Paraplegic Canadian veteran says government caseworker offered her euthanasia

A disabled veteran in Canada has harshly criticized her government for offering her euthanasia when she became frustrated by delays in installing a wheelchair lift at her home.

Retired Army Corporal Christine Gauthier, a former Paralympian, testified in Parliament on Thursday that a Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) social worker made the offer of assisted suicide.

After years of frustrating delays getting the elevator home, Gauthier says the caseworker told her, “Ma’am, if you’re really that desperate, we can give you medical help to die now.”

The worker who made the offer has not been identified, but it is feared that the same ‘solution’ may have been offered to three other vets who contacted VAC with problems, global news informed.

The scandal arose a week after Canada’s minister of veterans affairs confirmed that at least four other veterans were offered similar access to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) law in response to their problems, a situation which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described as “absolutely unacceptable”.

Gauthier said he has been seeking help from VAC to get a chair lift for his house since 2017.

“It has isolated me a lot, because I have to crawl on my butt with the wheelchair in front of me to get to my house,” he said. global news.

She said she was shocked by the social worker’s suicide offer, which came up in a conversation in 2019.

“I thought, ‘I can’t believe… you’re going to give me a shot to help me die, but you’re not going to give me the tools I need to help me live,'” he said. “It was really shocking to hear that kind of comment.”

Gauthier was injured in an army training accident in 1989, sustaining permanent damage to her knees and spine.

She competed at the 2016 Paralympics and the 2016 Prince Harry Invictus Games as a canoeist, weightlifter, and indoor rower.

Gauthier’s testimony and reports of other similar cases have sparked public outcry, with Trudeau vowing to make changes.

“I have repeatedly said that this is absolutely unacceptable, and as soon as we found out about this, we took action,” Trudeau said in Vancouver on Friday.

‘We are following up with the investigations and changing the protocols to ensure what should seem obvious to all of us: that this is not the place of Veterans Affairs Canada, that they are there to support the people who have come forward. to serve their country, to offer them medical assistance in dying,’ he said.

Physician-assisted suicide was first legalized in Canada for terminally ill patients in 2016, but last year, the law was expanded to offer euthanasia to patients whose natural death is not believed to be imminent.

Now people with long-term disabilities can also receive medical assistance in dying. Last year, more than 10,000 people in Canada died by euthanasia.

Starting next year, a new law will allow people with mental illness, which was previously not a qualifying condition, to receive physician-assisted suicide.

The expansion of Canada’s euthanasia laws, already among the most lenient on the planet, has raised concerns in some quarters.

A doctor told DailyMail.com he is concerned about the expansion as it will make suicide a standard treatment for mental health conditions with little oversight or guidance.

Dr. Trudo Lemmens, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Toronto, told DailyMail.com that the system could create an “obligation to introduce [suicide] as part of mental health treatment.

‘Imagine that being applied in the context of mental health. You have a person who suffers from severe depression, seeks help from a therapist and is offered the solution of dying,’ he continued.

He fears that vulnerable patients who are not in the right frame of mind could be convinced that suicide is a reasonable option. Dr. Lemmens called the entire system a “perverted concept of autonomy.”

There are already signs that the system is failing some Canadians, with reports of people being cleared for assisted suicide due to diabetes or homelessness.

Last month, a Canadian man facing eviction made international headlines when he requested to be legally euthanized and die rather than become homeless.

Amir Farsoud, 54, requested the drastic measure after the guest house where he lives was put on the market. His debilitating and intractable back pain made him eligible for physician-assisted suicide under Canadian law.

Farsoud had received one of the two medical signatures required to be accepted into the government’s euthanasia program, but a GoFundMe page created in his name by a stranger ended up raising over $60,000, enough to get him new housing and change his mind about ending his life.

last week, a The Canadian fashion giant was accused of glorifying suicide after launching a media campaign that appeared to promote euthanasia.

The ‘All is Beauty’ video ad, released by La Maison Simons, centers on a terminally ill woman, Jennyfer, 37, who ended her life with a drug intervention in October.

The three-minute video shows Jennyfer and her loved ones waving magic wands by the ocean, having picnics in the woods with friends, and watching a puppet show.

In an audio overlay recorded weeks before her death, she says: “I spent my life filling my heart with beauty, nature, connection. I choose to fill my last moments with the same… The last breaths are sacred. When I imagine my last days, I see music. I see the ocean. I see cheesecake.

Yuan Yi Zhu, a policy expert at Oxford University, told DailyMail.com: “By portraying a woman’s decision to commit suicide as a luxury lifestyle choice, Simons is glorifying suicide and telling vulnerable Canadians They’d be better off dead than alive.” .’

The video has also received criticism from social media users who called it “macro” and likened it to a “sci-fi dystopia”.

Since it was uploaded about a month ago, the video has garnered more than 1.1 million views on YouTube. A 30-second snippet of the video posted to Twitter has around 1.6 million views.