I'm Native American and know of the wildly disproportionate rates of suicide among Native Americans so I looked up the rates among First Nations people in Canada. I was not surprised to learn the suicide rates among First Nations people are approximately three times higher than among non-Indian people. In some tribes, the rate is up to 25 times higher. Since assisted suicide is legal in Canada then are First Nations people also disproportionately represented in that form of suicide? If not then why would a suicidally-prone group not also participate in disproportionate numbers in assisted suicide? Apart from cultural and religious reasons, I immediately thought of one potential factor: lack of access to quality healthcare. So here's a bizarre question to ask: Are white Canadians disproportionately committing assisted suicide because they have better healthcare?
Natives who commit suicide usually do so by measures familiar to non-natives who commit suicide: firearms and other violent means. Assisted suicide (very rare in Canada compared to active euthanasia) accounts for a tiny proportion of all suicides, so much so that we are talking about two entirely different phenomena. People who kill themselves likely never thought of asking a doctor to do it (because they typically don't have a qualifying underlying medical diagnosis and often do it impulsively) and people who ask a doctor to kill them almost by definition are unwilling or unable to do it by their own hand.
What is a good question is why aboriginal people are under-represented among people getting euthanasia. My own suspicion is that a doctor who kills an aboriginal person is likely to be accused of racism or cultural insensitivity in not allowing the extended family and various tribal elders to countermand (or at least participate in and majorly influence) his decision.
Your second point is a good one. Helping any brown or black person with an assisted suicide could very well indeed be blamed on racism—be accused of being another form of colonialism. But again I ask, how can any person pursue assisted suicide if they don't have access to the health care professionals who offer it? I think there are economic factors thought they likely have less effect than religious and cultural ones.
Indians in Canada get free health care. They often live on remote Reserves where health care facilities and staff are austere. But an Indian with chronic kidney failure -- common in aboriginals because of the high prevalence of Type 2 diabetes -- who lives on a fly-in Reserve will get flown at public expense to a hospital in a white town three times a week for dialysis. So an aboriginal person, perhaps one in such a predicament, who wanted to have euthanasia could have it. It's not like they are left to fend for themselves in their tipis. If an aboriginal wanted to talk to a MAiD doctor, the system would transport him to the appointment.
In the United States, any count of Native Americans based on self-reporting of identity ends up being inaccurate because people often falsely claim to be Indian or base their identity on very distant ancestry. I'm aware the same is true in Canada. This is to say that less than half of the people, and maybe up to 90%, who identified as First Nations when they committed assisted suicide are probably not Indian. So actual First Nations folks are even more under-represented in assisted suicides. The primary reasons why Natives don't commit assisted suicides are almost certainly cultural and religious but I still gotta wonder: How does a person commit assisted suicide if they have no access to the doctors who practice assisted suicide?
When I look at the distribution of Indigenous MAID recipients (Table 4.3A, p. 34), it seems to match the distribution of "Status Indians" in Canada. The Territories have the highest proportion, followed by Saskatchewan and then the other Western provinces.
In my experience, the "fake natives" are found mostly in eastern Canada, especially Ontario.
The Indigenous nations seem to be under-represented in MAID deaths. There were only 166 recipients who identified as First Nation, Metis or Inuit:
"A total of 15,927 people who received MAID responded to the question on racial, ethnic or cultural identity. The vast majority (95.6%) identified as Caucasian (White). The second most commonly reported racial, ethnic or cultural identity was East Asian (1.6%). These percentages are close to those reported for 2023 (95.8% Caucasian; 1.8% East Asian).
• A total of 16,115 people who received MAID in 2024 responded to the question on Indigenous identity: 102 people self-identified as First Nations, 57 people self-identified as Métis and 7 people self identified as Inuit. " (p. 4)
I doubt that access to healthcare is a factor. Wait times tend to be longer in Quebec than in Ontario, yet whites are proportionately less at risk of euthanasia in Quebec.
My initial reaction is that white Canadians are more likely to be plugged into the system and know how it works, better able to navigate it, as happens for other types of care, like cancer care and joint surgery. The article really got me thinking about it.
As a (now-retired) white physician who never had occasion to deal personally with requests for euthanasia, I can confirm that it is easier to have long involved discussion about wishes and preferences and values with people who more or less share one's cultural background....and who speak English as a first language. I can't imagine doing a MAiD discussion through an interpreter or those telephone translator services that were becoming in wide use when I retired. They were fine for explaining what a colonoscopy was, and the small risk of perforation, but for DNR discussions they got seriously overwhelmed. Sometimes the human on the other end of the machine was uncomfortable even rendering the discussion, which of course was very common with family members interpreting (and editorializing) at the bedside.
Also, going by DNR, I think the more religiously oriented non-white cultures have more deep seated opposition to doctors killing people and are unlikely even to bring it up as a request. "Do everything, Doctor", is their default, at least it was in DNR discussions -- they rarely agreed to DNR.
Also I think white doctors are worried (subconsiously) that if they euthanize too many non-whites, they will get accused of racism if anyone reviews their individual statistics. Even though all euthanasia requests are supposed to come from the patient, not from us, -- "Have you ever considered MAiD?" is improper I think -- I think most of us would be relieved that it was a white patient making the request. If an aboriginal patient made the request, we'd be worried that we would run afoul of some cultural competency shared-decision-making thing we didn't even know about and the family and the whole First Nation would get on our case about it, complaining to our licensing regulator.
With regard to your first point, my impression is almost the opposite. White Canadians tend to feel guilty about abusing the system. There is also a widespread belief among older Canadians (like my late mother) who felt that doctors kill more people than they save. She tried to stay away from hospitals as much as possible.
It's hard to generalize about immigrant groups, but many of them seem to be more savvy than Canadian-born people when it comes to accessing health care. They are aware of the long wait times and will often book appointments at the first sign of illness, knowing they can cancel if it turns out to be nothing to worry about.
I suspect that many immigrant physicians readily approve MAID requests because they don't want to argue with a white person. So the approval may be more a gesture of respect than anything else. Again, we need better and more recent data to answer this question with any certainty.
I think a contributing factor to the wider adoption of MAID is that Canadians are overly trusting of the government, often to their detriment. The social welfare dependency is quite pervasive. And when you market this with the usual buzzwords of compassion and dignity to tweak the perceived morals of the populace they’ll sign on gladly.
Canadians have created a high-trust society where you can take people at their word, especially people in authority. Unfortunately, that kind of society works only when you have a mechanism to expel people who are not trustworthy.
That mechanism no longer exists, since it constitutes a form of discrimination. So we extend our trust to people who have done nothing to earn our trust. In the case of untrustworthy public officials, it's becoming impossible to get rid of them. We now have a large permanent government that stays in power regardless of any election outcome.
Wonderful essay. There are so many influencing factors here that keeping them all in mind must have been like juggling ten balls at once. Incredibly, I came away with a clear understanding of which factors are likely playing a role in this phenomenon and to what degree, and the whole thing has the smell of something unpleasant though not surprising.
As Peter Frost said, this topic warrants more work and with more up-to-date statistics, but I can well imagine this avenue of research representing a damning piece of evidence against the anti-white wokeness of those who run our countries and our institutions.
I hope to get more data. For me the "smoking gun" is the difference between the national total of MAID deaths and the combined provincial/territorial total of MAID deaths.
That difference is about a thousand individuals, and almost all of the white over-representation is confined to those individuals. If this discrepancy is due to the address field being left blank, what does that tell us? It seems to tell us that the excess white mortality is occurring in certain institutions where MAID requests are rubberstamped if they come from Euro-Canadians.
I don't know the full story, and I suspect that certain people don't want too much questioning on this point.
Why wouldn't an institution include the address? Can't be bothered? Is the address the name of the institution or the person's address prior to being admitted to the institution?
It's both. Either they can't be bothered or they may be confused when they get to that part of the form. The form doesn't specify what is meant by "address".
This is a widespread problem with death certificates. If the certificate is filled out in a hospital, it tends to have a lot more errors than if it is filled out at the home of the deceased.
Obviously, New Found land, Quebec and Alberta do not have the right point of view. Executing evil people is always good, right? Unless they've committed a crime. Then it's wrong.
There may be several factors involved. I suspect that some institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests that involve a nonwhite person.
Or white over-representation in MAID deaths could simply be the flipside of in-group preference. If you and the physician share the same cultural background, the physician is more likely to talk you out of euthanasia — unless you're white. In the latter case, the physician may want to be fair and treat all requesters equally. Or a white physician may overcompensate by spending more time with a nonwhite requester or even try to find someone of that person's culture or religion.
I don't think that physicians make any effort to talk any patient of any race out of euthanasia. The licensing regulator might even deem it improper not to agree immediately with what the patient wants. It is a "right" after all. It seems the assessment process consists merely of determining if the requesting patient "qualifies" under the law and is serious about it. The only pushback would be if the patient really doesn't qualify. The doctor would then have to say, "Sorry, but you don't qualify." If the patient and the doctor really want to do it anyway, as seems to be happening in some of the dodgy cases you review, the white doctor might be more comfortable bending the law on behalf of someone he knows isn't going to have family with unanticipated cultural hangups who will come after him.
If true, this would suggest that a lot of white people are getting euthanized just because doctors have become too comfortable with doing it (in the case of white doctors) or are racially timid about pushing back on a request from a white patient (in the case of non-white doctors.) The immigrant doctor doesn't want a licensing complaint over "refusing" to provide euthanasia blotting his record after making all that trouble to emigrate and train to Canadian credentials.
How do we know the race or nationality of euthanasia providers in Canada? Country of graduation from medical school is kept on the public sites of the regulator but race is not.
According to the official guidelines, the medical professional has an obligation to ensure informed consent, which includes discussing:
- the nature of MAID
- available means to relieve suffering
- the risks and likely outcomes of each option
- the fact that the patient may withdraw their request at any time.
For example, the following guidelines are given for MAID in Saskatchewan:
"MAiD assessors and providers must ensure that the person’s request for MAiD is consistent with the person’s values and beliefs and is unambiguous and enduring. The assessors and providers must ensure it is rationally considered during a period of stability and not during a period of crisis. MAiD assessors and providers must consider making a referral for suicide prevention support and services for persons ineligible for MAiD if, in the assessor’s opinion, the finding increases the individual’s risk of suicide."
The wording "person's values and beliefs" suggests that the medical professional must discuss religious arguments against suicide if the requester has a religious background (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, etc.).
Yes, immigrant physicians may be afraid to push back against a request from a non-immigrant, especially a white person. So the excess mortality of Euro-Canadians may be due to excess respect from immigrant physicians.
But how would this explain the difference between MAID at home and MAID in an institution? Why is almost all of the excess mortality in the latter? I'm not sure but I suspect that many institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests where the requester isn't white or has trouble speaking English or French.
Everyone should review the short documentary Extremis on Netflix before discussing end of life care. The difference is that some groups are more willing to continue suffering while praying for a miracle. Maybe whites are more willing to admit that a miracle is not coming.
If that were so, whites should be more over-represented in Track 1 deaths — where there is a medical justification of foreseeable death. Instead, we see the opposite: whites are more likely to be euthanized where there is no medical justification, and presumably no physical suffering.
Let me set aside my concerns about the data analysis for a second and just assume that the reason whites are disproportionately represented in MAID is that they receive less pushback from doctors. So what? If non-whites had been disproportionately represented would that have been fine? Remember there is no evidence race **caused** the differences rather than other correlated cultural and unmeasured socio-economic factors.
It certainly doesn't tell us if it is too easy for whites to get MAID or too hard for other groups to get it or what. Maybe non-whites are more likely to see a doctor who is religiously resistant to the idea of MAID so tries hard to convince them not to.
Unless you believe that MAID is always wrong there is some optimum amount of resistance and pushback people should get from their doctors. Obviously, at the most extreme level a doctor could do everything in their power without lying or refusing to convince a patient not to proceed and I expect that would be successful in a really massive fraction of cases. At the other end a doctor could shrug and say yes without looking into it at all.
Canadians are trying to target some intermediate amount of pushback/verification of seriousness. As with any policy implemented by humans there will be some variation in how that happens and given that race correlates with almost all important socio-economic and cultural factors it would be shocking if there weren't some differences by race. But that isn't evidence of some kind of failure.
If everyone has a different doctor they won't all recieve exactly equal care but it doesn't mean they don't all get good care.
Actually, the Minister of Health had been concerned that non-whites might be over-represented, particularly Indigenous peoples. That's why the question about ethnicity was included last year.
"... the reason whites are disproportionately represented in MAID is that they receive less pushback from doctors." That is one possible explanation. It's also possible that some institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests from non-white requesters. The longer you drag out the process, the more people will change their mind, and the harder it will become to maintain an illusion of "consent." Finally, it's also possible that antiwhite racism plays a role.
Yes, there is evidence that antiwhite racism plays a role. Evidence isn't necessarily conclusive. Why do you think we use the term "circumstantial evidence"?
"Maybe non-whites are more likely to see a doctor who is religiously resistant to the idea of MAID so tries hard to convince them not to." That explanation is discussed in the above article. It's probably a factor but not the main one. Ethnic minorities in Quebec are just as likely to see a physician of their own background, yet there is no white over-representation in MAID deaths in Quebec. The main factor seems to be an interaction between the white "recipient" and something in the environment of institutions (hospitals, long-term care, correctional institutions, etc.).
"Unless you believe that MAID is always wrong there is some optimum amount of resistance and pushback people should get from their doctors." Unfortunately, there is considerable pressure in healthcare institutions to reduce the caseload. So the pressure tends to follow the path of least resistance. White people are easy targets. They tend to be solitary with few friends and kinfolk. And wokeness tends to inhibit discussion of antiwhite racism.
"given that race correlates with almost all important socio-economic and cultural factors it would be shocking if there weren't some differences by race. But that isn't evidence of some kind of failure."
You're committing at least three logical fallacies in the above statement. Do I have to point them out? And the term "failure" is relative. Failure for whom? For many people, there is no problem at all.
"If everyone has a different doctor they won't all recieve exactly equal care but it doesn't mean they don't all get good care." Actually, it could mean that. You tend to advance arguments that amount to wishful thinking.
The Canadian healthcare system is overloaded, and there is a very strong temptation to use MAID as a means to reduce this overload. MAID is becoming corrupted by the realities of the system.
Seems to me you aren't taking seriously enough the warning at the top of the report:
"the varied approaches within provincial and territorial health systems to collecting this information continue to impact data quality and reliability"
You tell a plausible potential story about one reason why reporting might differ between national and provincial results but there are a hundred others you could tell as well that relate to differences in data collection.
It is hard enough to use surveys to prove a theory when they are specifically designed to collect that data. But making inferences from the difference in two data sets measuring the same thing based on one theory about how that difference came to be is extremely weak evidence.
For instance I couldn't find the claim in the linked report that says the relative percentage of whites receiving MAID is lower in institutions. They had a summary statistic where you linked but (and I may have just missed it) I couldn't find any table that listed whites versus other groups in institutions -- and that matters because all sorts of things such as how you deal with cases where multiple boxes are checked can change these things. I think if you really want to substantiate this claim you would need to request more complete raw records from the government.
And we could also just look at whether whites report they would be more likely to consider MAID which my understanding is they do which suggests the default hypothesis of asking more for it.
The report doesn't discuss the discrepancy between the national total of white MAID deaths and the combined provincial/territorial total of white MAID deaths (about a thousand individuals).
I asked Health Canada and was told: “We are looking into the discrepancy you have pointed out and will follow up as soon as possible.” Despite a reminder email, I have received no further communication from Health Canada.
This sort of discrepancy is common in death statistics. An American study found there were many more errors when death certificates are filled out in a hospital than when they are filled out at the home of the deceased. You can find the reference to this study in the first footnote of the above article.
Yes, there is a summary table in the report that lists white MAID deaths by province. Just follow the link and go to Table C.5 on page 80. Go to the 4th and 5th columns ("Caucasian"). The word "Caucasian" is a synonym for "white."
No I found C5. I didn't find information about any difference in *institutional* MAID by race in provinces vs the national level. Are you merely presuming that if we had that by province we would see different racial percentages or am I missing something?
But do follow up because it is interesting and even if I'm not convinced yet by your reasoning it could be the right story and finding out would be good even if I don't really think it has much import directly on the MAID issue it does tell us interesting things about race and the medical system.
"Follow up" would require an official enquiry, and I don't see that happening.
If you add up the provincial totals, you'll find that whites were only 86.2% of all MAID deaths. This percentage is almost equal to the white percentage of the 65+ age bracket. So the white overrepresentation in MAID deaths is confined almost entirely to the thousand or so MAID deaths that are missing from the provincial totals.
Why is this so? Doesn't that fact make you wonder?
Yah that is unfortunate, I don't necessarily think we need transparency for things like political deals and etc where we get lots of sunlight laws but transparency with data would be great.
But we don't actually know that the over-representation *is* actually the same people who are missing from the provincial figures. It could just be an artifact of the data collection practices.
If we had a count that listed other racial categories in the provinces and we saw that the percentage of those groups rise I'd feel like you do but for all I know the way the provinces collected this data means people who are mixed race didn't count as white but did for the national one or simply that the data was collected differently or something else.
Even under your hypothesis that it is about the institutions it could even be that in hospitals some nurse is collecting the data in a hurry so people tend to only list one race instead of white and ...
Basically I just don't think "that difference is about the same as this difference" is a good reason to assume it has the same cause. It's reason to wonder and investigate but a thin reed to conclude on.
There is no separate federal form. There is only a provincial form. So only one form is filled out per MAID death.
Ethnic identify is self-determined by the MAID requester (and not by the physician or the nurse). This information is collected only once.
Consequently, there is no "double entry" as you seem to believe. The white overrepresentation in MAID deaths is therefore confined almost entirely to the MAID deaths that are missing from the combined provincial total.
The common factor seems to be ideological. I may be wrong, but I don't think there is an organized effort to euthanize white people. It's just that we have an ideology that facilitates certain decisions and inhibits other decisions.
It's understandable you feel that way, as that's the norm we've all been conditioned to.
But perhaps it's time to reevaluate why something that's acceptable, even celebrated, for every other group is somehow disapproved of when Euros want to do it.
It's a double standard. Frankly, it's anti-White racism.
I wanted to put all possible explanations on the table. If you had read further, you would have found that I largely discount this explanation, as well as the more general explanation that Euro-Canadians have a greater desire to be euthanized.
I'm Native American and know of the wildly disproportionate rates of suicide among Native Americans so I looked up the rates among First Nations people in Canada. I was not surprised to learn the suicide rates among First Nations people are approximately three times higher than among non-Indian people. In some tribes, the rate is up to 25 times higher. Since assisted suicide is legal in Canada then are First Nations people also disproportionately represented in that form of suicide? If not then why would a suicidally-prone group not also participate in disproportionate numbers in assisted suicide? Apart from cultural and religious reasons, I immediately thought of one potential factor: lack of access to quality healthcare. So here's a bizarre question to ask: Are white Canadians disproportionately committing assisted suicide because they have better healthcare?
Natives who commit suicide usually do so by measures familiar to non-natives who commit suicide: firearms and other violent means. Assisted suicide (very rare in Canada compared to active euthanasia) accounts for a tiny proportion of all suicides, so much so that we are talking about two entirely different phenomena. People who kill themselves likely never thought of asking a doctor to do it (because they typically don't have a qualifying underlying medical diagnosis and often do it impulsively) and people who ask a doctor to kill them almost by definition are unwilling or unable to do it by their own hand.
What is a good question is why aboriginal people are under-represented among people getting euthanasia. My own suspicion is that a doctor who kills an aboriginal person is likely to be accused of racism or cultural insensitivity in not allowing the extended family and various tribal elders to countermand (or at least participate in and majorly influence) his decision.
Your second point is a good one. Helping any brown or black person with an assisted suicide could very well indeed be blamed on racism—be accused of being another form of colonialism. But again I ask, how can any person pursue assisted suicide if they don't have access to the health care professionals who offer it? I think there are economic factors thought they likely have less effect than religious and cultural ones.
Indians in Canada get free health care. They often live on remote Reserves where health care facilities and staff are austere. But an Indian with chronic kidney failure -- common in aboriginals because of the high prevalence of Type 2 diabetes -- who lives on a fly-in Reserve will get flown at public expense to a hospital in a white town three times a week for dialysis. So an aboriginal person, perhaps one in such a predicament, who wanted to have euthanasia could have it. It's not like they are left to fend for themselves in their tipis. If an aboriginal wanted to talk to a MAiD doctor, the system would transport him to the appointment.
I’m a Native American who grew up on my tribe’s reservation. I have direct experience with all of this.
You have direct experience of medical treatment at Canadian fly-in reserves?
In the United States, any count of Native Americans based on self-reporting of identity ends up being inaccurate because people often falsely claim to be Indian or base their identity on very distant ancestry. I'm aware the same is true in Canada. This is to say that less than half of the people, and maybe up to 90%, who identified as First Nations when they committed assisted suicide are probably not Indian. So actual First Nations folks are even more under-represented in assisted suicides. The primary reasons why Natives don't commit assisted suicides are almost certainly cultural and religious but I still gotta wonder: How does a person commit assisted suicide if they have no access to the doctors who practice assisted suicide?
When I look at the distribution of Indigenous MAID recipients (Table 4.3A, p. 34), it seems to match the distribution of "Status Indians" in Canada. The Territories have the highest proportion, followed by Saskatchewan and then the other Western provinces.
In my experience, the "fake natives" are found mostly in eastern Canada, especially Ontario.
The Indigenous nations seem to be under-represented in MAID deaths. There were only 166 recipients who identified as First Nation, Metis or Inuit:
"A total of 15,927 people who received MAID responded to the question on racial, ethnic or cultural identity. The vast majority (95.6%) identified as Caucasian (White). The second most commonly reported racial, ethnic or cultural identity was East Asian (1.6%). These percentages are close to those reported for 2023 (95.8% Caucasian; 1.8% East Asian).
• A total of 16,115 people who received MAID in 2024 responded to the question on Indigenous identity: 102 people self-identified as First Nations, 57 people self-identified as Métis and 7 people self identified as Inuit. " (p. 4)
I doubt that access to healthcare is a factor. Wait times tend to be longer in Quebec than in Ontario, yet whites are proportionately less at risk of euthanasia in Quebec.
I really think Canada has a MAIDS epidemic
My initial reaction is that white Canadians are more likely to be plugged into the system and know how it works, better able to navigate it, as happens for other types of care, like cancer care and joint surgery. The article really got me thinking about it.
As a (now-retired) white physician who never had occasion to deal personally with requests for euthanasia, I can confirm that it is easier to have long involved discussion about wishes and preferences and values with people who more or less share one's cultural background....and who speak English as a first language. I can't imagine doing a MAiD discussion through an interpreter or those telephone translator services that were becoming in wide use when I retired. They were fine for explaining what a colonoscopy was, and the small risk of perforation, but for DNR discussions they got seriously overwhelmed. Sometimes the human on the other end of the machine was uncomfortable even rendering the discussion, which of course was very common with family members interpreting (and editorializing) at the bedside.
Also, going by DNR, I think the more religiously oriented non-white cultures have more deep seated opposition to doctors killing people and are unlikely even to bring it up as a request. "Do everything, Doctor", is their default, at least it was in DNR discussions -- they rarely agreed to DNR.
Also I think white doctors are worried (subconsiously) that if they euthanize too many non-whites, they will get accused of racism if anyone reviews their individual statistics. Even though all euthanasia requests are supposed to come from the patient, not from us, -- "Have you ever considered MAiD?" is improper I think -- I think most of us would be relieved that it was a white patient making the request. If an aboriginal patient made the request, we'd be worried that we would run afoul of some cultural competency shared-decision-making thing we didn't even know about and the family and the whole First Nation would get on our case about it, complaining to our licensing regulator.
With regard to your first point, my impression is almost the opposite. White Canadians tend to feel guilty about abusing the system. There is also a widespread belief among older Canadians (like my late mother) who felt that doctors kill more people than they save. She tried to stay away from hospitals as much as possible.
It's hard to generalize about immigrant groups, but many of them seem to be more savvy than Canadian-born people when it comes to accessing health care. They are aware of the long wait times and will often book appointments at the first sign of illness, knowing they can cancel if it turns out to be nothing to worry about.
I suspect that many immigrant physicians readily approve MAID requests because they don't want to argue with a white person. So the approval may be more a gesture of respect than anything else. Again, we need better and more recent data to answer this question with any certainty.
Interesting piece
I think a contributing factor to the wider adoption of MAID is that Canadians are overly trusting of the government, often to their detriment. The social welfare dependency is quite pervasive. And when you market this with the usual buzzwords of compassion and dignity to tweak the perceived morals of the populace they’ll sign on gladly.
Canadians have created a high-trust society where you can take people at their word, especially people in authority. Unfortunately, that kind of society works only when you have a mechanism to expel people who are not trustworthy.
That mechanism no longer exists, since it constitutes a form of discrimination. So we extend our trust to people who have done nothing to earn our trust. In the case of untrustworthy public officials, it's becoming impossible to get rid of them. We now have a large permanent government that stays in power regardless of any election outcome.
Wonderful essay. There are so many influencing factors here that keeping them all in mind must have been like juggling ten balls at once. Incredibly, I came away with a clear understanding of which factors are likely playing a role in this phenomenon and to what degree, and the whole thing has the smell of something unpleasant though not surprising.
As Peter Frost said, this topic warrants more work and with more up-to-date statistics, but I can well imagine this avenue of research representing a damning piece of evidence against the anti-white wokeness of those who run our countries and our institutions.
I hope to get more data. For me the "smoking gun" is the difference between the national total of MAID deaths and the combined provincial/territorial total of MAID deaths.
That difference is about a thousand individuals, and almost all of the white over-representation is confined to those individuals. If this discrepancy is due to the address field being left blank, what does that tell us? It seems to tell us that the excess white mortality is occurring in certain institutions where MAID requests are rubberstamped if they come from Euro-Canadians.
I don't know the full story, and I suspect that certain people don't want too much questioning on this point.
Why wouldn't an institution include the address? Can't be bothered? Is the address the name of the institution or the person's address prior to being admitted to the institution?
It's both. Either they can't be bothered or they may be confused when they get to that part of the form. The form doesn't specify what is meant by "address".
This is a widespread problem with death certificates. If the certificate is filled out in a hospital, it tends to have a lot more errors than if it is filled out at the home of the deceased.
I see.
Durkheim seems relevant here
Perhaps. But why aren't whites over-represented in MAID deaths in Quebec? Quebec is the most post-Christian, post-traditional province of Canada.
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Obviously, New Found land, Quebec and Alberta do not have the right point of view. Executing evil people is always good, right? Unless they've committed a crime. Then it's wrong.
There may be several factors involved. I suspect that some institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests that involve a nonwhite person.
Or white over-representation in MAID deaths could simply be the flipside of in-group preference. If you and the physician share the same cultural background, the physician is more likely to talk you out of euthanasia — unless you're white. In the latter case, the physician may want to be fair and treat all requesters equally. Or a white physician may overcompensate by spending more time with a nonwhite requester or even try to find someone of that person's culture or religion.
I don't think that physicians make any effort to talk any patient of any race out of euthanasia. The licensing regulator might even deem it improper not to agree immediately with what the patient wants. It is a "right" after all. It seems the assessment process consists merely of determining if the requesting patient "qualifies" under the law and is serious about it. The only pushback would be if the patient really doesn't qualify. The doctor would then have to say, "Sorry, but you don't qualify." If the patient and the doctor really want to do it anyway, as seems to be happening in some of the dodgy cases you review, the white doctor might be more comfortable bending the law on behalf of someone he knows isn't going to have family with unanticipated cultural hangups who will come after him.
If true, this would suggest that a lot of white people are getting euthanized just because doctors have become too comfortable with doing it (in the case of white doctors) or are racially timid about pushing back on a request from a white patient (in the case of non-white doctors.) The immigrant doctor doesn't want a licensing complaint over "refusing" to provide euthanasia blotting his record after making all that trouble to emigrate and train to Canadian credentials.
How do we know the race or nationality of euthanasia providers in Canada? Country of graduation from medical school is kept on the public sites of the regulator but race is not.
According to the official guidelines, the medical professional has an obligation to ensure informed consent, which includes discussing:
- the nature of MAID
- available means to relieve suffering
- the risks and likely outcomes of each option
- the fact that the patient may withdraw their request at any time.
For example, the following guidelines are given for MAID in Saskatchewan:
"MAiD assessors and providers must ensure that the person’s request for MAiD is consistent with the person’s values and beliefs and is unambiguous and enduring. The assessors and providers must ensure it is rationally considered during a period of stability and not during a period of crisis. MAiD assessors and providers must consider making a referral for suicide prevention support and services for persons ineligible for MAiD if, in the assessor’s opinion, the finding increases the individual’s risk of suicide."
https://www.crns.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Medical-Assistance-in-Dying-MAiD-Guideline.pdf
The wording "person's values and beliefs" suggests that the medical professional must discuss religious arguments against suicide if the requester has a religious background (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, etc.).
Yes, immigrant physicians may be afraid to push back against a request from a non-immigrant, especially a white person. So the excess mortality of Euro-Canadians may be due to excess respect from immigrant physicians.
But how would this explain the difference between MAID at home and MAID in an institution? Why is almost all of the excess mortality in the latter? I'm not sure but I suspect that many institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests where the requester isn't white or has trouble speaking English or French.
Everyone should review the short documentary Extremis on Netflix before discussing end of life care. The difference is that some groups are more willing to continue suffering while praying for a miracle. Maybe whites are more willing to admit that a miracle is not coming.
If that were so, whites should be more over-represented in Track 1 deaths — where there is a medical justification of foreseeable death. Instead, we see the opposite: whites are more likely to be euthanized where there is no medical justification, and presumably no physical suffering.
Let me set aside my concerns about the data analysis for a second and just assume that the reason whites are disproportionately represented in MAID is that they receive less pushback from doctors. So what? If non-whites had been disproportionately represented would that have been fine? Remember there is no evidence race **caused** the differences rather than other correlated cultural and unmeasured socio-economic factors.
It certainly doesn't tell us if it is too easy for whites to get MAID or too hard for other groups to get it or what. Maybe non-whites are more likely to see a doctor who is religiously resistant to the idea of MAID so tries hard to convince them not to.
Unless you believe that MAID is always wrong there is some optimum amount of resistance and pushback people should get from their doctors. Obviously, at the most extreme level a doctor could do everything in their power without lying or refusing to convince a patient not to proceed and I expect that would be successful in a really massive fraction of cases. At the other end a doctor could shrug and say yes without looking into it at all.
Canadians are trying to target some intermediate amount of pushback/verification of seriousness. As with any policy implemented by humans there will be some variation in how that happens and given that race correlates with almost all important socio-economic and cultural factors it would be shocking if there weren't some differences by race. But that isn't evidence of some kind of failure.
If everyone has a different doctor they won't all recieve exactly equal care but it doesn't mean they don't all get good care.
Actually, the Minister of Health had been concerned that non-whites might be over-represented, particularly Indigenous peoples. That's why the question about ethnicity was included last year.
"... the reason whites are disproportionately represented in MAID is that they receive less pushback from doctors." That is one possible explanation. It's also possible that some institutions have an unofficial policy of reviewing MAID requests from non-white requesters. The longer you drag out the process, the more people will change their mind, and the harder it will become to maintain an illusion of "consent." Finally, it's also possible that antiwhite racism plays a role.
Yes, there is evidence that antiwhite racism plays a role. Evidence isn't necessarily conclusive. Why do you think we use the term "circumstantial evidence"?
"Maybe non-whites are more likely to see a doctor who is religiously resistant to the idea of MAID so tries hard to convince them not to." That explanation is discussed in the above article. It's probably a factor but not the main one. Ethnic minorities in Quebec are just as likely to see a physician of their own background, yet there is no white over-representation in MAID deaths in Quebec. The main factor seems to be an interaction between the white "recipient" and something in the environment of institutions (hospitals, long-term care, correctional institutions, etc.).
"Unless you believe that MAID is always wrong there is some optimum amount of resistance and pushback people should get from their doctors." Unfortunately, there is considerable pressure in healthcare institutions to reduce the caseload. So the pressure tends to follow the path of least resistance. White people are easy targets. They tend to be solitary with few friends and kinfolk. And wokeness tends to inhibit discussion of antiwhite racism.
"given that race correlates with almost all important socio-economic and cultural factors it would be shocking if there weren't some differences by race. But that isn't evidence of some kind of failure."
You're committing at least three logical fallacies in the above statement. Do I have to point them out? And the term "failure" is relative. Failure for whom? For many people, there is no problem at all.
"If everyone has a different doctor they won't all recieve exactly equal care but it doesn't mean they don't all get good care." Actually, it could mean that. You tend to advance arguments that amount to wishful thinking.
The Canadian healthcare system is overloaded, and there is a very strong temptation to use MAID as a means to reduce this overload. MAID is becoming corrupted by the realities of the system.
Seems to me you aren't taking seriously enough the warning at the top of the report:
"the varied approaches within provincial and territorial health systems to collecting this information continue to impact data quality and reliability"
You tell a plausible potential story about one reason why reporting might differ between national and provincial results but there are a hundred others you could tell as well that relate to differences in data collection.
It is hard enough to use surveys to prove a theory when they are specifically designed to collect that data. But making inferences from the difference in two data sets measuring the same thing based on one theory about how that difference came to be is extremely weak evidence.
For instance I couldn't find the claim in the linked report that says the relative percentage of whites receiving MAID is lower in institutions. They had a summary statistic where you linked but (and I may have just missed it) I couldn't find any table that listed whites versus other groups in institutions -- and that matters because all sorts of things such as how you deal with cases where multiple boxes are checked can change these things. I think if you really want to substantiate this claim you would need to request more complete raw records from the government.
And we could also just look at whether whites report they would be more likely to consider MAID which my understanding is they do which suggests the default hypothesis of asking more for it.
The report doesn't discuss the discrepancy between the national total of white MAID deaths and the combined provincial/territorial total of white MAID deaths (about a thousand individuals).
I asked Health Canada and was told: “We are looking into the discrepancy you have pointed out and will follow up as soon as possible.” Despite a reminder email, I have received no further communication from Health Canada.
This sort of discrepancy is common in death statistics. An American study found there were many more errors when death certificates are filled out in a hospital than when they are filled out at the home of the deceased. You can find the reference to this study in the first footnote of the above article.
Yes, there is a summary table in the report that lists white MAID deaths by province. Just follow the link and go to Table C.5 on page 80. Go to the 4th and 5th columns ("Caucasian"). The word "Caucasian" is a synonym for "white."
No I found C5. I didn't find information about any difference in *institutional* MAID by race in provinces vs the national level. Are you merely presuming that if we had that by province we would see different racial percentages or am I missing something?
But do follow up because it is interesting and even if I'm not convinced yet by your reasoning it could be the right story and finding out would be good even if I don't really think it has much import directly on the MAID issue it does tell us interesting things about race and the medical system.
"Follow up" would require an official enquiry, and I don't see that happening.
If you add up the provincial totals, you'll find that whites were only 86.2% of all MAID deaths. This percentage is almost equal to the white percentage of the 65+ age bracket. So the white overrepresentation in MAID deaths is confined almost entirely to the thousand or so MAID deaths that are missing from the provincial totals.
Why is this so? Doesn't that fact make you wonder?
Yah that is unfortunate, I don't necessarily think we need transparency for things like political deals and etc where we get lots of sunlight laws but transparency with data would be great.
But we don't actually know that the over-representation *is* actually the same people who are missing from the provincial figures. It could just be an artifact of the data collection practices.
If we had a count that listed other racial categories in the provinces and we saw that the percentage of those groups rise I'd feel like you do but for all I know the way the provinces collected this data means people who are mixed race didn't count as white but did for the national one or simply that the data was collected differently or something else.
Even under your hypothesis that it is about the institutions it could even be that in hospitals some nurse is collecting the data in a hurry so people tend to only list one race instead of white and ...
Basically I just don't think "that difference is about the same as this difference" is a good reason to assume it has the same cause. It's reason to wonder and investigate but a thin reed to conclude on.
There is no separate federal form. There is only a provincial form. So only one form is filled out per MAID death.
Ethnic identify is self-determined by the MAID requester (and not by the physician or the nurse). This information is collected only once.
Consequently, there is no "double entry" as you seem to believe. The white overrepresentation in MAID deaths is therefore confined almost entirely to the MAID deaths that are missing from the combined provincial total.
Probably the same reason the “reunification” camp/therapy industry mostly targets middle to upper class White children.
The common factor seems to be ideological. I may be wrong, but I don't think there is an organized effort to euthanize white people. It's just that we have an ideology that facilitates certain decisions and inhibits other decisions.
Yes, and the money and support systems to do so. But...I do hope you look into the mental health side of courts and boutique treatments.
"Euro-Canadians may also feel alienated in a country that scarcely resembles the one of their youth. "
I stopped reading at this point. Ridiculous.
It's understandable you feel that way, as that's the norm we've all been conditioned to.
But perhaps it's time to reevaluate why something that's acceptable, even celebrated, for every other group is somehow disapproved of when Euros want to do it.
It's a double standard. Frankly, it's anti-White racism.
I wanted to put all possible explanations on the table. If you had read further, you would have found that I largely discount this explanation, as well as the more general explanation that Euro-Canadians have a greater desire to be euthanized.