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by defrost 1268 days ago
> after reading about what it's actually looking like in practice in Canada - where the results seem horrifying.

I live in a state (W.Australia) with legal assisted death and I have no specific opinion on what is actually happening in Canada (a peer Commonwealth country) .. but I can see that much of what there is to read on the matter is strongly bent toward the worst possible presentation.

Eg: When I read horrified accounts of social workers recommending death to (otherwise) healthy disabled people I too am shocked .. and then I read elsewhere that this is the isolated practice of individuals whose behaviour is being hauled over the coals at tribunal hearings into "this is how not to do this".

It's a charged issue and no system can ever be perfect. The question for Canada is how much effort is going into oversight and keeping things ethical.

2 comments

Okay, I'm not Canadian, and I'm not going to pretend to be intimately familiar with how things work there. But then I read appalling anecdotes like this one:

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/10/13/medical-assistance-de...

> “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” shared Farsoud.

One doctor has already signed off on his euthanasia and he only needs one more.

I don't know how common this kind of story is but it shouldn't be ignored - and it's the exact kind of thing that all those scary right wing monsters warned would happen if we didn't listen to them.

The fact that such people exist is unsurprising - and it concerns me.

The fact that one doctor has confirmed he meets one (of several) criteria (which is physical suffering due to a disability that is intolerable and cannot be relieved) is a factoid.

At this point he has not been approved, and in the state I live in, on the face of the article, would not be approved, at the very least not without the intervention of counseling and effective welfare assistance.

You're correct, this is the exact kind of story scary right wing monsters amplify and use to suggest that any day now we'll be stacking the corpes of the homeless in carts and rolling them off to the landfill.

I'm guessing their endgame here is improve support for the homeless?

Yeah, .. right.

> You're correct, this is the exact kind of story scary right wing monsters amplify and use to suggest that any day now we'll be stacking the corpes of the homeless in carts and rolling them off to the landfill.

I don't think this issue has been politicized yet (at least in the US). Has it been politicized in Canada or something?

Preamble: I read a lot "news media" from about the globe - I'm more interested in substance than culture war type material.

My perhaps incorrect view from afar (Australia) is that a great many events in Canada get politicized in the US press with the cooperation of some Canadians with less mainstream views.

Canadian Health Care is often smeared (like the UK NHS) as it would otherwise serve to shaow that better than "Obamacare" is feasible, etc.

> and then I read elsewhere that this is the isolated practice of individuals whose behaviour is being hauled over the coals at tribunal hearings into "this is how not to do this".

Ahh yes, it's only a couple of bad apples and not the system in place that's enabling their behavior