Many Canadians, especially older ones who grew up when Canada was still a very high-trust society, have what could be described as a reverence for authority figures. This involves a significant degree of obedience, bordering on subservience.
Medical professionals are often among the most revered authority figures to these Canadians, even to the point of being seen as infallible. There are Canadians who won't question any advice made, nor any suggestions given, by these medical professionals.
If a medical professional were to recommend euthanasia to these kind of Canadians, even if it wasn't something that they really wanted to do, I think a significant proportion would feel obliged to go along with it, as irrational as this may seem.
This attitude became quite apparent over the last three years, when many Canadians completely bought into the many obviously nonsensical, and sometimes even outright harmful, policies being pushed by medical professionals and public health officials.
At the same time, however, those three years have been a significant eye-opener for some Canadians, too. For these people, the trust they once had in the various medical professions was completely shattered.
With a larger proportion of the Canadian population no longer trusting Canada's medical professionals and health care systems, it doesn't surprise me at all that we're starting to see more questioning of policies such as this one.
In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
“Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.
Catherine Frazee, a professor emerita at Toronto’s Ryerson University, said cases like Foley’s were likely just the tip of the iceberg.
https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-toronto-7c63...
It doesn't sound irrational to me. It's doctor's job to describe the available options, possible outcomes, and give recommendations. With enough trust, stating euthanasia as one of the best paths implicitly says: everything else is likely worse - do you really want to go through suffering that has the same end result anyway. And there will be lots of situations where that's literally true.
It should but it's possible to push real hard. There are literally TV interviews where MAID participants are like "I would like to live but they convinced me it's for the better"
I'm actually personally fine with counseling people to die, even moderately aggressively. In many cases it's the right thing to do and we should probably be doing it more. The problem is that when there is a conflict of interest because the org that is telling you to die is the org that benefits from it.
Given this conflict at best the Canadian government should be providing death services for free and mentioning it is an option. And that's it. They should be letting other nonprofit orgs with no funding from the govt counsel people to die.
The risk is that vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the sick will be (or are being) subjected to pressure. The case where a medical "ethicist" was trying to shame someone into accepting death because of the cost they were inflicting on the medical system was chilling, and convinced me that this was a real issue. Surely we can agree that we don't want that?
Doctor's job is to give available paths and explain possible outcomes, their likelihood and side effects. If your options are die today or die in 3 days while a machine breathes for you and you're drugged like crazy to avoid the pain... no, they shouldn't be pushing you to live.
Then, there's the whole range where it's not 3 days, but 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, etc. with different levels of discomfort.
