Slippery slopes aren't always fallacies

Actually horrifying to see the way Medical Assistance in Dying—which goes by the self-consciously tidy acronym MAiD—is being implemented here in Canada. For people in the late stages of terminal illness, it makes sense. But Canada is already euthanizing people who have made the terrible calculation that they cannot afford to stay alive.

And it's only going to get worse, with the state prepared to agree with people in the throes of mental illness that their lives aren't worth living.

The Globe and Mail reports:

When that option arrives in March, Canada will have one of the most liberal euthanasia laws in the world, joining only a few other countries that allow assisted dying for mental illness.

It will be the most controversial expansion of MAID since a Supreme Court ruling led the federal government to legalize euthanasia in 2016. At that time, MAID was only for patients with a foreseeable death, but Parliament – with Bill C-7 – removed that requirement in 2021.

The original version of the bill did not allow assisted death for patients with mental disorders as a sole condition because, the government said at the time, there were outstanding questions about how illnesses such as depression could be safely included, and what the future implications might be. The Senate disagreed, removing that exclusion before the bill passed, but with one caveat: Parliament would study the issue for two years before any of those patients could receive MAID.

With four months to go, there is still no consensus in the mental health community – and, in fact, doctors remain deeply divided. There are no finalized national standards, no transparent review process in place to watch for mistakes, and hospitals are still figuring out how they would implement the change.

… The law requires patients asking for MAID to be informed of possible treatment options that might alleviate their suffering. But this assumes those are readily available. Instead, wait times to see mental health clinicians have only increased.

Psychotherapy, a recommended treatment for most mental disorders, remains too expensive for many Canadians. In Toronto alone, an estimated 16,000 people are waiting for supportive housing for mental illness and addiction.

In Ontario, nearly 6,000 patients with the most severe mental disorders are on a years-long list for specialist community-based care.

The rising cost of rent and food is also taking a particular toll on people with chronic mental illness, who are often already the poorest in society – and the very candidates who will qualify for assisted dying under the new law.

Just as life is getting harder in Canada, it is getting easier to die.

Before I moved here, I shared your average American progressive's rosy picture of Canada. But this is a country that—even moreso than its neighbor—sees itself wrapped in light and doesn't know its own darkness.

It turns out defining yourself by your progressiveness is dangerous, for countries as much as for individuals. It makes your morality so easy to hack and your mistakes so hard to see. After all, if you're sure you're marching in the correct direction, is there any such thing as going too far? How would you know if you’d overleaped?

Watching Canada put assisted suicide into practice is like watching a cancer metastasize. Was there ever any containing it?

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It turns out some slopes really are slippery—slippery slopes aren’t just fallacies. There can be a terrible momentum to things like this.

Let’s say a doctor sterilizes a few gender-confused kids experimentally. As soon as he does this, it becomes hard for him to say: Well, it was OK for those kids but it's not OK for these kids. Because why would it not be OK? If it was OK to do in the first place—and he’s a good person and he did it, so it must have been OK—how could it be wrong to apply the principle more broadly?

Or maybe you start to see something not as it is now but as what you believe it will inevitably become. The distressed girl in front of you becomes their transgender 'alter': a boy, riddled with correctable birth defects, so you operate. Or you look at a patient you’ve decided will inevitably kill herself so why shouldn't the state lend a hand? (Never mind for now that what individuals do and what the state does with its full authority or what doctors do in the name of medicine are not the same thing at all.)

There’s a dark echo here—one I’ve written about before. Nazi doctors conceptualized the human beings they euthanized or subjected to brutal experiments as—in every sense but one—already dead. Under that twisted way of thinking, didn't doctors have a responsibility to use these ‘walking corpses’ to build medical knowledge?

The danger starts whenever you can no longer see what you're doing, whenever words and meanings part, after you've mastered your perceptions and conquered all your hang-ups.

Canada has conquered a lot of its hang-ups lately.