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Colby Cosh: The radical character of Canada’s assisted death regime

Many people aren’t consciously radical about assisted suicide, but can imagine themselves considering suicide for reasons of catastrophic life failure

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The Post’s national treasure, Tristin Hopper, filed a story earlier this week on a new Research Co. poll about Canadians’ attitudes toward legalized assisted suicide, an industry in which we are now in the vanguard of the world. Hopper’s piece emphasized surprisingly high levels of support for providing medical assistance with suicide to people whose problems might be described as primarily social.

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Then again, maybe the levels aren’t surprising. The key question, which is reported with detailed crosstabs on page 4 of Research Co.’s PDF file, uses the “medical assistance in dying” euphemism. The results might have been different if the wording of the questionnaire had involved some plain-English query such as, “Should people be allowed to kill themselves for no other reason than that they’re poor?” Most people, it is easy to forget, aren’t active news consumers on the level of literally everyone reading these words. If you haven’t been following the rhetorical struggles over “MAID,” “medical assistance in dying” sounds like something you might expect as a matter of course. If you were dying, would you not want “medical assistance”?

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The bottom line is that the poll found that a significant minority of Canadians are open to allowing MAID requests for reasons such as “poverty,” “homelessness” or “inability to receive medical treatment” (a useless phrase that might have all sorts of meanings, and which might easily be read to include incurable degenerative disease). It’s a very outnumbered minority. Only 27 per cent of respondents supported assisted suicide for poverty either “strongly” or “moderately,” but the “strongly disagrees” alone were 44 per cent of the weighted sample and the “moderately disagrees” add another 18 per cent. The numbers are about the same in the “homelessness” category. The figures vary surprisingly little by political affiliation or geography, but older people are much more opposed to legal euthanasia, as you would probably anticipate if you are one of those.

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My takeaway from the poll is that this probably isn’t an issue that is best handled by means of a simple, and presumably automated, poll with a brute “agree”/“disagree” scale. Still, some people will be terrified and disgusted by the willingness of a few respondents to answer “Full speed ahead” to complicated questions about assisted suicide for social reasons. I would propose that somewhere around half the “agrees” are people who really do espouse a radical position that people have a right to dispose of their own lives for their own reasons. Poll that one, with that wording, and you’ll get lots of support! I’ll probably vote for it myself! — my problems with state-provided physician assistance in voluntary suicide aren’t really located in the “voluntary” part of this new legal phenomenon.

I would suspect a lot of respondents aren’t consciously radical about assisted suicide, but can imagine themselves considering suicide for reasons of catastrophic life failure, reasons nobody really thinks of as purely social. Everybody knows consciously that “homeless” people aren’t all crack-smoking street-defecators with hundred-page histories of violent crime, but if you are asked about “homelessness” as a phenomenon, what mental picture comes to mind? One finds oneself wishing the poll had rural/urban breakdowns; if you live in the core of a big Canadian city these days, you’ll see a few people on any day who would (and will) need 10 full-time social workers apiece to establish something vaguely resembling a decent, ordinary human future.

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To put it another way, if you live downtown in Victoria or Regina or Winnipeg, you are confronted continuously with unassisted suicide in plain sight. If this is stoicizing the Canadian character or making some of Research Co.’s poll respondents more nihilistic, that ought not to be such a big surprise. And troubling crosstabs in a semi-competent poll about MAID aren’t going to be the only political side-effect.

National Post
Twitter.com/colbycosh

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