Winning journalism awards always provides a lift this time of year, but two of the awards The B.C. Catholic won this week from the Canadian Christian Communicators Association had special meaning. The awards acknowledge the investigative journalism this newspaper, through writer Terry O’Neill, has been doing on the issue of assisted suicide.

For the past year, O’Neill has been documenting the deadly expansion of euthanasia in B.C., in particular as a substitute for palliative care. This year’s awards recognized his work, which found that patients in the Fraser Health Authority are being offered death by euthanasia without requesting it, contrary to the health authority’s safeguard policy of requiring patients to first raise the issue of assisted suicide.

O’Neill found that not only do medical personnel in Fraser Health and elsewhere suggest euthanasia before patients ask about it, they do so even before outlining details about palliative care.

We recently republished a column by Yan Yi Zhu, a Canadian senior research fellow at Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project and a researcher based at Nuffield College, Oxford. He cited cases of disenfranchised individuals who are choosing to die because they can’t afford to keep on living or to pay for treatments that would help them. That column has attracted worldwide attention.

In this week’s coverage, O’Neill interviews experts who are working to make palliative care more available but are witnessing how the growth of euthanasia is actually leading to a dwindling of palliative care resources.

What a sorry state we’ve come to. We were assured that when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the law against doctor-assisted suicide, lethal injections would only be for extreme circumstances to end unbearable pain for the dying.

 Now there’s every likelihood that within the next year assisted suicide will be legal for anything from mental illness to the euthanizing of children.

If governments had decided they wanted to weed out society’s elderly, sick, and frail, it’s very likely they’d have implemented a plan exactly like the one that’s unfolding across Canada today.

They would issue platitudes about the need for robust end-of-life care, and then fail to honour those promises.

They would do whatever they could to make sure that any health-care provider who objects to euthanasia is punished, called uncompassionate or a religious bigot, and have their property taken away.

They would keep the soaring death numbers as quiet as possible.

They would talk a good game about the importance of safeguards so euthanasia is not abused, and then they would allow policy to be developed and implemented at closed-door meetings and by word of mouth.

A parliamentary committee is currently examining euthanasia in Canada, although no one calls it euthanasia anymore. They call it MAiD, for medical assistance in dying, the only example of a preposition being included in an acronym. But they had to include it or else it would be MAD, which is just what it is.

The committee examining the law has extended the deadline for receiving submissions until May 30. To share your concerns about what’s happening with death and dying in Canada, please visit https://tinyurl.com/parlcttee2022.