Jacques Comeau, 66, has applied for what is referred to in Canada as “medical assistance in dying”, known as MAiD, due to failures of home care provision that have left him feeling desperate and abandoned by his country’s health services.

“I can’t live that way”, said Comeau after his local health service replaced his usual provision of familiar orderlies, knowing his exact needs and requirements, with a succession of random and indelicate attendants.

Consequently, Comeau, a quadriplegic from Montreal in Canada, is applying for assisted suicide as he looks in desperation for a solution to his plight.

“I’m stressed beyond belief, I’m not sleeping well, I’m not eating regularly”, Comeau said. “The amount of pain I’m dealing with, psychologically, is the kind I’ve never dealt with… I wake up in the morning, and my first thought is, ‘How am I going to make sure I’m not going to kill myself today.’”

Despite reaching out to his health service, Comeau’s pleas for a bearable solution have been ignored. “I was totally taken aback… Is my life going to be sitting in front of a TV, wearing a diaper, sitting in stool all day long? Is that what my life is going to be?

“The biggest problem is, I get up in the morning, I don’t know who’s coming, how it’s going to go. So I’m constantly on edge wondering what’s happening.”

Feeling disregarded, depressed and desperate, Comeau has now arranged to be assessed for assisted suicide. “I’ve done everything, I’ve paid my taxes, I’ve contributed to society, but here I am”, Comeau concluded.

The situation in Canada

Since the introduction of MAiD in 2016, assisted suicide has killed 31,664 people in Canada (as of 31 December 2021).

Earlier this year, SPUC reported on the story of Denise, a disabled Canadian woman, 31, who was conditionally granted assisted suicide after requesting to die because she was living in “abject poverty”.

In 2021, 10,064 assisted deaths were registered in Canada alone, leading The Lancet, the prominent medical journal, to remark on the “worryingly high number” of assisted suicides in Canada after the expansion of MAiD.

“What was originally conceived as an exceptional practice in medicine has quickly become normalised. Even before the law is set to be expanded to include mentally ill patients, we already have worryingly high numbers of people dying”, wrote Professor Trudo Lemmens of the University of Toronto.

To meet the increasing demand for assisted suicide, Canadian funeral homes are now offering “dystopian” assisted suicide rooms for individuals to die in.

An “appallingly neglectful case”

SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “Here is yet another shocking example of the dire and often fatal situation arising in Canada, where many vulnerable Canadians, failed by the system, are turning to assisted suicide – if only because, since 2016, that is the only option available to them.

“But what option is it really when such persons are abandoned by those claiming to care for their wellbeing?

“Increasingly we see how assisted suicide is replacing care and compassion. The very legislation of MAiD is self-perpetuating, imposing a throwaway culture that speeds poor souls to needless premature deaths instead of working to find a solution to their problems, as is clear in the appallingly neglectful case of Mr Comeau.

“SPUC hopes that a real solution can be found for Mr Comeau, quickly, before it is too late. His story stands as a warning to us all of the threat posed by assisted suicide. At a time when such legislation is being considered for the UK, at Holyrood and Westminster, legislators and the public must be made aware of this danger and wholly reject death in favour love, life and true care.”

To read about SPUC’s ongoing campaign against assisted suicide in the UK, please visit our Lives Worth Living webpage.