A couple of months ago, Angelina Ireland was invited to speak at the Bringing America Back to Life conference in Cleveland.
It’s billed as one of the largest gatherings of the Christian right in the world. Ms. Ireland, from Delta, B.C., was asked to recount her experiences as the president of a hospice society that has gained notoriety in this country for its efforts to ban medical assistance in dying (MAID) from taking place in its facility.
Ms. Ireland told her mainly U.S. audience that she was arriving with a warning: What was happening in Canada would soon be showing up in their country. “It’s like a contagion.” But first she wanted to clarify her bona fides. “I’m a wife, I’m a mother, I’m a Catholic, I’m pro-life, I’m pro-family and I’m pro-gun.”
A resumé that won a healthy round of applause from the crowd.
I recently watched her nearly hour-long appearance in mid-March on YouTube. It was quite a performance. The picture she painted of life in this country since the government decriminalized medical assistance in dying in 2016 was frightening. Among the things she declared:
That the legislation has ushered in the “dawn of the death industry.” Ms. Ireland defended her stance against MAID by saying she is president of the “Delta Hospice Society, not the Delta Auschwitz Society.” When the B.C. government threatened to strip the society’s funding if it didn’t offer MAID services, she said, it was effectively an order: “Kill or be killed.”
Ms. Ireland also cautioned her audience that this is coming to the U.S., and they need to start developing strategies to fight it “before they compel you to kill your neighbours and your family – because that’s where we are.”
She said there was legislation being drafted that will make MAID available to not just the elderly, but to the disabled, the mentally challenged and children. She offered up the scenario of parents getting a call from a distraught teenager who’d just broken up with her boyfriend wanting to take advantage of MAID. “This is what’s happening now [in Canada],” said Ms. Ireland, who was an unsuccessful candidate for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada in the last election. She characterized what was taking place here as “stone-cold communism” and “cultural Marxism.”
When she was asked by someone in the audience what they could do to help, Ms. Ireland said, “The best thing you could do is vote President Trump back in the next election.”
There was more – lots more. But you get the idea.
As we say, Ms. Ireland is at the centre of a debate in Delta over a hospice’s right to deny MAID services. She has organized a special meeting of the society next week in the hopes of altering the organization’s constitution to establish it as a Christian-based body. It would have the rejection of MAID entrenched in its bylaws.
Under the language being proposed, any attempt to overturn that bylaw, once passed, would require consent by 100 per cent of the members – a near impossibility as long as the organization has a prominent base of people supporting the mandate being propagated by Ms. Ireland.
Recently, there have been allegations that the current board has been stacking the membership with supporters ahead of the critical June 15 meeting - while denying membership to others who disagree with the direction the society is taking. Ms. Ireland denies this.
What is taking place at the hospice society is simply wrong. The fact is, while it may be a private institution, it was built with money raised from the broader community. It was always intended to meet the needs of those contributors as well. I doubt many donated hoping that one day the society would be taken over by a closed-minded religious element that imposed its Christian canon on the operation.
The province has promised to cut off the $1.5-million in operating funds that go to the Delta Hospice every year if it doesn’t comply with government policy to offer the services of MAID. If the society persists on its present course, the government could move in and close the facility down — it owns the land on which the facility was built.
In some respects, the province must own part of this dispute. The government has offered MAID exemptions to faith-based facilities. This exemption has been linked to the exclusion offered under the federal legislation to doctors who have a “conscientious objection” to participating in the MAID program.
The B.C. government should rethink this policy. It’s one thing to absolve an individual whose conscience won’t allow them to perform a certain procedure. It’s another to give the same pass to a facility that is supposed to serve a broad, polylithic community.
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Gary Mason