Jobless millions whisked away At last we have more room to play All systems go to kill the poor tonight — The Dead Kennedys, “Kill the Poor”
In the 18th century, Jonathan Swift offered “A Modest Proposal” for dealing with the poor: sell their excess children for food. Of course, Swift was being satirical: 200 years later, George Bernard Shaw was deadly earnest when he proposed “humanely” gassing “those who are a burden” on society. Not just the criminal, but the disabled, and indigent.
Canada is finally realising the dream of eugenicists through the ages.
Kill the poor!
Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.
Remember when they swore, hand on heart, that there was no euthanasia slippery slope?
As with most slippery slopes, it all began with a strongly worded denial that they exist. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed 22 years of its own jurisprudence by striking down the country’s ban on assisted suicide as unconstitutional, blithely dismissing fears that the ruling would ‘initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide’ against the vulnerable as founded on ‘anecdotal examples’. The next year, Parliament duly enacted legislation allowing euthanasia, but only for those who suffer from a terminal illness whose natural death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’.
Within just five years, Canada was careering down the slope with blithe abandon. The “reasonably foreseeable” and “terminal” requirements were both ditched. All that was required was that the condition “cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable”.
In other words, if you can’t afford proper treatment, it’s off to the Soylent Green factory for you!
Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.
Not coincidentally, Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialised country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalised euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005.
Spectator Australia
It didn’t take long for the most egregious abuses to come to light. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist (!) at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days.
A woman was forced to submit to euthanasia because she couldn’t afford better housing on her state benefits. Others applied to be killed by the state because they simply couldn’t afford to keep on living. Other disabled people allegedly chose death over the filthy conditions in state care homes.
Lest anyone be in any doubt about the motivation behind the euthanasia changes, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer counted the beans, estimating that the new euthanasia rules would save the state $62 million a year. After all, Canada can knock off its sick and crippled for just over $2 grand: what a bargain, compared to a lifetime of sickos bludging on Medicare!
Canada isn’t done yet. In a move that would have Shaw glowing with pleasure, another lot of “burdens” are about to be targeted. From next year, the mentally ill will be able to line up for the human abattoir. And they’re already talking of allowing “mature minors” to off themselves courtesy of the state.
But there’s no slippery slope. Just remember that.
