[okaram]

The way most countries who have it (including Canada) have solved it is to add waiting periods, and layers of reviews. In Canada, you need two different doctors to sign off on it. If you're not actively dying, you also have a 90-day period of reflection. And you have to be of sound mind.

This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?

[rich_sasha]

My ultimate point is that old people, especially those not very well, are very vulnerable to being forced to do this, and I saw ~first hand how easy and undetectable it was. You can add bureaucratic constraints but it's fundamentally a human problem. While expressing utmost sympathy to critically ill and unwell people, I don't know how you make this without endangering many more people than those would benefit from such changes.

How do you even measure if it's working "well" in Canada? They have a process. There is no way to question the people who went through with it whether, on reflection, it was their own free will.

But of course looking at how others do it is a good starting place for further analysis and I'll go now and educate myself.

[paulcole]

> This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?

No. I think it’s too much.

Nobody else should be deciding that my mind is unsound.

And if my body being “unsound” is a reason that makes it OK to want to die, why should an “unsound” mind be different?

[lucubratory]

The system in Canada results in the state killing homeless and disabled people rather than offering them support.

[deanCommie]

Does it? Or is this what anti-euthanasia advocates are spreading as misinformation around to acquire the support of progressives to their cause (which is driven not out of a care for homeless and disabled people, but out of religious/conservative mindsets)

Keep mind: I'm not asking "Do those cases ever happen"? Of course they do. There's already been stories. The question is what are the statistics. Every policy, every procedure, every decision can have mistakes and negative outcomes. Some homeless and disabled people have been offered euthanasia. Those cases should be investigated and the policies should be updated. But nothing will be perfect.

You can say "if you can't have a perfect system then you shouldn't have it at all." and while that may be philosophically justifiable in the same way that "I'd rather let 10,000 guilty people go free than convict 1 innocent person" is, but it's important to remember that despite that we still convict innocent people.

Some trans people regret their transition. They're a tiny minority. Some people abuse welfare. They're a tiny minority. Some people are pushed towards euthanasia when they shouldn't be. They're a tiny minority.

[LorenPechtel]

And note that the stories aren't always accurate portrayals of what happened.

I remember reading about one where someone drugged their mother to bring her in for euthanasia. What the naysayers didn't report was that that was by her own wishes--she knew her mind was going and set it up for when it was too far gone. I have no problem with that.

[lucubratory]

Comparing the act of people transitioning or people being given financial assistance to the act of people being killed by the state is genuinely sickening. Total inversion of reality and conflation of reversible benefits with literal death.

The government has no incentive to provide better housing or disability benefits to the working class when they can instead withhold those things and watch legions of poor & desperate people die. Do you know they actually calculate how much money killing all of these marginalised people saves them? That Canadian media advertises these figures to sell the state killing program?

[deanCommie]

I can't negotiate with people who have such a deep distrust of Government that they belie that the Government will kill it's citizens if given incentives to do so, or from pure $-based miscare.

This to me feels like a very dystopian way to have a relationship with it's government, and is a uniquely american perspective amongst the developed world.

The government is a proxy for society leadership. I expect human society to protect it's humans, and most of the world with functioning government does too.

The biggest threat to Canadian prosperity today is these american ideas percolating above the border and infecting the mind of Canadians who previously believed and trusted their government and no longer does.

[lucubratory]

I am not American, I am Australian and have never been to America, nor do I like the country; so much for "uniquely".

On what basis do you call yourself a communist when you explicitly advocate "trust" in a bourgeois government on the topic of state killings of homeless & disabled people? Shouldn't that be one of the last topics you would ever trust them on, given their clear class interest in killing members of the proletariat who are unable to continue labouring for profit? It seems fine to trust them not to lie about easily verifiable facts that don't threaten them, like weather warnings, but you should trust them about literally everything else before trusting them to "fairly" and "consensually" carry out killings of proletarians.

[raydev]

> The government has no incentive to provide better housing or disability benefits to the working class when they can instead withhold those things and watch legions of poor & desperate people die.

What was Canada's excuse for poor healthcare before MAID existed then?

[lucubratory]

They didn't have a good one, and people were mad at them for it and demanded better results. MAID ameliorates both some of the direct anger ("We have improved healthcare by reducing suffering, look at how severe disability is declining"), and ameliorates some of the proximate causes (killing the sick, disabled, & homeless reduces load on the healthcare system & leaves more funds for other parts of it).

[jacobgkau]

It seems like somewhat reasonable safeguards for most circumstances, except that other guy replied to you saying he thinks there should be zero safeguards and he may well continue espousing and voting for that viewpoint for the rest of his life now that the basic system's in place.

Even if you think the current safeguards are the "sweet spot," continued pressure to make it more difficult will be necessary to prevent it from being made less difficult. (And if you don't think it would be a problem for it to be made less difficult, then citing those safeguards as part of your argument would be disingenuous.)

[ljsprague]

Bureaucracy for the win.

[marcosdumay]

Bureaucracy is usually added for the win. But people only notice when it's not.