Sheila Gunn-Reid and Kian Simone’s MAID, The Dark Side of Canadian Compassion documentary exposes Canada’s euthanasia program’s systemic failures, including $8M Delta Hospice expropriation for refusing MAID providers, healthy individuals coerced into death, and veterans denied access. Gunn-Reid argues expansion to minors or mental illness risks abuse, diverting palliative care funds toward "death care." The project challenges MAID’s portrayal as compassion, framing it as abandonment, while referencing vaccine injury programs where two-thirds of compensation funds benefit consultants over victims. Their goal: equip future generations to reject euthanasia as a false solution. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Hey everybody, I'm sure you noticed a bit of a change in scenery.
I'm out on the road with my friend and videographer Kian Simone.
Actually, he's the chief documentary filmmaker here at Rebel News.
And the reason we're traveling right now, currently in Ottawa in an Airbnb that we're using as a studio and HQ, is that we are working on our documentary on Canada's medical assistance in dying.
It's called MAID, The Dark Side of Canadian Compassion.
And we just wanted to give you an update about the status of the documentary.
I know many of you have contributed.
And if you'd like to, you can do that at made documentary.com.
But we're hard at work.
We've gathered up a bunch of interviews already, people from all walks of life.
And I thought, since I owe you folks a gun show, that we would sit down and just give you a bit of an update and tell you a little bit of what we've heard so far.
Just a bit of a sneak peek for our regular viewers.
Kian, thanks for taking the time since you were sitting on the other side of the table just a couple minutes ago and you can't go anywhere without me because I have the keys to the rental car.
This has been a challenging documentary because we are crisscrossing the country.
We were in BC last week.
We're in Ontario this week.
We're in Toronto.
We're in London, Ottawa.
But the stories are tough to listen to.
I didn't realize it would be that hard to hear from some of these families.
And I don't know why I thought that because we are stepping into them to hear the story of the day a nuclear bomb went off in the middle of their lives.
It takes a lot to have to remove yourself from the interview and just listen and not have the sniffles in the background while I'm pressing record.
Yeah, it's tough.
One of the reasons we're in Ottawa right now is because we attended a summit on MAID, what I think is probably Canada's largest summit on medical assistance in dying, and it was about the Christian response to MAID.
And so we're trying to go and get stories from all aspects of this issue.
Families who are supportive of MAID, but disagree with how it happened to them, people who have experienced MAID in their family under the previous protocols, people who have been offered MAID but were basically perfectly healthy.
Tell us, you know, give us a little bit of a sneak preview of some of the things we're going to include in the documentary.
I think the not so funny part about that is we had a plan to talk to people.
And while we were in places like BC, you would just get an email saying, hey, this is happening because we had that email that went out asking for people's stories.
So we'd already be somewhere and then we'd get an email saying this happened three, six months ago.
And we're like, okay, now we have another interview.
And I think some of our most important interviews came that way.
And I think in regards to a sneak peek, it really is just like that sporadic moment of, holy ass, like, holy crap, this is the craziest thing that I've ever heard with MAID beyond the veteran stories.
And I can't even give a sneak peek on the one I want to give a sneak peek on because they have some big news coming with that.
But I think it's just, it has been hard, but it also has been, it's been a very great feeling knowing that we're doing such important work on such an important story.
Yeah, I mean, one of the big stories that we can't really talk about, but I'm glad to say that we were involved and were able to do just a little bit more than tell this story.
Came to us when we were sitting at the airport waiting for our respective flights to come home.
You were headed back to Calgary and me to Edmonton, and then you were on the phone as we were waiting for our flights to come in.
And one of the things I've noticed, and I've said this to people who ask us sort of why we're making the documentary, is that our emails are divided when they come to us.
It is people who, as you say, are saying, I've got a crazy story to tell.
You're never going to believe what's happening to my family or my grandma or whomever.
And the other half of the emails I'm getting are people saying, Sheila and Kian, it's nowhere near as bad as what you're presenting it to be.
They are not actively trying to kill people who are not within hours of their imminent death.
They're not already trying to kill the mentally ill.
You guys are exaggerating.
This is just a conspiracy theory.
And for me, those two sides are exactly why we have to do the documentary, because there are so many important stories to be told because those stories are going to be what informs that other group of people who think that we are just completely off our rockers.
I would say that I would, before we did this, started this documentary, I sat with the people who would email us and say, it can't be that crazy.
It can't be that bad.
And my line was crossed before that when they started talking about adding people with mental illness to the expansion.
But this documentary, it felt more like it was yours at the time before.
And I was happy to do it.
Yeah.
Of course.
But now I feel like it's mine because I now stand with the other side.
And I think a little bit more extreme that this should not be a thing at all.
I know people who have gotten made and inside it kind of made sense why they got it.
And just after hearing more, with my job, I'm 20% removed from a lot of the stories that I don't particularly have my foot in because I'm working on bigger, like not bigger stories, but other big stories that I can't really diverge my attention over.
But now that I have, it's been insane.
So yeah, I stand with the other side now.
Yeah, I think it's a testament though to you as a filmmaker.
And I think as I don't want to even say that you're a conservative, but I think the political spectrum is closed-minded and not willing to hear the other side and people who are willing to listen and are open to their viewpoints changing.
And I think that's how you approach this.
Your mind wasn't turned off to hearing the arguments from people who say, we opened a door here the day we made this legal for people whose deaths were imminent and something else marched through and now we don't know how to close that door.
Yeah, and I guess looking at a lot of the opposition to MAID, 90% of it I want to say, and from what I saw was just from the more religious folk.
And as many people who watch this show know, I'm not religious at all and I have trouble standing with them on a lot of this stuff that they right.
You look at it through a secular worldview.
Knew that the pastors who are being arrested, being arrested for going to church was wrong.
Yeah, but you didn't wrong.
You didn't have to believe in what they believe to feel that way.
And I think you're approaching this kind of the same way.
Yeah, so it's been great to put 100% of my attention in on being able to look at it set aside from the religious perspective and then also set aside from the perspective of when I came into it, where I kind of agreed with the first stage of MAID, but now I don't.
So I think it's going to be great for the documentary too because I'm going to be able to make it from that perspective of kind of an evolution of MAID.
Of when majority of Canadians said, okay, this kind of makes sense.
Some people, it's a way out.
And then it's going to kind of go along into, no, that's not the way out.
Right.
And here are the people that you should not be trusting your way out with.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, we're stepping, as I said, into families who are explaining the worst tragedy that has ever happened to them.
And for them, we've heard, you know, where's the compassion for us?
There is no end to our suffering because this was not just done to our loved one, but it was also done to us.
And there's very little support for those people.
We have these well-funded activists like dying with dignity pushing and advancing this agenda for anybody who feels an inconvenience in their lives at this point.
And it's families that are just ruined in the wake of it.
Yeah, I think the most powerful thing I've heard throughout our month now of interviewing people is someone said that when you decide that my life is not worth living anymore, your compassion is a threat to my life.
Yeah.
It really stuck with me.
Yeah.
I think I might open up the documentary with that quote.
That's great.
That's great.
Now, for people who don't know, can you sort of set out the kinds of people that we're talking to?
Because it's not just families, it's not just people who've experienced this.
We're really trying to get a global view of what's unfolding in Canada.
Yeah, I think it's starting with, I think, the most important people to talk to are the families.
Right.
And also the people who kind of survived this.
But we're also talking to activists who are along our side with kind of the angle that we're going to and veterans who are alongside other veterans who are offered it and veterans who were offered it.
And also talking to smart people, as I like to call them, people who are really physicians.
They're in it.
They are opposed to it.
Or I would love to even speak with a physician who is with it.
As you know, we reached out, no one would.
So it really is a broad spectrum.
A lot of, I saw a lot of the emails that came in, and especially to our forum that we offered people to tell their story so that we could do it.
And a lot of the negative ones were assuming that we wouldn't talk to people who are on the other side of Pro-Made.
And it really got me thinking when I made the Trucker documentary, I would have loved to speak to someone who was anti-trucker.
I think you can be anti-blocking all the roads in Ottawa.
I think that's fair.
You can do that if you are on the other political side.
I would have loved to speak to someone with Church Under Fire who has said, you know, that COVID is whatever and these people shouldn't have opened up their churches.
I could have spoken with them.
I'm sure you could have too and had like a big broad spectrum of opinions.
And I think it would have worked.
But with this, I don't care to speak to the other side because I don't think it's a political issue.
They're literally killing people.
I have a lot nastier things that I would want to say.
And there is always a time for dialogue, but I don't think when it comes to killing people that you need to speak to them.
Like you don't need to speak to them.
Yeah.
And frankly, these people don't need to speak to us.
They are the ones constantly courted in the media.
They're the ones constantly courted by the government and funded by the government to advance this agenda.
They have everybody in the whole wide world to speak to.
They have the entire mainstream media.
Their ideas are already being pushed in the House of Commons.
I think it's our job, as we say at Rebel News, to tell the other side of the story.
And I think that's exactly what we're doing here.
We're telling the stories of the people who are being shut out.
And, you know, considering things that I hadn't considered.
And I think about issues of life because I look at this through a religious worldview, but I also look at it through a scientific worldview.
So I'm one of those people who thinks, you know, we're created in the image of God and that makes us worthy of life.
And I don't think suffering is a fatal illness.
I think suffering is part of the human condition, as Jordan Peterson would say.
But we're hearing things that I had never considered.
And I would like to think that I'm somewhat attuned to what's going on with MAID, like the actual process of what happens, like the actual medicines that a doctor or a nurse practitioner in the case of Canada will come and administer you a series of cocktails.
I'd also never even thought of how it happens.
Like we heard that in Ontario, it's like less, literally less than a handful of people who are administering this to themselves, which is an option.
It's almost exclusively medical killing.
I had never even considered that.
I just thought people were taking the prescription, going home and dying quietly at home.
That's not at all what's happening.
It's sort of systemic and sterile and assembly lined.
The way I look at it, as I said before, my line was crossed when they opened it up to a mental illness or at least tried to.
And they will.
They would have loved to kill me when I was 18 so they can kick rocks.
Systemic Sterile MAID00:10:05
Yeah.
Yeah, and we've heard that over and over again.
We've heard that some of the family members who are left behind say, my depression was so bad in the wake of this MAID death that if it were open to the mentally ill, I would have accessed this too.
And I'm so glad it wasn't available to me.
We're hearing over and over, like young people saying, if I were able to do this when I was 18, I would have done it, but look at me now.
And you're saying that too.
People like that, they have the will.
And I don't disagree that they don't, because a lot of people who struggle with suicidality, like myself, they have the will to do it, but they don't have the means.
A lot of people don't really think about what goes on inside their head when they're actually vulnerable with themselves, when they struggle with suicidality.
They can ask themselves questions that other people could never have asked.
Like, who's going to find my body?
Who do I want to find my body?
It takes that all out of it.
It removes everything that nobody really, and it's not their fault that they don't think about it.
I don't blame them for not thinking about it, but that's what people think about.
And that is the means of which the government can give them that opportunity that they would have otherly not had.
Right.
It removes that little bit of sober second thought, you know, like, oh my God, I don't want my mom or my dad to find me in my closet.
Or what if nobody finds my body?
Or is it going to hurt?
Well, no, you have a doctor saying, actually, I'm going to administer this first drug.
Yeah, just close your eyes.
Then you'll just close your eyes.
And then the next drug is going to be a paralytic so that you just stop breathing.
You suffocate because your muscles don't contract anymore.
And it's all those objections that would make someone say, look, I want to go, but I can't do this, which I think is an objection that saves a lot of lives.
That's gone.
And that's very frightening, especially when you see just how MAID has skyrocketed, like growing exponentially, 30% year over year, consistently, so that it's becoming one of the leading causes of death in this country.
And I think higher than we could imagine, because in BC and Ontario, they have recommended that doctors don't put MAID on the death certificate, just the cause of MAID or the reason they access MAID.
So I'm worried that once we open it up to the mentally ill, I just, I can't even imagine the absolute trauma.
I mean, I think it's going to grow because of the things we heard.
We heard families left behind saying, I became suicidal because of the damage.
Well, great.
We've got an easy way for you to join your loved one.
I'm just, I'm worried that it is just going to be a mushroom cloud of death in this country.
We've heard someone talk about how they, unbeknownst to them, drove their daughter to a MAID appointment when they thought it was a regular doctor's appointment.
Yeah.
And I can only think of a 16, 17, 18-year-old who would do that without telling their parents just because teenagers are secretive.
Exactly.
And that's scary because that's going to happen a lot more than someone who's struggling with something that now could be approved as MAID, which shouldn't be.
But then it just opens up that to every young person that goes through something slightly traumatic that just kind of throws them over the edge when they're struggling with something.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's the whole idea, and we're seeing this in some of the more radical jurisdictions of the world.
People point to the Netherlands all the time as this extreme culture of death.
And it really is.
Mature minors there can access MAID.
People who are just done living, just over it, they've checked all the things off their bucket list.
They can apply for MAID.
But it took them 22 years to get there.
We're catching up really fast.
In six, to the point where now we are considering the next expansion to MAID, it's recommended that it be mature minors too.
I don't even know what that means.
What is a mature minor?
I guess the kids who could go get vaccinated behind their parents' back, I guess.
I mean, we've already got some precedent for this.
It's the things we're hearing are difficult and important because one of the things that proponents of medical assistance in dying, it's not that, it's medical killing.
Let's call it what it is.
Is that they've made it so sterile.
It's clinical, it's compassionate, it's not dirty, it's, you know, just you'll drift off into a tomorrow land.
And I think what we're learning along the way is it is completely the opposite of that.
It is, it's really, it's a bloodbath without the blood.
And that's what I learned is actually, which I had no idea and didn't even think about it that way, is that that's only Canada, is that when you bring up the other countries that are kind of more advanced, I hate to say, they don't have it included in part of their medical system.
Canada is the only country in the world that has it included it in part of our, it's a step that you can take in the hospice.
It's like it's something that they can, that they will offer you.
You won't have to seek it out as easy.
And the other countries that it's separate, like they only do it in your home.
They only do it if you come seek it out, which is sad, but scarier that it's here in Canada, a part of our medical system.
Like it's a, it's, it's a part of the steps that they have the checklist of questions kind of thing.
They don't actually, but it's a part of it.
Yeah, you know, one of the things I learned from that MAID summit was that the funding for medical assistance and dying actually comes out of palliative care.
Yeah.
So when the federal government or the provincial government is announcing funding for palliative care, it's not really for palliative care because a portion of that is going directly to killing people.
So when we hear the government saying that they're giving supports to end of life, that's not it at all.
It's actually drawing funds away from proper end-of-life care and throwing it into the death care category.
Scary.
Yeah.
That's sneaky.
Yeah.
Like I think it would be a lot, I don't even know if we would be sitting here right now or traveling around and doing this documentary if they were just completely open with everything.
I think that we would still be doing our activism, still be doing journalism on it, but I don't think that we would be blowing it as wide open as we would be right now if they weren't so sneaky.
Right.
If they weren't hiding the funding in palliative care, if they weren't secretly trying to offer it to veterans or grandmas, if they weren't actively, and I hate to say it, it feels like they're trying to actively kill people.
Well, of course they are.
And they kind of boast about how more made means less money spent.
Yeah, and more organs harvested.
More organs harvested.
I just feel like we wouldn't be here if they weren't so sneaky.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, and punishing the objectors.
So we talked to a story that a person in a story that Drea Humphrey has covered extensively, and that is the Delta Hospice Society.
The Delta Hospice Society ran an $8 million privately funded, or at least they had crowdfunded the money to build the facility, a palliative care center, and a supportive care center.
So cancer patients who had recovered or learning to live with their diagnosis, they could go there too.
And they operated in partnership with the provincial government, but when they refused to allow the MAID providers into the facility, then the BC government just expropriated their facility, took an $8 million facility, didn't compensate the Delta Hospice Society, slapped a new name on it, and made it a place where they can kill their patients now.
It's insane.
I don't.
I don't know what else you can say.
And now at least the Delta Hospice Society, they recognize that you might be sending your grandma off to the doctor's office, but the doctor might be whispering in her ear a little bit about how you can just make it easier on your grandkids at the end of your life.
They send people to accompany people to their medical appointments to make sure they aren't coerced into medical killing.
It's a great idea.
I think it's great.
It's sad that we even had to come to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think for people who are worried about how their loved ones are being treated in the system, I think it's a great idea.
But one of the things we're also learning is there's not a lot of support, particularly in the West, for families who are trying to either save their loved one or who have experienced medical assistance in dying in their family.
There's almost nothing out there for them.
I have no words.
Well, I know.
I know.
I mean, if I just, they've never actually given any thought to the people left behind.
Supporting Those Left Behind00:06:17
Nobody really has.
There are a few organizations that are working hard, but they're like this big versus these other organizations that are actively pushing this culture of death.
And until there's some sort of balance between this and this, I don't know what's going to change.
I don't think you can have a balance anymore.
You just need to get rid of it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Kian, tell everybody how they can support the work that we're doing.
We're staying in an incredibly cheap Airbnb.
We're driving a very, very tiny rental car.
We are booking all of our interviews super duper close together.
We're living off bubbly water and coffee and Zen.
How do people support the documentary and see some of the work that we've already done?
Because we are posting little snippets of the things that we're doing.
Yeah, we set up a special website, made documentary.com.
We're crowdfunding the documentary in our travel or Airbnb.
I'm buying my own Zen.
That's right.
The nicotine's on him.
And you can donate to us and we set up some special perks that people can get depending on the level of donation.
I think it's super important because this is expensive to do.
It's not cheap at all.
And we really are living on shoestring budget.
And I only brought three sweaters, so I don't have to get another carry-on.
It's true, yeah.
But I think it's important to crowdfund this documentary because the documentary is the MAID issue is a lot bigger than the documentary.
And at least we can take a crack at it.
My first motivator to making the documentary was that I told my three friends back in Ontario of a group chat about what I was doing and not one of them even knew what MAID was.
And I wouldn't go to say that they're dumb people.
They know about Rebel.
They know about all the stuff that we do.
They know about all the stuff that's happening in the government, but they didn't even know what MAID was.
And I looked at some polls and I can't remember the numbers off by fact, but some people still, a lot of people don't know what it is.
And that was a huge motivator to me that even though at that time I wasn't really sitting on the side of let's abolish MAID altogether, I still wanted people to know about it so they can make their own decisions.
And now that I sit on the other side, I still want to do it in a fact that, sorry, in a way that people can at least know what MAID is, can see the evolution of at least my experience with how I learned to come, not to MAID, but come to MAID as a journalist.
The MAID is so much bigger because it is not just about what MAID is, is that there is a level of there, what MAID is to other people is abandonment by the medical system.
It's despair.
It's so much things that this documentary actually can't provide to people.
And that's my worry about the documentary.
I'll be open about it is that I, inside of me, I want to be able to give people something at the end of it like hope, and I'm going to try my best.
But I think it's important to one fund this documentary, to make it not in any order there, but because we need people to know what it is.
We need more people to know what it is, so that at least whoever watches it and knows someone, maybe they can give someone a sense of accompany, like accompany them in in their suffering, and that they, they will choose not to abandon people.
That is the only thing that I can do with this documentary, because you can't give someone their life back with a documentary, but you can at least equip someone with enough information that they can do it.
Yeah, and you know, that brings you back to something we heard over and over again, and the studies demonstrate it, it's that people are not accessing made because their suffering is too great or their death is imminent.
One of the number one reason they give for accessing made is that they don't feel useful or meaningful anymore, and so, as you say, that's despair, that's lack of hope, and so abandonment abandonment, and they've abandoned themselves to despair.
And so you know we, we've asked people who are, as they say, on the left, working in this space to offer their advice to people like you and I, who will definitely in our lifetime, encounter people who are idealizing made as a way out.
And what can we do and say to help those people feel meaningful and valuable and have purpose again, because it is really an epidemic about a lack of purpose that is leading people to access made and hopefully, hopefully we can change that, because once, once the culture adopts this, I don't know how we get it back.
Um, we saw through studies as I was researching for the accompanying book for this that in Holland, like 20 only, it's only 20 percent of people who object to giving euthanasia to people who are done with living.
There's only 20 opposition to that.
It's wide society adoption of just.
Well, if you, if you're done, you can just go, and I don't want Canada get to get there, I don't know what to do, but hopefully our documentary will help.
I big part of me is making this documentary for myself when I was 18, and I think of something that you said too is that as long as you can save one life.
But I think we need to be realistic that me, when i'm 18, i'm not going to watch this documentary, and someone who is suffering um, to the point of wanting to grab made they're probably not going to watch this documentary too.
But there are people out there who are watching this right now um, who will watch this documentary, and it's important for those people to share it so that someone like my friend when I was 18 can watch this documentary and then be equipped with Being able to help me, because I'm not going to, I wouldn't have watched it, but he might have or she might have.
Vaccine Injury Stories Needed00:04:35
Kean, thanks for sitting down with me.
Thanks for giving the viewers an update.
I said this about Church Under Fire, our last documentary.
I think that it was one of the most important things that we've done here at Rebel News to document the damage the government did to religious freedom.
And I will reiterate that sentiment for this documentary.
Not only do we have an obligation to tell the stories of these families and to tell them well, but to make a difference where we can when we see a great evil before us.
And I think that's what we're doing.
And I'm just so proud to work with you.
And I know you're going to do a great job.
Thanks.
We've come to the portion of the show wherein I invite your viewer feedback.
I know I say this every week, so it's probably sounding pretty redundant, but we get new people all the time, so we have to tell them the rules.
We have no Rebel News without Rebel News viewers.
So I care what you think about the work that we do here at Rebel News.
It's why I give you my email address right now at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gunshow letters in the subject line so I know exactly what you're talking about and why you're emailing me because I do get dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails a day, depending on what sort of controversial nonsense I've said or done on the internet.
So gun show letters in the subject line.
I'll find it.
But don't let that be the bar for entry and participation.
If you're watching the free version of the show, be it on YouTube or Rumble, and you sat through some ads.
I appreciate you for doing that.
Leave a comment, story idea, suggestion, viewer feedback there.
I do go looking over there sometimes for what you have to say.
Now, today's gun show letter comes from the email bag and it comes to us from Peter Bass, who writes to me on the January 31st show.
And I sat down then with my friend and colleague, senior editor at Rebel News, Tamara Ugolini, to discuss her coverage of the vaccine injury compensation program and how like two-thirds of the money there is going to consultants.
Almost none of it is going to the vaccine injured and the vaccine injured already face an exceptionally high barrier to entry and acceptance into that program to get compensation.
Anyway, we heard that time and time again during the National Citizens Inquiry.
Anyway, Peter writes, Hey, Sheila, great episode January 31st.
You are correct with your assessment of Tamira's coverage of this beat.
I called her Canada's leading medical journalist.
And I think she is.
Second to none in Canada.
News of the vaccine injury lack of support is what I like to see pushed forward.
The fact that cash to friends was two-thirds is ridiculous.
Not surprising in the slightest, though, nobody else is touching it.
It should be a headline story.
You and Tamara also went over the biggest open secret of it all.
Big Pharma has no liability whatsoever for their vaccines.
Both in Canada and in the United States, the vaccine injured can apply for compensation to a faceless bureaucracy that turns down most claims and pays out a pittance of what the approved ones should be.
Anybody who watches American TV has seen ads for class action lawsuits against pharma manufacturers, but they gained an exemption in 86 specifically for vaccines, and the taxpayer has picked up the bill since.
The documents submitted to the government from the industry claimed that they needed the exemption because vaccines are inherently unsafe, yet they admit it in writing in the federal filing to the government.
Then they tell us the old safe and effective BS.
Pretty obvious which narrative is true.
Anyway, terrific episode.
Kudos to you and to Mara, Peter.
Well, Peter, thanks so much.
Yeah, I reiterate, Mara is really Canada's best medical journalist.
And if she worked for the mainstream media, she would be getting accolades for her investigative journalism.
However, she works for Rebel News, so the mainstream media treats her like she has cooties and then they'll steal her story a couple weeks later and claim it as an exclusive.
They do that over and over again here at Rebel News.
They get all the money from Trudeau to just regurgitate the things that we did days in advance.
Yeah, what they won't tell you is safe and effective was a marketing slogan and not actually something they had ever actually bothered to test.
Mainstream Media Theft00:00:15
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in and bearing with us in our little Airbnb studio.
We'll see everybody in the same time and possibly in the same place next week.
Well, not the same place here, but same place, you know, on your screen next week.