To hear B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix proudly announce the new St. Vincent’s Heather residence last week, senior citizens are a sacred trust to him.
“As people age, they want to know they will have access to the right care services that will allow them to stay healthy, active and safe in their community,” said Dix.
“St. Vincent’s Heather will offer vital long-term care for seniors and wraparound services that will support their happiness and well-being in a home designed to meet their needs.”
As if to emphasize just how happy the future residents will be, he said the residence will have “culturally safe living spaces and services for Indigenous Elders, such as a sacred space for smudging ceremonies with access to traditional medicine gardens for spiritual ceremonies.”
What it won’t have is euthanasia. As a Catholic residence operated by Providence Health Care, the facility can’t be forced to allow doctor-facilitated suicide on its premises, unlike, say, the Delta Hospice Society, which had its hospice taken from it by the government for not allowing lethal injections onsite.
Announcing the new Catholic facility, Dix acknowledged that most people in long-term care are living with Alzheimer’s or dementia. “And we have to, I think, create living spaces that allow people under those circumstances … the ability to live better lives.”
If that’s the case, it’s a good thing the Knights of Columbus, the Archdiocese of Vancouver, and Providence are making possible projects like St. Vincent’s Heather and a new Columbus Homes residence in Cloverdale. As with the history of health care in B.C., if left up to government the sick and elderly would find themselves permanently sidelined.
St. Vincent’s only became a hospital in what was then the outskirts of Vancouver because Archbishop William Duke saw the sickness and suffering taking place, unprovided for by government or existing health care. He appealed to the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception in New Brunswick, and for 65 years the hospital delivered compassionate health care to Vancouver.
Since St. Vincent’s was closed in 2004, health care has obviously continued, but there have been increasing attempts to squeeze religion out. Appeals to take over religious facilities or force them to provide procedures they oppose come up with growing frequency. Dix hasn’t tried to coerce religious institutions yet, but non-religious facilities haven’t been as fortunate. Dix was only too happy to seize the Irene Thomas Hospice operated by the pro-life Delta Hospice Society when it refused to allow assisted suicide on its premises.
Thousands of Canadians are now ending their lives each year, the vast majority of them seniors. B.C. has the highest euthanasia rate in the country, and the government has shown little interest in persuading the elderly of their value
Meanwhile “MAiD providers” are doing their utmost to encourage the elderly to opt out of life, for reasons that have nothing to do with the justifications used to legalize euthanasia in 2016.
In an investigative report in the Winter 2023 New Atlantis, writer Alexander Raikin went behind the scenes of Medical Assistance in Dying in B.C., interviewing the physicians who administer lethal injections, primarily to the elderly. He quotes one doctor laughing as she admits her real concern is not protecting the vulnerable from abuse. “Angry family members are our greatest risk,” she says.
Raikin reports in his article No Other Options that euthanasia doctors even have their own organization, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, where they offer training seminars and acknowledge patients come to them because of poverty, loneliness, and lack of social supports.
Ironically in a recent op-ed for the COVID National Day of Observance, Dix reflected on the impact the pandemic had, noting more than 5,000 British Columbians died from COVID.
He ended the article by stating no one who lost a loved one or friend to COVID is alone. “None of us is alone in this.”
Yet thousands of British Columbians, average age 78, are lining up to die every year with the help of Dix’s “ministry of health.” Many of them, lonely and feeling abandoned, would probably be hard-pressed to agree with him that “none of us is alone in this.”