Thank you.
Thank you for having me here on the unceded territories of the Algonquin people.
I research institutions for disabled people, an ongoing phenomenon stretching back more than a century and a half in Canada. As a result, I have sifted through hours of class action settlements and years of inquests, archives and interviews with survivors, all replete with the stories of death of friends, roommates, fellow inmates and disabled people who died by suicide, who hanged themselves from the rafters or died by suicide years after they had escaped the institution but were still haunted by their experiences inside it.
For many years these suicides were a catalyst for great social change, resulting in government commissions and inquiries into these deaths. Last week Minister David Lametti expressed the intention of track two MAID being necessary because disabled people are unable to complete suicides.
As a researcher of institutions, I find the fallacy of this argument troubling.
For the last century and a half, disabled people have been trapped in institutions away from their communities, reduced to a point of efficiency, a mere practicality. These institutions, which were used as tools for eugenics, removed disabled people from society and prevented their reproduction.
Today the same logic is maintained in institutions, where access to pleasure, leisure or pain management is seemingly non-existent. Instead, these institutions, such as prisons, long-term care homes and psychiatric institutions, maintain conditions of neglect, isolation and such disregard for individual autonomy that it produces depression and suicidality both in people inside the institution and in those who fear it in their future. People are very clear in their discussions with me: They would rather die than live in an institution.
Historically, deaths have been one of the few windows into institutions—sometimes murky windows, as in the case of the Huronia Regional Centre, where the deaths were hidden away in mass graves without markers or names. The view into institutions, no matter how murky, is a view into austerity and privatization that yield bedsores, neglect and forced feeding.
We had a view inside the institutions where people use MAID, such as Chris Gladders' retirement home, before you passed track two changes. There, feces stain the floor. Instead of cleaning it up, you made changes to expand track two. Now the deaths have become so frequent that we are haunted by the possibility of loss at all times.
Because of track two MAID, disabled people are dying en masse in institutions they had been fighting to leave. These were beautiful lives. As disabled persons, we look into the windows of these institutions and we fight as hard as we can for a way out for all of us, not just for an individual through an individual death.
You ask us for the protections of disabled people. It is clear that track two MAID must be ended.
When you look inside these windows smashed open by dead bodies, you see people suffering from the conditions that you yourself created. Instead of offering a solution, a help out the door through provisions of accessible housing, home care and pain management, you offer people death.
Do not be mistaken: This provision of death for disabled people under track two MAID is eugenics, and it must be repealed as soon as possible.
We must look at the political economy for the timing of these decisions. Why now, with the increase of pandemics and incurable illnesses, such as COVID and long COVID? Why now, with pandemic health care rationing and with health care under the budget axe?
The expansion of MAID must be viewed within the context of the economic order we live under that is eviscerating the social contract by encouraging government to retreat from its responsibilities for the public's welfare and to instead kill us. You feel generous providing mercy from the austerity that you have designed.
To all of you, disabled people do not need your help to die. You have been killing us for years. We need your help to get out of the institution you trapped us in. The only safeguard against MAID is foreseeable death.