Canada is one of the most civilized places in the world. We all like to tease Canada; we call it the 51st state. We make fun of their use of “eh” all the time. We wonder at their choice of Prime Ministers, who often seem goofy.

But Canada has become a dark place recently. Their cities may be clean and the people are nice, but their government has become tyrannical and their Left wing murderous. Justin Trudeau is a Marxist with a pretty face.

You do have to admit he is pretty. Not at all like his father Pierre.

Perhaps this is why people keep on arguing his real name is Justin Castreux. Far be it from me to fuel the flames of that unfair rumor. Who could believe that Justin looks more like Fidel than Pierre? I can’t even see why that rumor continues.

It does seem that whoever sired him that Justin admires Fidel’s politics more than his very liberal father. His statement on Fidel Castro’s death helped fuel the rumors. It was quite admiring:

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.

The Canadian Prime Minister’s admiration for Fidel clearly extends to and even beyond emulating Cuba’s decrepit health care system. While cleaner and brighter than Cuba’s, Canadian health care has replaced neglect as a killer with an antiseptic form of murder. It’s very Western, in a way. Rather than allowing people to die by neglect in hospitals, Canada sends doctors in white coats to dispatch their unwanted citizens.

Both Ed and I have written about Canada’s disgusting medical murder industry. Most Americans probably believe that Northern Europe would lead the world in euthanasia, but they would be wrong. Canada now leads in disposing of human beings by white coated murderers, and is even about to legalize the suicide of so-called “mature minors” without parental consent.

Hearing loss, depression, and indeed any physical or mental disability is considered a reason for murdering a person through assisted suicide. And if the idea doesn’t occur to you on your own, the medical professionals and even counselors will helpfully suggest offing yourself without prompting. In some cases they may even refuse a patient care as an incentive to wish for death.

They can’t just kill you without permission, but they sure can make you want to die.

That is the case with our latest victim of the Canadian health care system, Roger Foley.

Roger is suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease, and his future is not bright no matter what the doctors do. He is an expensive patient to care for, and he doesn’t have deep pockets to pay for that care. The government does, although it will never see any return on an investment in keeping Roger alive and functioning. A broken arm or a heart attack survivor can return to work and start paying taxes again, but Roger’s economic value to the state is entirely negative.

Best kill him, then.

So that is what the Ontario government through its hospital administrators are pushing for, by pressuring Roger to choose death over continued life.

“I’ve been pressured to do an assisted suicide,” he told The Post, alleging this happened with caretakers at Victoria Hospital, a primarily government-funded center in London, Ontario.

“They asked if I want an assisted death. I don’t. I was told that I would be charged $1,800 per day [for hospital care]. I have $2 million worth of bills. Nurses here told me that I should end my life. That shocked me.”

Canada has free health care, right? Well, not so much for Roger. They want their $2 million and $1800 a day to take care of him. Or they could provide him a comfortable death.

While Foley — who suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a disease that attacks the brain and muscles — has Ontario’s provincially funded insurance, OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan), it pays only for “basic medical and emergency services,” he said. The 47-year-old has been bedridden for around six years and needs continual help in order to eat, wash and sit up.

Assisted suicide has been legal in Canada since 2016. According to Forbes, Canada leads the world in assisted suicides, with 10,064 in 2021 as compared to 7,666 in the Netherlands. Eighty-one percent of global requests for medically-induced deaths were honored in Canada.

Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described the law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

I think we all would appreciate free health care if we ran into an emergency, but clearly there are downsides. Such as, perhaps, having bureaucrats consult their Excel tables to determine whether helping you out has a good return on investment. Roger undoubtedly doesn’t–and there is no conceivable case to be made that his life is worth saving if economic considerations were the only ones we cared about.

In fact, there are large categories of people who are drags on economic productivity. However, as archaeologists can tell you, from the dawn of civilization human beings have looked after our old and weak to the extent we possibly can because–well, they are human beings and have ineffable value.

Love trumps money. Even Neanderthals understood this.

Not in Canada, though. Have hearing loss and depression? We can off you for free!

“Mr. Foley was told by hospital staff that he had stayed at the hospital for too long and if he did not receive self-directed funding [from local agencies, covering home care], he should apply for assisted death as an option,” the lawsuit claims.

It goes on to accuse the defendants of “sending a collection agency after [Foley] to pressure him into a medically assisted death,” adding that “defendants have violated [Foley’s] rights and freedom.”

Marie-Claude Landry, head of Canada’s Human Rights Commission, has stated that euthanasia “cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligation.”

The pro-euthanasia group, Dying with Dignity, says that euthanasia procedures are “driven by compassion, an end to suffering and discrimination, and desire for personal autonomy.” But human-rights advocates argue that legalized euthanasia has gone too far in Canada — claiming that safeguards are missing; that suicidal measures are being suggested to people who would not consider it on their own; and that suicides are being done for people who have other options.

The medically assisted suicide of Alan Nichols in 2019 has been held up as an example. The 61-year-old was depressive and reportedly suicidal. Canadian law requires patients can only legally undergo medically-assisted suicide if they suffer from a physical — not mental — ailment. Nichols, it is reported in an article by Associated Press, listed hearing loss as his reason for euthanasia. Relatives maintain that hospital employees helped him to put in the request.

“He didn’t have a life-threatening disease,” his brother Gary Nichols told CTV news. “I didn’t think he had a sound mind at all.”

Foley’s health has never been good, but he worked for the National Bank of Canada for years until his condition made doing so impossible. Because his medical condition is progressive and attacks his nerves and muscles, he is now incapable of taking care of himself without constant assistance. Unquestionably his life would have been over already but for living in the 21st century in a Western industrialized society with exceptional medical care.

Canadian bureaucrats, looking at the situation, clearly believe that his being able to survive is a shame, and are determined to correct that.

These days, in order to get out of bed, he requires the use of a Hoyer Lift — machinery that hoists him into a sitting position and helps him maneuver around. Foley cannot operate this himself, he said, nor is he able to feed himself or to even take a spoonful of medicine on his own.

He claims that, for a period of time, the hospital did not provide a Hoyer Lift or personnel to operate it. “I almost died because I could not have food or water for days,” Foley said. “If I can’t sit up, I can’t swallow food without choking.”

The lawsuit references “the defendants denying him food and water, and failing to provide him with the necessities of life and endangering his life [by] making him critically acidotic [a condition in which there is too much acid in bodily fluids].”

The neglect is not from 3rd rate home care assistants who are underpaid and unreliable–this is taking place in a hospital and being perpetrated by doctors and other medical professionals.

It’s not just chronically ill patients being pressured into what Canada calls Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD. The Veterans’ Affairs department has tried to pressure veterans with PTSD to kill themselves, and soon children will be on the chopping block as well. Actually, children already are, if parents want to off their children. Soon the children themselves will have the right to choose death without their parents’ permission.

All of this was predictable. The Left is all about performative compassion, not actual compassion. It was the tyrants of the French Revolution who promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, filled with high minded sentiments and profound declarations regarding human worth. And it was those same tyrants who ran The Terror, using the guillotine to kill by the thousand in order to keep people in line.

I have always admired Canada without fetishizing it. The cities are clean and the people are nice. But watch out for the leaders and their doctors. The only thing nice about them is the smile on their face as they approach you with the killing needle.