How poverty, not pain, is driving Canadians with disabilities to consider medically-assisted death – National | Globalnews.ca: “We’re
hearing about people who are choosing medical assistance in dying or
thinking about it more because they don’t have money to live.”
Dr. Dosani is a palliative care physician and professor of community and family medicine at the University of Toronto.
“People are living in abject poverty when they’re on social assistance, in almost every province and territory across Canada.”
The
numbers are grim. Looking across the country, provincial disability
support rates vary from a low of $705 per month in New Brunswick, to a
high of $1,685 in Alberta. Try getting by on $1,228 per month in
Toronto, or $1,358 in Vancouver, where the average rent on a one-bedroom
apartment is about $2,500.
The result is that according to a 2017 report from Statistics Canada,
nearly a quarter of disabled people are living in poverty. That’s
roughly 1.5 million people, or a city about the population of Montreal.
“When
people are living in such a situation where they’re structurally placed
in poverty, is medical assistance in dying really a choice or is it
coercion? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves,” Dr. Dosani
says.
