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Canada Losing Right to Call Self Free

Jan 27, 2016

By Wesley J. Smith

Murray Rankin says there are concerns the right to die among the provinces could be treated like access to abortion. CHRIS ROUSSAKIS / CHRIS ROUSSAKIS

Murray Rankin says there are concerns the right to die among the provinces could be treated like access to abortion. credit: CHRIS ROUSSAKIS

Canada is fast transforming into a full-fledged, banshee-shrieking, culture of death.

That requires authoritarian measure, and so efforts are underway to punish provinces that don’t ensure access to euthanasia.

From the Ottawa Citizen story:

Provinces that refuse to offer right-to-die medical services should have federal health care subsidies slashed to discourage a repeat of the jurisdictional patchwork that limits legal access to abortion in parts of the country, parliamentarians heard Monday.

NDP [New Democratic Party] MP and health critic Murray Rankin, at a hearing of the special joint House-Senate committee on assisted dying, pressed witnesses Abby Hoffman, assistant deputy minister at Health Canada, on whether the government would withhold heath-care transfer payments from provinces and territories that chose not to make physician-assisted death services available.

“The last line of defence is withholding funding,” responded Hoffman. But “there would be a lot of conversation with that jurisdiction long before the point of withholding funds. It is a very long process to turn an alleged violation of a principle into a situation where there are financial penalties.”

So, if ready access to medicalized killing isn’t guaranteed by a province, the federal government will punish that area’s sick by restricting its share of the provinces health care costs.

This goes past mere legalization to creating a positive right to access becoming dead. And that requires authoritarian coercion of doctors–and in a socialized system–local government entities. Canada is throwing away the right to call itself free–or moral.

Editor’s note. This appeared on Wesley’s great blog.

Categories: Abortion