21-05-2025
FIRST READING: Quebec radio host says assisted suicide is 'solution' for the mentally ill
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Canada is already on track to have the world's highest rate of deaths caused by assisted suicide, and Quebec is easily the province that has most enthusiastically embraced the practice.
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Health Canada's most recent figures on MAID are from 2023, and in that year assisted suicide was responsible for 7.2 per cent of total Quebec deaths — about one in every 14.
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That was the same year that the head of a Quebec MAID oversight body, the Commission sur les soins de fin de vie, warned that the province's health-care system no longer saw assisted death as an 'exceptional' option, or even as a last resort.
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'We're now no longer dealing with an exceptional treatment, but a treatment that is very frequent,' Michel Bureau said at the time.
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In recent months, Quebec has even taken the step of expanding MAID eligibility into areas that are still technically considered homicide under federal law. In October, Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette told doctors that they could start administering MAID to unresponsive or mentally incompetent patients, provided the patients had signed an 'advance directive' to that effect.
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Even under Canada's rather permissive MAID laws, euthanizing an unresponsive patient qualifies as homicide, and the federal government has rejected Quebec's pleas for an exemption.
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Nevertheless, Jolin-Barrette said the province's prosecutors would simply be ordered not to enforce the Criminal Code in cases involving the doctor-assisted death of an unresponsive patient, provided the death was 'provided in compliance with wishes expressed in a free and informed manner.'
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The saga of the C-19 rifle used by the Canadian Rangers is very close to the platonic ideal of why Canada is chronically unable to acquire good kit for its armed forces. Until the debut of the C-19, the Rangers were one of the last armed forces on earth still using the bolt-action Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, a firearm that dates back to the First World War. Instead of simply buying a newer gun, the Canadian government insisted on a designed-in-Canada replacement that took years and ultimately cost $5,000 per unit. And apparently these new guns are already breaking: The wood stocks quickly began cracking in the extreme cold of the Arctic.
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Although Mexico has always been the primary fentanyl-smuggling threat to the United States, a new U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency report has highlighted Canada as a 'growing concern' given the high number of fentanyl 'super-labs' that the RCMP keep busting. The gist of the report is that if the U.S. is successful at stemming the flow of Mexican-origin fentanyl, drug cartels might be able to pick up the slack via Canadian branch operations. 'These operations have the potential to expand and fill any supply void created by disruptions to Mexico-sourced fentanyl production and trafficking,' it reads. The political implications for this, of course, are that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump keeps citing fentanyl as the reason why he's slapping trade tariffs on Canada.
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