Not that we object to the Star editorial board clearing its eyes of the very MAiD moonshine it has helped spread even before the practice of injecting poison into Canadian patients was legalized in 2016. Better late than never is, well, at least something that isn’t nothing. And if it plays a part in freeing Canada as a country from going boldly where no other jurisdiction on the planet has been mad enough to go, God bless us everyone.

Saints preserve us, the Nov. 25 Star editorial was as unequivocal as it’s possible for flamboyantly fashionable ideologues to be in calling for a halt to death by public health care. “We need to put the brakes on expanding access to MAiD and, while the matter is reviewed, improve social supports for those suffering not from terminal illness, but from poverty and despair,” it concluded.

The obvious initial question is why it took so long to recognize something that was so obvious from the time it was initiated. Contrary to the argument in the editorial, and indeed percolating up through other quarters as well, our current MAiD mania has been perfectly predictable for almost a quarter century. 

Anyone paying attention saw it seep inexorably through Canadian society following the 1993 Rodriguez decision when the Supreme Court of Canada firmly shut down the prospect of health care lethal injection sites. By 2015, when the justices reversed themselves and came to the borderline lunatic conclusion in the Carter case that it was a breach of Charter rights to prevent people from committing suicide now in case they might not be able to commit suicide later, the die was cast.

Cardinal Thomas Collins, testifying at a joint Commons-Senate committee hearing on proposed medical homicide legislation, was among the most vigorous of Catholic voices warning no bill could stand against such deepening of the culture of obliteration. “Pish-posh,” the State injection intelligentsia insisted, “there will be safeguards.” Indeed there would. And the ink wasn’t dry on them before the lobbying grew furious to eliminate limits and expand access. So here we are, six years later, the world’s leading MAiD country where everything from non-terminal illness to mental health disability to poverty qualifies for a final shot in the arm. 

Now the woke awaken, at the Star and elsewhere. Except their eyes are not yet fully open. They properly see that pushing people to medico-technocratic annihilation because of “poverty and despair” is an abomination. But they can’t yet see that our real poverty and despair are  spiritual disorders. They embody that blindness that led us to confuse homicide by suicide with enlightenment rather than locating it in the heart of darkness.