Forget 'Assisted Suicide', Bring on the 'MAID'.

   Life was simple when I was a  young doctor.    I knew exactly what society expected and demanded of me and I knew exactly what my duty was to both society and myself.  It was easy, my responsibility was protect and extend the life of my patients and where I could not cure the disease or maintain life, to relieve pain and suffering to the extent that my skills would allow.  Medicine was about life and how to make it as livable and free from suffering as possible.  Most of the people I knew thought the same way and that is why they chose medicine as a career.  Not Law, not Accountancy, not political science.  Medicine.  I thought it was a noble profession and so did most of my classmates. You may think this presumptuous and perhaps it was, but somehow and for whatever idyllic misconceptions we had, it seemed to work out very well.  Don't get me wrong, there were always rogues and rascals in my profession, as in any walk of life, but they were a small percentage of the whole and after a lifetime of medicine, I still believe, as I always did that 5-10% of the profession caused 95% of the problems.  I continue to believe, that the objective of most physicians is to prolong healthy life, cure illness, where possible and relieve suffering when cure is not possible.  It was impossible to believe that the state had an entirely different expectation of the role of physicians. Those expectations are related to politics and economics.
   The legislators in the land have now decided that part of a physicians duties include terminating patients.  I disagree. Since the dawn of modern medicine and indeed before that, the goals of medicine have been to restore health, prolong life and relieve suffering.  Although there are circumstances when treatment should be limited to the latter and the objective of prolonging life is no longer tenable, throughout the history of medicine terminating life has been the ultimate prohibition.  And, for physicians/nurses there it should remain.
   If society decides it wants to authorize a group to take a citizens life when the citizen requires it or demands it, that's none of my business.  Let them identify a group of technicians to do the deed, it really isn't very difficult.  When the expectation is that this should be a physician's duty and indeed that the physician who refuses should be penalized, I am outraged.   A technician could be trained to do this in a couple of months.  As someone who has spent much of his professional life training physicians, I know a thing or two about young people and young doctors.  Once a physician ceases to hold life as sacrosanct, the slippery slope begins.  We have seen the end of that slope in Auschwitz, in Buchenwald, in Treblinka, where individuals who had been perceived as reputable, brilliant physicians committed atrocious, heinous acts.  Just beneath the veneer of concern for aging sick patients, the politician/bureaucrats are acutely aware that the health care costs of the elderly are astronomical and growing rapidly.  An efficient method of reducing costs would be for assisted suicide (now known as Medical Assistance In Dying) to become the norm and in the not too distant future gently (for the moment) encourage it.  This piece of social engineering would let the politicians off the hook and help them conceal or at least make much less obvious that there is no alternative but to ration health care before it consumes the complete GDP.
   Canada, sanctimoniously proclaims its sympathy for all of mankind and all of life.  Unfortunately, this concern for the protection of life seems rather hypocritical when we look at the way we kill our own unborn.  I am not against abortion for any religious reason and I think there are circumstances when it is entirely justified.  I don't condone it when the fetus is a viable baby killed for convenience, as it often is.   In many instances it is merely a cruel and expensive method of birth control.   In fact, we have one of the highest abortion rates in the western world.  Still, free and unregulated abortion is so popular that governments are reluctant to place even the most logical restrictions on it.  So let us stop playing the pious protectors of life and human rights.  The administridiots have made it difficult to even discuss these issues dispassionately.
The Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, the licensing bodies, have allowed themselves to be the willing tools of government, as has the Canadian Medical Association in Ontario and elsewhere.  When a group of physicians protested that their ethical  standards prevented them from assisting in patient suicide or even referring a patient to a 'terminator' and that the College was negating their Charter rights, here is what the College arrogantly responded:  "It is the colleges position that not only can it do so, (override the Physicians Charter rights) but that it should  do so"   Thus the College of Physicians and Surgeons of  Ontario is complicit with the government of Ontario in attempting to compel physicians to violate their consciences. 
   Let's pray that they fail!