True North

One Canadian veteran has had enough of Canada’s euthanasia program after hearing her peers were offered death as an alternative to potentially life-saving healthcare.

Kelsi Sheren is the CEO of Brass and Unity, a jewellery company which works to prevent military veterans from committing suicide. 

Sheren served as an artillery specialist and a female searcher during the war in Afghanistan after enlisting at 19 years old. She was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder upon her return home to Canada.

Having considered suicide regularly after returning from war,  Sheren views herself as someone who could have been a candidate for euthanasia.

She started her fight against Canada’s “medical assistance in dying” program after hearing her fellow veterans had been offered assisted suicide at a time when accessing treatments can be difficult.

She told True North in an interview at a pro-life conference in Mississauga on Saturday that she faced more barriers accessing psychedelic plant medicines through Canada’s special access program than many Canadians face to access state-sanctioned suicide.

“Why is it that we can access death care, but we can’t access a genuine treatment that can help us become a functioning healthy, taxpaying part of society?” Sheren said.

She credits plant medicine therapy such as ayahuasca and psilocybin treatments for her mental health recovery.

“We have plant medicine which solves a significant amount of psychological issues, and trauma, and we can use those things but when we have our hands tied behind our back and bricks tied to our feet, how do you expect us to heal?” she said.

Sheren, with the help of lawyers, had to pay out-of-pocket, wait months, and wade through bureaucracy to access what she considered to be a potentially life-affirming treatment, while her fellow service members were being offered MAiD when they asked for support. 

“My issue with (euthanasia) is how we are killing people and how we have a predatory behaviour of telling individuals that they can’t heal, they can’t get better, and the solution to their problems is death,” she said. 

For Sheren, the solution for many veterans is in healthcare and treatment.

She said the government shouldn’t be in charge of the program, because many of the problems that lead someone to want suicide could be a result of the government’s mismanagement.

“We don’t look after our own people. We send our money to other places, our schools are overflowing and there are not enough teachers, classrooms, housing or jobs,” she said. “We charge people astronomical amounts to live here, and then we wonder why people want to die.” 

Aside from what she views as the government creating a stronger incentive to kill off the most vulnerable than it is to fix issues in the country, Sheren also objects to the process of killing itself.

She pointed to studies conducted by anesthesiologist and intensive care medicine specialist Dr. Joel Zivot on the effects of paralytic drugs in capital punishment, drugs that he said are similar to those used in the death cocktails offered by doctors in the “MAiD” program.

In an interview with True North, Zivot warned that the use of paralytics in Canada’s “MAiD” system may be giving patients a “terrifying” death rather than the peaceful death many advocates of the program say it is.

Though there haven’t been large-scale autopsies to study the effects of MAiD, Zivot found that 79% of U.S. prisoners had a “bloody frothy liquid” in their lungs after being executed with two paralytic drugs.

He said paralytics such as rocuronium, which is used in Canada’s euthanasia programs, can do the same thing as the drugs used to execute those prisoners in the U.S., in a process he said was “akin to waterboarding.”

“(Parilytics) have no effect on unconsciousness or pain control, when a person is given only a paralytic they would be very much awake and very much in pain,” Zivot said. “Outwardly, if you looked at a person who was paralyzed, you know, it might look very peaceful because, of course, they wouldn’t be moving at all…but on the inside their internal experience could be quite terrifying.”

He said MAiD practitioners are “suffocating people to death.”

Some euthanasia-performing doctors have disputed Zivot’s claims saying patients would be in a coma during the time of death and wouldn’t feel the pain Zivot described.

Zivot also warned that the system is being used to bypass long-standing rules that prevent organ donors from a donation that would kill them.

He said the allowance of donating organs such as lungs or hearts creates new incentives to kill people while using “MAiD” to harvest their organs.