Our three founding members were Patricia Seeley, Vernon Jones and Brenda Marceau. Our intention was to build a board and membership consisting of disabled and disability-adjacent people from a diversity of disability and cultural experiences. Although the “non-profit organization” we tried to establish no longer exists, our Vision, Mission and Goals still stand.
Vision
We aspire to be proud citizens of our country, Canada. The Canada we want to live in would value, support and celebrate the lives of people of all ages with disabilities of all kinds.
Mission
We want to shift cultural views in favour of equally valuing the inherently dignified lives of all Canadians.
We believe that there are historic inequalities in our treatment of disabled people that must be acknowledged and addressed.
We are not opposed to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) for people who are dying.
We are strongly opposed to the expansion of MAiD to people who are not dying, as set out in law in 2021. We believe that so-called Track 2 MAiD endangers the lives of people with disabilities who, in moments of weakness, will be pressured to request MAiD rather than continue to demand adequate financial and social supports. We want the Government of Canada to repeal that legislation.
Medical assistance in dying, as first enacted in response to the Supreme Court’s Carter decision (as Bill C-14, 2015), introduced an informed and thoughtful approach that met the need to provide assisted death upon request to people with and without disabilities whose suffering was grievous and irremediable, and whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable. This is the standard that we advocate should be maintained.
Our Goal
Our main goal was to become effective allies for people with disabilities who are struggling with all kinds of intersecting levels of oppression. Although our organizational goals were not met, we hope that having articulated these goals will not have been in vain.
We strongly believed that, with media exposure, Canadians would wake up to the frightening state of affairs that has befallen people with disabilities, particularly those living in conditions of legislated poverty, in this wealthy country. People are being put in the position of having to “choose” death because they cannot afford to live. Inadequate palliative care, inadequate pain management, inadequate, unsafe and unaffordable housing, inadequate personal care, discriminatory COVID-19 and other medical treatment and support, inadequate suicide prevention counselling and other supports have allowed MAID to loom as a cheap and readily available “solution”. We find this appalling and we stand opposed to it!
Hello. I’m wondering if you will take additions to your “Remembering Lives Lived”. I know of someone who died by MAID primarily because she couldn’t get her pain managed. But there was a couple open sourced articles about her. I’m wondering if and how I could go about this addition to your website?
Yes, of course, KC! If you have links to the articles, please reply to this message with the link(s). Usually I source from published papers, and they usually have photos that I can “screen grab”. If your links have both text and photo, I can easily add your friend to the Remembering page. And please accept my condolences on the loss of your friend.
I can work with whatever you have, no worries!