Sheila Gunn-Reid’s Made, the Dark Side of Canadian Compassion exposes how Canada’s MAID program—expanded under Justin Trudeau—now targets chronic and mental illness sufferers, including homeless or addicted individuals, bypassing healthcare solutions. The documentary frames MAID as a tool for societal dehumanization, revealing Gunn-Reid’s shift from support to opposition after confronting her own past struggles with suicidality. Activists push for policy reform and cultural change to prioritize aid over elimination, arguing MAID avoids natural death’s realities while screening in cities nationwide at endmade.com. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Well, today's the day we premiere our brand new documentary.
It's called Made, the Dark Side of Canadian Compassion, and it documents Justin Trudeau's use of medical assistance in dying, euthanasia, really, or medical killing if we're going to cut the BS, to eliminate the wait times in his failing healthcare system.
For those of you who don't know, medical assistance in dying, under its first iteration, was meant for people who were terminally ill whose deaths were in the foreseeable future.
Now it's expanded to people who have chronic illnesses, and very soon it will be expanded to include people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness.
So people who are sad, people who are not able to get the health care they need, so their condition becomes chronic and painful.
Those people, they are, you know, some, they can get medical assistance in dying in this country faster than they can get adequate health care.
So our new documentary, it's out today in Calgary.
If you want to see the documentary in a city or town near you, go to endmade.com to find out showtimes and get tickets.
And I am here right now outside of the venue.
The documentary is screaming right now in Calgary.
So this is new and exciting for us.
This is my filmmaking partner, our head of documentaries, Kian Simone.
Kian, there's a lot of people here tonight, right?
Yeah, it's a packed room.
It's hot in there, even though the AC is blasting.
It's cold outside.
We're going to get rained on.
So we'll talk as long as we can.
But if it starts to rain, I'm worried about Kian's fancy camera equipment.
You and I have talked about this before.
The last time we sat down for the gun show on this topic, we were on the road.
I think we were in Ottawa filming the documentary.
The documentary is put together.
It's complete.
What was it like going through all the interviews and then piecing it all back together?
Heartbreaking.
While we were sitting there doing the interviews, obviously you could feel it.
It's in the room.
It's sinister, even though everybody in there is there for good intentions and trying to do something to stop this.
But you could feel the evil in there.
And I think going back to it, I'm not just reliving it once, not twice, not three times, not four times.
Right.
Over 10 times going through these interviews, piecing it together.
Yeah, no, it took a toll on my mental health.
I won't lie.
It's harsh.
But I think I pieced something together that's palatable, has its ups and downs, which I think people will appreciate because it is a really hard topic.
It is a hard topic and it's kind of complicated.
You know, how did we go from really a change in the criminal code where doctors couldn't be prosecuted for ending someone's life if their death was in the foreseeable future to where we are where doctors now are at House of Commons committees proposing euthanizing inconvenient babies, really sick babies.
This is where we're at now.
And, you know, it's kind of a complicated route, several changes in legislation for us to get here.
But I think you did a really good job of sort of threading the needle and then looping back in those stories of the people who are living with the consequences of it.
When you were introducing the show, you mentioned that it got extended to people with chronic illnesses.
And I think you glazed over that too nicely.
And it's something I kind of regret now after finishing the documentary is that it's not just chronic illnesses.
It's homeless people.
It's not a chronic illness.
That's a chronic problem.
with our country, not with them.
That's a failing of government policy frequently.
Maybe with them a little bit, but come on.
Like it's not even a problem with trying to get adequate health care.
It's trying to get adequate help for people and instead offering them aid.
So it's not even, it's not a healthcare issue is kind of the way that I framed it in the documentary.
But as I said, I regret not focusing a bit more on the fact that it's everybody.
It's not just people who are sick, who are depressed, who are this who are that.
It's everyone.
Right.
It seems it's like it's a way out for failed government policies.
People who were productive individuals who are down on their luck, who find themselves homeless, or who end up addicted to drugs and maybe they don't have the good fortune of living in Alberta, so they don't have treatment available and they have government enabling them.
Those people can get access to MAID in some provinces quicker than they can get access to drug treatment.
And you're right.
We shouldn't even be framing this as a healthcare issue.
This is a deep rot in our society that we are really offering people suicide when they're inconvenient.
I said evil earlier when we were talking about in the room what you could feel.
And sure, I think negligence plays into evil, but that's, I think, more of what it is, is that a lot of people would go back.
And it's funny, I quote Adolf Hitler right off the beginning, but a lot of people would go back and kind of try to relate it to that.
And I don't think it's a, we think these people are beneath us and they should die because of we don't believe in who they are.
It's literally, we don't know what the hell to do.
So we're just going to do what we can.
And I think that's a serious problem and maybe controversial to say worse than evil because there's no point.
There's no point to the killing.
It's we don't know what the hell to do.
Right.
It's the end stage of dehumanization where we don't even see the people in front of us as people, but just a problem to get out of the way because we don't know what else to do or we don't have the political will to do it.
I agree.
All right.
Well, that was that.
Kian, we did this documentary and it's dark and it's about a sinister, a failing of, I think, not just the government, but also of Canadian society.
I think this is a failing of our culture that we accept this.
Although the good news in the documentary is that many people don't.
I think your documentary serves as an educational tool because you and I both know as we were making the documentary, we were getting 50% of our emails were saying, Sheila and Kian, there's no possible way it's as bad as you're saying it is.
And the other 50% were saying, it's that bad and worse.
But the documentary, we interviewed the activists who are fighting for change.
And there's, you know, there's two pathways to change.
There's change the government, sure, but also change how we interact with our neighbors because we found out time and time again, it's not really a crisis of health care, as you say, or of pain and suffering.
It's hopelessness.
Yeah, it's feeling like you don't have a purpose.
And It's extremely sad that that's what it is.
And you can look at the data, like we say in the documentary, and it's very publicly out there.
People choose it because they feel like they don't have a purpose.
And I think that that's where, well, that is where the documentary leaves off is that it's not government because, and it's, you know, Pierre Polyev says, when I get in government, I'm going to stop the expansion to mental illness.
Okay, and what?
And then what?
Right.
Are you going to peel back that we're not going to kill homeless people anymore either?
Are we not going to go to BC and take people off the streets and disappear them too?
Like the government's not going to do anything.
It has to come from us.
And giving people purpose doesn't mean you need to completely change their life when you know that their life is going to, their lives are going to end in three months.
It's going, and my favorite thing in the documentary is going to play cards with them because that's purpose for tomorrow.
For someone who has absolutely nothing is having something to look forward to the next day.
And that's kind of the message that try to get out with the documentary itself.
I didn't make the documentary.
Actually, I did make the documentary at first to stop people from killing themselves with MAID.
And I realized that no one who is going through that is going to watch this documentary.
And I had to stop kidding myself.
I had to put the extra work in to have someone who watches the documentary be the person who stopped someone from getting made.
They need to know how to speak to people who are suffering from lack of purpose and hopelessness.
And I think I succeeded in that in being able to equip people with what they need to know of how to stop someone from getting it.
You know, you change the culture, you change politics, right?
Like politics is downstream of culture, as Andrew Breitbart once said.
And I think that's really where this starts.
Yeah, we can hope and pray from my lips to God's ears that Justin Trudeau is not re-elected in 2025, but that doesn't change the pernicious problem with our culture that people are suffering around us and we're not doing the things we can to help them.
Yeah, they didn't extend the MAID to people with mental illness because they had a moral problem to it.
They did not extend it because they could not live up to and accept all of the people who wanted mental illness made for them.
It was a capacity problem.
It's a capacity problem.
And that says nothing about MAID.
That says nothing about anything else other than we have a problem with our society.
And that's that.
Right.
And, you know, your question or your documentary, right in the middle of it, there's a question.
How do we know which people need mental help for suicidality and which people need medical help to commit suicide?
And there's no possible way that any doctor can answer that.
Why in the world would you have suicide prevention when you can have suicide assistance?
Right.
Because to them, it's the same thing.
And they just chose the other one.
Yeah.
Now, I know we talked about it last time you were on the show.
We're going to get rained on and your camera's going to die.
And then we're going to have to do a crowdfund for that extra camera.
So we don't want to do that.
But tell us a little bit and then we'll wrap it up.
Tell us a little bit about your change as you were doing this documentary because you went on a bit of a journey.
I love that you're a filmmaker who approaches the topics with an open mind instead of with a conclusion and you find the facts to fit your conclusion.
You went the other way around.
Tell us what happened to you.
Yeah, so I had a family friend who got made and I agreed with it at first.
It made sense.
It was terminal illness.
Kids didn't want to look like that and be like that.
Got made.
Everybody was fine.
It was a very nice process.
Everybody was involved.
Like I wasn't personally, but I saw it from the outside and that kind of just solidified it for me.
But then, you know, you see all of the crazy stuff that's happening.
And I kind of just opened up and I said, okay, I'm going to come into this with an open mind.
And I have, I said it tonight.
I have never made such a radical change in my life on any topic so fast.
Yeah.
Like I felt like I was getting brainwashed.
I was getting brainwashed.
Bad choice of word.
But I flipped so heavy to the other side and I realized that I had such a personal connection to it because I suffered from mental illness when I was 18 and suicidality and failed attempts.
And it's, I didn't, I'm not here today because I'm bad at suicide.
I'm here today because of logistics of suicide.
Right.
And the logistics of suicide.
When you ask yourself, who's going to find me?
How am I going to do it?
Will it hurt?
MAID gets rid of all of those worries and makes it easy for people like myself at 18.
And now I made it for myself.
I made it so that someone could have spoken to me with this and said, no, you don't need to do it.
It wouldn't have been the government doing it.
It would have been myself.
Either way around, it doesn't matter.
That's the change that I made.
It came from something non-personal to something extremely personal because I had never made that connection.
Yeah, all those barriers that prevented you from doing it were eliminated through MAID.
Who's going to do it?
Or I'm scared to do it.
Well, a doctor will do it.
Is it going to hurt?
The doctor said it's not going to hurt.
Who's going to find me?
Hell, you can do it right at the funeral home if you want to.
Who's going to find me?
We'll take your body and we'll just tell your mom.
Yeah.
We'll tell her after.
It's funny, your personal story is different than mine.
Mine, my dad died when I was quite young.
And my mom and dad made a decision not to have us come to the hospital to see him anymore because he had very aggressive cancer.
And I wish that I had seen the process of him dying because I'm still jarred by seeing the skeleton of a man wearing my father's suit in that casket.
I wish I had been able to go on that journey and to see it.
And I think part of MAID is that it's tidy and it isolates people from the reality of death, but nobody gets out of here alive.
And I think we should all come to terms with it.
I think it's a bad analogy for your story that's obviously very important, but it's like watching the end of a movie before seeing the middle of it.
Wishing I Had Seen It00:00:35
Like it's, you just, you just don't know.
Yeah.
And then you're stuck.
Like you just can't watch the middle of it.
Yeah.
Sad.
Well, on that note, Kian, tell us how we see the movie.
And MAID.com, MAIDDocumentary.com, whichever one you prefer.
If you're seeing this on Wednesday, we're probably showing it right that minute as you're seeing this in Lethbridge.
But after that, we are going to Red Deer, Edmonton, Muir, Grand Prairie, Fort St. John, Surrey, Ottawa, Elmer.