The Pairodocs has become a bit obsessed with MAiD lately. But in our defence, it has slid so far down the slippery slope that the insanity is laid more and more bare, for all (hopefully) to see.

Cast your mind back 6 years, when COVID was not a cold, but a terrifying disease coming for us all. Like a meteor hurtling towards earth, death and destruction was on the way.

Public health/the government/legacy media promoted ideas and rules that were somewhere between ridiculous and insane, but definitely evil: “lockdown” (prior to 2020 a word only used for prison riots or school shootings), masking rules (put it on when you stand up, but you can take it off if you sit down, or are eating—as logical as taking off your condom when you switch positions), and later “vaccine” mandates (we know there are no long term side effects even though it’s brand new!). To bring people on side, it was necessary to terrify them by exaggerating the threat of COVID. And it worked. This is not news to readers of this Substack.

A terrified populace is a compliant one. Statistics (and our post-COVID voting record in Canada and other countries) shows that most of these measures are still thought of as reasonable and necessary, even in retrospect. I think (and last year’s “drought lockdown” in Nova Scotia proves my point) that the government remains very comfortable infringing our civil liberties, and the majority of the electorate will be on board with draconian measures again next time .

Honest, open-eyed physicians noticed the disconnect between reality and the mainstream news early in the COVID saga. Far from overflowing with COVID victims, hospital wards and ER’s were emptier than at any other time during the 33 years since I started medical school. I recall thumbwrestling my colleague for the privilege of seeing the next patient in ER, because we had both been sitting for an hour with nothing to do. (I won).

So, unable to terrify us with video of people gasping their last breaths on COVID wards or photos of young, healthy people who had dropped dead in the middle of the street, what was a poor government to do? It turns out that motivated parties can always find ways to lie with statistics.

I’ve written about this before but statistically, deaths from conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart failure actually FELL after COVID arrived. How? Did COVID cure cancer?

Not at all. Rather, what was happening was that we were re-defining “cause of death,” taking people from other statistical buckets and using them to fill the COVID bucket. It didn’t matter if “having” COVID (in some cases this meant just a positive test, not the disease) had shortened a life by a month, a week, a day, or not at all. A person right at the end of life, literally even someone on the palliative care ward (yes I saw this happen), who died after a positive COVID test had died “of” COVID. They were entered in the stats as such, stats which the obedient media and medical officer of health could then use to terrify us.

The most egregious case I know of was a patient in their late 80’s. (My use of the indefinite, plural pronoun is to avoid identifying the person’s sex, not because they had pronouns in their bio.) They had severe, end-stage dementia and were at most a few weeks from end-of-life. Their quality of life was so poor that their family wanted no further treatment for any diseases. Because the patient’s brain was so damaged they couldn’t swallow reliably, and they aspirated food on a Wednesday. By the next day it was clear they had developed aspiration pneumonia. The family was informed and re-stated they wanted only comfort care. The patient became very unwell and stopped eating altogether.

Because the patient had “respiratory symptoms”, the nurses (against my recommendation—they were “following protocol”) swabbed the patient for COVID every 48 hours. The test was negative on Friday, Sunday, and again Tuesday. Wednesday morning the patient died. Shortly after death, a report came back from the lab saying that the Tuesday swab had been “reprocessed” and was now positive for COVID. (I assume “reprocessed” meant re-running the test at a higher cycle threshold, which is more likely to give false positive results—read “The King’s Chessboard” to understand this issue). The death was reported as being from COVID, even though it doesn’t take any medical training to understand that the patient died of dementia and ultimately aspiration pneumonia. The patient at best died “with COVID” (or more likely with a positive COVID test), not “of COVID”.

Even for those on death’s door with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, if they happened to test positive for COVID at any point near their death, there was strong pressure and intellectual momentum to report this as a “COVID death”.

Considering all of that, the great irony and contradiction of a recent new guideline from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario struck me full force when a colleague shared it.

Unlike a COVID death, where the actual cause of death is to be ignored and COVID is to be substituted as cause of death—whether or not it was 11th hour, or contributory in any way, with MAiD we are being instructed to do the opposite: even though it is ABSOLUTELY the cause of death, we cannot list it as such.

Keep in mind that MAiD is not palliative sedation, when we give a comatose patient gurgling and struggling for breath at the very end of life enough medication to be comfortable, even if it might hasten his death. MAiD can only legally be done to lucid, competent individuals—by definition, those who are not in their final throes.

Achy knees, a weak heart, an early cancer—any condition can qualify a Canadian to apply for euthanasia, as long as he feels his suffering is “intolerable”— even if the condition might be compatible with years more of life (“Track 2 MAiD”). If we euthanize a 65 year old with mild COPD and arthritic knees, it takes no medical training to see that the cause of death is clearly “euthanasia”, not “achy knees and COPD”.

In the same way that the Venezuelan government pressured doctors not to write “starvation” as a cause of death there, soon we will not be allowed to write “Euthanasia”, “Suicide” or even “MAiD” on a death certificate here in Canada.

And so the statistics will lie to suit government purposes and agendas. Of course we’re not euthanizing thousands of people per year! Of course there weren’t thousands of people starving in Venezuela! Where did you right-wing conspiracy theorists ever get such a crazy, crazy idea!!? After all, just look at the statistics!

The best we can hope for is that ethical physicians will not knuckle under, and will refuse to sign false death certificates. But given that the type of physicians who are involved in MAiD are not necessarily the most ethical (Ellen Wiebe, anyone?), I despair somewhat that this will be the case. So be prepared for future headlines like “MAiD deaths peaked in 2025 and are falling”. Worried about MAiD? Fuggedaboudit! Fudged statistics will provide convenient, constructed cover for a practice that cannot be defended ethically.

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