Step right up! Step right up!!! Gather round, you beautiful, bewildered creatures of this late-stage Western civilization carnival, because what I’m about to tell you isn’t just a story. It’s not merely news. It’s a mirror held up to the soft underbelly of a society that’s started mistaking death for kindness and bureaucracy for compassion.
An 83-year-old Christian great-grandmother, Brigitte Stegemann, living out her final chapters in an Ontario long-term care facility. Stage IV stomach cancer. Untreatable. And yet, clear in her faith, she had said no. Explicitly. Firmly. I do not want to be euthanized.
But boundaries, my friends, are inconvenient things when the system has already decided what’s “best” for you.
While her granddaughter, Brigette Kranendonk, who had power of attorney, was away for a few days, the gears of the medical machine ground into action. They put the pressure on GG to convince her to request Medical Assistance in Dying. MAiD. That soft, bureaucratic acronym that sounds almost gentle until you realise it’s the state’s preferred euphemism for ending a life it no longer finds convenient or economically viable to sustain.
Cognitive decline had become glaring, obvious, and documented in the daily erosions of clarity. Yet somehow consent was secured. The granddaughter returned to discover the irreversible has already been done. She never heard GG say the words “I want MAiD.” What she saw was confusion.
“I truly believe that one nurse really saw us as an obstacle,” Brigette said. “We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother.”
Months later, she still hasn’t been allowed to see the supposed consent paperwork. She’s appealing to the Ontario Chief Coroner’s Office, the Patient Ombudsman, Belleville Police. “I don’t know who the witness was. I don’t know how they explained the paperwork to her. I have no idea.”
And the police confirm the investigation is open. Criminal Investigations Division. That’s official language for something here stinks.
Canada now boasts one of the highest euthanasia rates on the planet. A whopping 4.7 percent of all deaths in 2023. In British Columbia alone, a recent oversight report found errors in more than half the cases.
And here’s the deeper rot, the part that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, when a system cheerfully funds the ending of a life we’re talking about a quiet, smiling eugenics dressed in the language of choice.
Live Action’s Bridget Sielicki has pointed out the grim mechanics, saying that a paralytic can make a person look peaceful while they drown in their own secretions. Think about that for a second. Oh, they look so peaceful. No, they’re just unable to cry for help. Experimental drugs that burn the throat. Some patients take days to die.
This isn’t progress. This is a civilisation that has lost the sacred.