The Council of Canadians with Disabilities is infuriated with the Trudeau Government reintroducing a bill extending access to Medical Aid in dying. It’s aimed at people experiencing intolerable suffering as a result of illness or disability. Doctor Heidi Janz, Chair of the CCD’s Ending-of-Life Ethics Committee says, “The Trudeau government’s decision to move forward with this bill without adding safeguards to prevent marginalized Canadians from being driven to seek assistance to die because they cannot get assistance to live, is evidence of a head-in-the-sand mentality that endangers the lives of Canadians with disabilities.” She points to evidence of system discrimination against people with disabilities which she says is mounting daily.

The Council calls it, “Ableism,” the discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. With the pandemic, Janz says we have seen the introduction of critical care triage protocols which identify the pre-existence of a disability as an exclusion criterion for critical care. She says we’ve seen elderly and disabled people who fall ill being left to die in nursing homes and never sent for medial care in hospitals.