulating my/our message. 

For someone to read my letter as it stands, who knows little or nothing about life issues, will believe that I/we call ourselves "anti-abortion" when this is simply untrue, misleading to readers, and unfair to us. 

Surely it is not the Citizen's goal to mislead/misrepresent their readers/letter writers? 

...another argument is this: It is one thing for the OC to use the word "anti-abortion" in articles written by staff members (and I don't agree with this either), but it is another thing entirely to change a letter that I have written to use the word "anti-abortion", when clearly the letter should be in my voice, not in the voice of the OC. And the same goes for Cardinal Collins: I was writing about what he said, it wasn't OC staff writing about what he said."

The Citizen has now agreed that:

"letter-writers should be given their own voices as much as possible, regardless of our other style protocols around the issue. As a result, I’ve gone in to our web file and updated your letter to use the term “pro life” where you used it."

I think this is very good news for us at the Ottawa Citizen. Now we need to educate other newspapers in Canada where this policy is practiced.

My letter with the word "pro-life" put back in.

Doctors need conscience protection please help if you can

This is extremely disturbing. This 6 minute video shows how doctors are being pressured into being involved in MAID.

Canadian Physicians of for Life is making a financial appeal to support the court challenge in support of doctor's conscience rights. If you can make a donation I urge you to do so.

Ont. Gov't still has no conscience protection in Bill 84

Dear Dr. Hoskins,

On April 2, 2017 you are quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying:

“Many of these same people, when they express their concern, they ask us to implement what’s sort of being referred to as the Alberta model...We are implementing the Alberta model.”

I understand that this is NOT the case. The Alberta model does not require any physician involvement – it does not require an effective referral, and the model is entirely patient accessed.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario still requires an effective referral from doctors if requested by a patient – even though a care coordination service has been created.

Many Members of Provincial Parliament and Ministers have been confused by this statement and are now under the incorrect impression that an effective referral is no longer needed with the model the government has implemented.

To protect conscientiously objecting doctors and health care providers here in Ontario we must implement a conscience amendment in Bill 84.

Can you please ensure that proper a conscience clause is inserted into Bill 84?

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Patricia Maloney

cc Nathalie Des Rosiers

Kathleen Wynne

Gov't still not addressing "duty to refer" clause in Bill 84

After complaining to our MPP Nathalie Desrosiers about the "duty to refer" clause as it relates to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), a group of us received a response.

Nathalie does not respond to our "duty to refer" concern.

I responded to her with this letter:

Dear Nathalie,

Thanks very much for your email reply to us. 

However I notice that you did not specifically address our very important concern regarding "duty to refer" as it relates to MAID. 

Can you please do so? 

This is a very important issue for all of us. It is also a very important for the doctors whose entire livelihood, and the livelihood of their families, depend on in that they do not want to be forced refer patients to be killed through MAID. 

If they are forced to "refer" patients, many good doctors will leave the profession. This is not what the citizens of Ontario want or need. 

As well, if we are assured of this provision being safeguarded, it also gives us the peace of mind that when we go to a hospital or doctor, that there WILL be doctors who are NOT participating in MAID, and we can feel safe and secure in that knowledge that, we will not be encouraged to prematurely end our lives by killing ourselves. 

We look forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience. 

Sincerely,
Patricia Maloney 

cc Kathleen Wynne
Dr. Eric Hoskins Minister of Health and Long Term Care

A prayer for health care professionals

Yesterday morning during prayer I was filled with gratitude for the men and women who refuse to participate in assisted suicide and abortion. They need our continual prayers and support.

God bless them all and keep them strong in their resolve to protect and defend the most vulnerable members of our society.

Monte McNaughton principled stand on conscience rights

January 17, 2017

Patricia, 

Did you see the story on LifeSite news yesterday entitled, “Ontario MPP promises to dig in to defend conscience rights of health care providers, workers"? The story, written by Lianne Laurence, begins: "Progressive Conservative MPP Monte McNaughton says he’s ready to “fight tooth and nail” for conscience rights of health care workers and institutions in Ontario."

I was happy to state publicly my commitment to defending the conscience rights of health care workers in Ontario, and I want to reaffirm that commitment to you today.

While I have been the only MPP to challenge the Liberal government on this issue (watch my statement at Queen’s Park by clicking here), I know that some of my colleagues also share my concern. In addition to forcing Doctors and other health care workers to act against their conscience, I believe that current language could allow Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government to compel religious institutions which receive funding through Ontario's health care system, to perform practices like euthanasia.

How best do you think I can intervene on this issue further? I welcome your thoughts and advice and thank you for your continued friendship and support.

Yours sincerely,

Monte McNaughton, MPP
Lambton—Kent—Middlesex

PS: On October 17^th I wrote to Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, Dr Eric Hoskins on the importance of conscience rights. You can click here to read my important letter on preserving Doctors conscience rights across Ontario. 

Dear Blessed Mother Mary please pray for Canada

My sister Maureen put together this amazing site on the Marian Congress Ottawa 1947.

There were 200,000 attendees in Ottawa for the congress. An amazing number of people considering that Ottawa itself only had a population of 200,000. I wonder if there were a Congress held today if numbers of 100% of Ottawa's population (almost a million people) would attend a similar congress?

Devotion to Our Lady is even more important today than it ever was. Canada really needs her intervention for abortion and assisted suicide.

From newspaper articles on Maureen's site:

"...In his closing remarks the Pontiff said. “Take courage and know that the Immaculate Mother of God had appealed to her Divine Son so that the repentance of the world will bring redemption"

“...Let the sin laden soul take courage and know that a mother’s heart filled with mercy is pleading with her divine Son for the needed grace of repentance and forgiveness. Let growing youth of both sexes know that loving mother’s eyes are always on them.

No path of circumstances is hidden from her anxious care. Go forward, then with determination, o dear young men and young women, vindicate the glory of your Immaculate Mother. In the face of a vicious world prove that young hearts can still be chaste. And oh, how much depends on the genuine active Catholicity of the home!”

...The Message of the Marian Congress: Intercession with the Mother of God to obtain from her Divine Son, a lasting world peace was the keynote of all the addresses delivered by world known prelates during the Congress.  

In his sermon, a high point of the congress, Archbishop John D’Alton, of Armagh, Irish Primate, said that in this age “of moral anarchy” the world had great need of Mary’s example. She was the ideal mother in the Ideal home.

Today, he said “the home has been invaded by the modern spirit of restlessness and indiscipline which helps to weaken parental authority. ”Then there were the self-styled progressive thinkers who were continually deriding the Catholic ideal of marriage as out of harmony with the trend of modern civilization and who clamored for companionate marriages, easier divorces and birth control...."

Mother Mary pray for us.

Canada's assisted suicide law will claim unintended victims

What Dr. Johnston writes about below is frightening. This is where Canada is heading with it's
assisted suicide law. Reprinted with permission from the author. Sorry for the weird formatting.
INTERNATIONAL   DR. WILL JOHNSTON   SEP 29, 2016   |   1:13PM    WASHINGTON, DC

The Carter decision to allow assisted suicide and euthanasia claimed that Canada could avoid abuses through careful guidelines and screening. Medically facilitated elder abuse bygreedy relatives and medicalized suicide for the depressed — a grim reality where this practice is legal — were supposed to be avoidable, said the judge, because of a superior medical culture in Canada. The abuses of Belgium? Not for us.

Experience proves otherwise.

According to the new law, it will be five years before Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia regime has to report back to the nation. Two stories offer reasons why that report will fail to reveal those depressed patients, far from death, who are steered to suicide by others and by their untreated mental illness.

A friend, herself dealing with advanced ovarian cancer, heard from a neighbour that his wife was going to get assisted suicide. The neighbour said they would be going to a doctor in Vancouver to get this done. This baffled my friend, who had seen the woman outside her home, gardening. The husband made other comments suggesting that his wife would be dead soon. She had heart trouble.

My friend tipped off her own nurse to get community services involved and the suicidal woman’s depression began to be addressed by a nurse and social worker. This apparently able-bodied woman did not go to Vancouver right away — but she had been invited, as soon became clear.

This appears to be medical homicide as a solution to depression.

I will let my friend’s words testify to the end of that story:

“A few days later the husband came over with a clipboard and a pen. He started by saying, “Damn government did not pass the bill.” He asked me to sign a form — that he needed two signatures for the doctor in Vancouver. He stated that none of their family and friends would sign. I almost passed out!

Seriously. I told him I would not sign. He assumed that it was on religious grounds and I said no it was experiential. He said “OK, then I will ask your husband.” I told him he had better not even bring it up!

We went on a two-day visit to the grandsons and came back on June 7 (the designated day of the euthanasia) and his balcony was draped in black crepe.

Several days later I bumped into him at the mailbox and he complained that none of the neighbours had given condolences even though he made it obvious that [his wife] had “passed.” I asked him how he was and he said that his wife had a nice last day, that she liked the walk around the seawall.

He also told me that he felt sorry for the poor doctor because she was so tired because she had so many euthanasias that day. He and the boyfriend are now residing together in a big new travel coach parked elsewhere in the same trailer park and the Mustang has become the vehicle of preference and he sold his house. No one talks to him…”

This appears to be medical homicide as a solution to depression, apparently facilitated by a husband with other interests.

Several weeks ago I was contacted by the wife of a young man with a neurological disease. The man had been assured by a euthanasia-performing doctor in Vancouver that he qualified for an assisted suicide. He was depressed and never ventured outdoors.

At the patient’s invitation I visited him in his shared room in a dingy nursing home, a place once described to me as “a prison.” He told me about his struggle to find a cure with massive doses of vitamins. He was less disabled than, for instance, Walter Lawrence, who works in Vancouver as an inspiring peer counsellor to spinal injury patients and others.

Any able-bodied person would be given psychological help to relieve it.

But this patient had lost hope for the future and felt his existence was meaningless and that death was the only solution. This death-focused tunnel vision defines a suicidal depression, and any able-bodied person would be given psychological help to relieve it. This disabled man, who was nowhere near dying, was instead killed by a Vancouver physician.

Follow LifeNews.com on Instagram for pro-life pictures and the latest pro-life news.

The physician’s rationale for circumventing the law, reportedly given over the phone before she met or examined the patient, was that he could easily get bed sores and then die of infection, so that his death “was reasonably foreseeable.”

What surprised his wife was “how easy” it was for her depressed, self-isolated husband to be killed under the new regime. What seems obvious is that the whole nature of this death is not going to be reported to the Minister of Health or the Minister of Justice — there is no transparency to this system.

Five years from now, the mandatory report is going to be full of bland and self-justifying statistics presented by the very doctors who have done the killing. By sanitizing these medicalized suicides and homicides with the now-familiar euphemisms about “medical aid in dying,” the uninvolved public will be reassured that nothing has gone wrong.

Canada has simply created a system which offers, and completes, suicide for people whose personalities, disabilities and personal situations put them at high risk for it. Well over a hundred real people have died in the few months since the old law was discarded. To complain that this was repeatedly predicted is to indulge in powerless understatement.

And next, we have the unfolding tragedy of palliative care. That medical specialty has always struggled to reassure fearful dying people that palliation has nothing to do with “mercy killing” and assisted suicide. Reluctant families have been truthfully promised that hospice nurses and doctors are not self-appointed angels of death.

Sadly, palliative care wards and hospices across Canada are, right now, in a hailstorm of administrative edicts to perform euthanasia inside their walls, in whispering range of those families and patients who had been promised a refuge of care.

Violating the principles and purposes of palliative care is in no way required by the new law. The thoughtless imposition of this radical shift needs to be halted. Hospital administrators can and must provide other locations for those few final minutes.

Our Minister of Health and her provincial colleagues would be wise to act quickly on this. The principles of suicide prevention have been betrayed. It is not inevitable that the principles of palliative care must be next.

LifeNews Note: Will Johntson, M.D., is a physician practicing in Vancouver British Columbia.

Yasir Naqvi - Don't force doctors to participate in assisted suicide

From the Coalition for Health CARE And Conscience:

"As you know, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) is continuing to demand that doctors who conscientiously object to assisted suicide refer patients seeking to end their lives to other physicians who will provide the procedure. No other jurisdiction or country that has legalized assisted suicide requires doctors to perform or refer. 

Currently, three physician groups who are members of our coalition are challenging this approach by the college in court.  However the Attorney General of Ontario, Yasir Naqvi, has intervened in this case on the side of the CPSO. 

We need to let Yasir Naqvi know that Ontario voters want their doctor’s conscience rights protected." 

Click here to write to Attorney General Yasir Naqvi and tell him to support conscience rights.

Rally to oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia

Maureen's videos of the Rally Opposing Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, June 1, 2016, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Once the new assisted suicide law passes in the Senate, we will legally be able to kill people  at both ends of their life. God help Canada.

More pictures Maureen took from the rally.

Catholic bishops - no "right" to assisted suicide

CCCB brief on Bill C-14 (“medical assistance in dying”) to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights

Tuesday, May 03 2016

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As clearly stated in its previous statements on this issue, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops absolutely and categorically disagrees with any attempt at justifying or supporting a "right" to assisted suicide or euthanasia. This is based on the unchanging teaching of our Church, derived from the teaching of Christ himself, that these practices are always inherently wrong (cf.Catechism of the Catholic Church 2276-79; St. John Paul II,  n. 66). For this reason, Bill C-14, which legalizes the killing of certain categories of persons, is a fundamentally unjust law. From the Catholic perspective, no amendments could legitimate the inherent evil in the premises behind the proposed legislation.

While the legislation is itself intrinsically and gravely immoral for the reasons stated above, there are particular characteristics of the current draft of Bill C-14 which make it even more damaging and dangerous to Canadian society. For example, it contains no protections for health care workers who refuse to cooperate in so-called "medical assistance in dying" or to give an effective referral, nor to institutions that refuse to provide the service for religious or conscientious reasons. Leaving such protections to provincial legislators or professional organizations (such as provincial colleges of physicians, pharmacists, or nurses) would result in a chaotic situation with conflicting rules between provinces and would effectively prompt the resignation or removal of many health care professionals. It could also potentially force the closure of hospitals operated under religious auspices, most of which are Catholic. These institutions employ thousands of physicians and tens of thousands of staff. At a time when our health care system requires more resources, not less, the federal government should not allow lower jurisdictions to drive conscientious health care practitioners from their professions.

It is also regrettable that Bill C-14 fails in what appears to be an attempt to limit the potential harm caused by legalizing assisted suicide, as in the criterion enunciated in section 241.2(d) (that a person's "natural death has become reasonably foreseeable"). Every person who has reflected on their own mortal existence knows that their own natural death is not only reasonably foreseeable, but indeed inevitable. This "safeguard" will protect no one.

The teaching of the Catholic Church and the stance of the Catholic Bishops of Canada affirm the sacredness and dignity of human life. Suicide and euthanasia are contrary to the most profound natural inclination of each human being to live and preserve life. Furthermore, they contradict the fundamental responsibility that human beings have to protect one another and to enhance the quality of health and social care which every human life deserves, from conception to natural death.

Bill C-14, no matter how it may be amended, is an affront to human dignity, an erosion of human solidarity, and a danger to all vulnerable persons – particularly the aged, disabled, infirm and sick who so often find themselves isolated and marginalized. Moreover, it is a violation of the sacrosanct duty of healthcare providers to heal, and the responsibility of legislators and citizens to assure and provide protection for all, especially those persons most at risk. The passage of Bill C-14, occasioned by the seriously flawed Carter decision, will have devastating effects on the social fabric of our country that cannot be predicted today.

2 May 2016

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops is the national assembly of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Catholic Bishops. As its principal pastors who officially speak on behalf of the Church in Canada, the Bishops are the spiritual leaders and teachers of more than thirteen million Canadian Catholics. Forty-six per cent of Canadians are baptized Catholics.

Conscience rights are violated with Bill C-14

From the Protection of Conscience Project:

"... it is necessary to emphatically reaffirm that conscientious refusal to kill people is a manifestation of essential humanity that deserves the protection of law... 

...Bill C-14 does not provide that protection. The government is deliberately ignoring the ongoing coercion of health care providers to compel participation in euthanasia, and Bill C-14 will allow coercion to continue..." 

...the federal government can prevent such coercion because it has exclusive jurisdiction in criminal law. It can enact a law to prevent powerful groups, professions, or state institutions from forcing people to be parties to homicide and suicide. It can prevent those in power from punishing health care providers who refuse to arrange for their patients to be killed or helped commit suicide...

...It is true that the bill’s preamble states that the government will “respect the personal convictions of health care providers.” But – aside from the fact that preambles have no legal effect – what is that worth? 

...the Special Joint Committee claimed that respect for freedom of conscience is exemplified by their recommendation that, “at a minimum,” objecting physicians should be forced to find colleagues willing to kill their patients. Behind this Orwellian perversion lies the Committee’s more astonishing premise: that the state can legitimately order people to become parties to homicide and suicide, and punish them if they refuse. 

...Whatever else it might decide about euthanasia and assisted suicide, parliament should make it the law of the land that no one and no institution in Canada can be forced to be a party to homicide or suicide, and no one will be punished or disadvantaged for refusing to do so.”

Assisted suicide - its chilling reality

Good letter in today's National Post:

Re: Euthanasia Makes Us All Complicit, Andrew Coyne, April 19.In his book, Other People’s Lives: Reflections on Medicine, Ethics and Euthanasia, Richard Fenigsen wrote that, “In Holland, the country much praised for its practice of voluntary euthanasia, the lives of 400 disabled newborns are terminated every year by denial of medical assistance, dehydration/starvation and lethal injections. The reports of government-ordered studies revealed that lethal injections are given to 1,000 gravely ill persons who had never asked for death, but have a “low quality of life” or “no prospect of improvement;” some were killed “because the families could not take it anymore” or even because their beds were needed. Thus, along with the voluntary euthanasia that is going on, we witness the extermination of persons who embarrass their families, are undesirable for society, or arbitrarily judged unfit by doctors.

In a society, the ones who are in most need of protection are infants, children, the aged, the weak, the infirm and the marginalized. We are slowly turning into a society that, under guise of constitutional guarantees of freedom, autonomy and self-determination, is riding the slippery slope of exterminating the very people who need our protection the most. 

Cynthia Robles, Mississauga, Ont.

Assisted suicide - a message for Justin Trudeau

Protest yesterday on Parliament Hill against assisted suicide.

We must protect the most vulnerable. We must protect doctor's conscience rights. We want our doctors to help people not kill them. We must tell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould that we are against assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Assisted suicide in Canada - make your voice heard

Below are links on resources about assisted suicide in Canada, including suggestions on contacting our elected leaders to voice our objections to doctor assisted suicide. Also resources on doctor's conscience rights and how they must be protected.

A Pastoral Exhortation on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide - Archbishop Terrence Prendergast– Read by Fr. Charles Orchard C.C.

Cardinal Collins on assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Youtube Video from Archbishop Collins

From the Diocese of Victoria, On Assisted Suicide and Perspective: A Practical Response by Stephanie Gray

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Coalition for Health Care and Conscience

follow on twitter Coalition for Health Care and Conscience

Life Canada - Euthanasia in Canada: What can you do?

Take Action: Respond to Pending Euthanasia Legislation in Canada Now

Coalition for Health Care and Conscience

Canadians for Conscience -Take action

Take Action – write to the Federal Government

Take action - in Ontario, write to the Provincial Government

Association of Reformed Political Action (ARPA Canada includes ways to contact your MP)

The dangers of doctor assisted suicide

Cardinal Collins speaks out on doctor assisted suicide. Only Canada in the world insists a doctor act against his conscience. Cardinal Collins calls it religious discrimination.

Archbishop Prendergast also speaks out on doctor assisted suicide.

Both leaders encourage Canadians to register their opposition to doctor assisted death, and their support of conscience rights, to our elected MPs. You can do this at the link below.

Visit http://www.canadiansforconscience.ca/
Also send your own letter to Justin Trudeau at justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca

The Grim Wiebe

From the Globe and Mail:

"Dr. Wiebe is the Vancouver physician who this week oversaw the first court-sanctioned physician-assisted death in the country."

The Globe calls Dr. Wiebe a "trailblazer", a "public service pioneer", "courageous" with "immense compassion" and "a deep understanding of the human condition."

Interesting adjectives for a doctor who makes a living in ending the life of the very young, the old and the sick.

Some background on Dr. Ellen Wiebe:

Dr. Wiebe recently opened up a new clinic along with other like minded doctors to "help" people who wish to have doctor assisted death: Hemlock Aid in Dying (750 W Broadway #1017,Vancouver, British Columbia).

It is conveniently located next door to Dr. Wiebe's other place of business where she performs medical abortions: Willow Women’s Clinic, (Suite 1013 – 750 West Broadway),

It seems that salaries for abortion doctors are quite lucrative. While the average salary of a GP is $275,058 (Ref: The Medical Post, Vol 52 No 2 February 16, 2016, Page 14.), Dr. Wiebe has been earning about one million a year (Ref: MSC Financial Statement (Blue Book)) for the last number of years*.

Back in 2001, Dr. Wiebe was in charge of clinical trials for RU-486, which has now been approved in Canada. During those trials a woman died after taking the drug. At the time Dr. Wiebe told the Catholic Register: 

“that a specific decision was made to not inform the women about the drug manufacturer's warning.”

And Dr. Wiebe is now giving webinars on assisted death:

“The BC Pharmacy Association is pleased to announce a free webinar featuring Dr. Ellen Wiebe, who will be speaking about how physicians and pharmacists can work together in providing assisted death to patients. Dr. Wiebe, a Vancouver family physician who enabled a patient to access physician assisted death after a court approval last week, will be sharing her story on this case. This webinar provides an opportunity to talk about the issues raised because of this court case and the important issues facing interprofessional collaboration that came to light afterwards.” 

Remember when doctors used to be healers?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
* 

2015 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth............................... 951,037.80 

2014 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ............................ 1,062,590.49

2013 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth............................... 1,065,980.97 

2012 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth............................... 1,013,016.22

2011 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth............................... 955,546.17

2010 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ............................... 932,935.30 

2009 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ............................... 784,749.02 

2008 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth........................... 704,824.53 

2007 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ............................... 631,264.58 

2006 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ........................... 548,520.41 

2005 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth........................... 467,615.22

2004 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ........................... 375,626.95

2003 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth ............................... 417,439.83 

2002 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth .............................. 392,353.01

2001 Wiebe, Ellen Ruth.............................. 380,583.09

Civil disobedience needed in doctor assisted suicide

"Bruyère hospital says it will not offer the practice [of assisted suicide] or refer patients to doctors who do when it becomes legal. In a memo to staff Bruyère says it must follow with its sponsor, the Catholic Health Sponsors of Ontario. The CHSO provides sponsorship to 21 health care organizations and says the practice of physician assisted death is "incompatible with the mission and values of its Catholic Health providers.""

I hope a lot more hospitals follow suit. I hope hospitals and doctors across the entire country refuse to kill their patients.

Forcing doctors to kill patients or refer patients to be killed is wrong. This is not a difficult concept to understand. Some may say they have a right to assisted suicide. Wrong. They have a right to kill themselves, but they do not have the right to force someone else to be involved in this killing. Just because the Supreme Court of Canada said doctors have to do this, doesn't make it any less wrong. It is still wrong. It was wrong 100 years ago. It was wrong a 1000 years ago. And it is still wrong today.

Perhaps we need a little civil disobedience across this country? Perhaps this is what is needed?

Assisted suicide should NOT be done by doctors

From today's Ottawa Citizen regarding Dr. Margaret Somerville's take on physician assisted dying:

"She said the harms and risks can be limited if government adopts these recommendations: 

• To avoid the future “normalization” of physician-assisted dying, any new law must make it clear that it is an exception, should only be used as a last resort, and will be used rarely.

“If Canada had the same percentage of total deaths of deaths by (physician-assisted dying) as the Netherlands and Belgium currently have (about 4 per cent and 4.6 per cent, respectively) we would have between 11,000 and 12,000 deaths each year.” 

• Patients requesting such a death must first be offered high-quality palliative care, including fully adequate pain management.

• A new profession should be established to carry out physician-assisted dying. The practitioners should not be health care professionals or, if so, only ones who have permanently retired from practice. Practitioners should be specially trained, licensed and have travel money provided to give people across Canada equal access to euthanasia.

“For nearly 2,500 years, physicians and the profession of medicine have recognized that assisted suicide and euthanasia are not medical treatment and this position should be maintained and these interventions kept out of medicine,” Somerville told the committee.
“If this approach is not adopted, two publicly available lists of physicians and institutions should be established, those which will provide euthanasia and those which will not. This is a reasonable compromise between Canadians who agree with euthanasia and those who oppose or fear it.” 

• Assisted death should be restricted to people who are terminally ill, with a life expectancy of less than four weeks, from a physical illness, disease or disability and experiencing extreme physical suffering.

It should not be allowed for children unable to consent for themselves. “Whether it should be available for ‘mature minors’ is a separate question.” 

• There must be psychiatric consultation to rule out depression, or coercion, undue influence of others, or duress, “at the least where there is any possibility of these factors affecting the request or consent to it or any doubts about the person’s mental competency.”

• A Superior Court judge should certify that all legal requirements for access to the procedure have been met.

• There must be a minimum 15-day waiting after the patient’s request to die.

• A national research and review body should be established to collect records of all cases, investigate where there might have been non-compliance with the law, and report, at least annually, in a way that does not breach individuals’ privacy, but informs Parliament, provincial legislatures, courts, professional licensing and disciplinary bodies, medical institutions, the public.

“This body should also be able to make recommendations for changes in law, regulations or practice when these are needed to prevent abuse of euthanasia or to protect vulnerable people.”"

I agree with Dr. Somerville especially about doctors not being the killers, and said so in this letter to the National Post in December 2014:

"Should Canada ever find itself in the sorry state wherein assisted suicide is legal, it should not be up to the doctors to perform this task. Doctors went into medicine to save lives, not to end them. Doctors are healers, not killers.

Instead, there should be a new “death technician” job for euthanasia and assisted suicide. These people would be technicians who are trained in killing people. They can’t be doctors, because obviously, it is a conflict of interest to be a doctor and also to end people’s lives. When we see one of these “death technicians” walking the halls of the hospital, there would be no mistake as to what their duties are.

When and if I am ever in the hospital knowing that my life is nearing its natural end, I want to make sure that my doctor — who has my life in his hands — would never ever willfully aid in my demise. Conversely if I see the death technician enter my room, there would be no doubt as to why he’s there."