ABLEISM ENTRENCHED: Inside the Pedagogical Politics of Canada’s MAiD Curriculum

Abstract

This article seeks to illuminate the chasm that exists between the promise of a stringent, humane and equitable MAiD regime and the actual realities of MAiD for non-dying persons [known as Track 2, or “T2 MAiD”]. It arises from efforts and observations during the course of a two-year engagement with the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers [CAMAP], primarily as a member of a working group tasked with development of one of the course modules for a national program of MAiD practitioner training. During that time, the author learned much about the ideological culture within which T2 MAiD is practised, the considerations that play out in clinical MAiD assessments and the life circumstances of disabled persons who are deemed ‘eligible’ for T2 MAiD. Her good faith efforts of two years revealed to her that the only way that high-ranking practitioners and advocates in positions of authority can justify MAiD Track 2 practice is if it is shorn of any critical reflection about how dominant ableist assumptions have historically shaped and continue to shape the lives, realities, suffering and death of disabled persons. Such reflection, the author concludes, is antithetical to MAiD Track 2. As the suffering of social and material deprivation, stigma, trauma and toxic insecurity afflict more and more disabled Canadians, modern medicine has failed to evolve to meet the challenge of tending to our pain. Entrusted instead with a straightforward, deadly, but sure-fire “cure” for complex human suffering, the institutions of medical authority – self-governing regulatory colleges and influential practitioners who established and now lead CAMAP – embraced the law and made it their own. Along the way, they shed any sense of obligation to understand the problem of human suffering more deeply, to engage in critical ethical reflection, or to respond with the time-consuming and painstaking work of life-affirming care.