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During the month of November, as the world’s most extreme (or most transparent?) supporter of assistance in suicide promoted his horrible euthanasia machine with a detachable coffin, our Quebec politicians bickered about whether the Quebec government should ask the courts to clarify the concept of “reasonably foreseeable death” in the federal law on assisted suicide.

One again, always obsessed with one side of the story that only thinks of extending euthanasia to a greater number of suffering people, our public decision-makers have not been able to see the threats that, before our very eyes, dangerously await vulnerable people in Quebec and their loved ones.

Thus, in a landscape that increasingly preaches death as a solution to suffering, the troubling picture that emerged from a survey by the Association des proches aidants de la Captiale-Nationale should have been seen as an alarm signal by these same politicians. Indeed, the results show that 49% of family caregivers in the Quebec City area are physically taxed by their responsibilities while 57% say they are at the end of their rope psychologically.

With this in mind, the results of the University of Sherbrooke survey published last month take a distressing turn, which is no longer anecdotal: the survey indicated that 91% of caregivers interviewed would agree to extend euthanasia to terminally ill people, and 72% said they were in favour even in the absence of prior consent of the person who had become incapable.

To heed the warning of Mr. Pierre Côté, a consultant to the APACN, “the tsunami is coming. We are almost in it. In 10 years, it will be terrible. It is important to act quickly to be prepared for the aging of the population and all that it will imply in the coming years.”

In light of these findings, should not our politicians rather ask themselves how to better support the people (most of them women) called to care for a spouse or parent who is aging, sick, or losing autonomy?