Ezra Levant interviews Amanda Ackman, Canada’s top euthanasia opponent, exposing how government-assisted suicide—now the fifth leading cause of death—has surged to 70,000 cases since 2016, with 11.4% of deaths on Vancouver Island linked to it. Originally limited to terminal patients, Canada expanded criteria to mental anguish like depression, mirroring Nazi-era eugenics where financial justifications (e.g., Hardheim Castle killings) paralleled Bill C-7’s cost-saving claims. Quebec’s 2022 9% dementia-related euthanasia rate and advanced requests signal a slippery slope toward child euthanasia, eroding trust in medicine and life’s value, as figures like Harari, Gates, and Gore push depopulation agendas. Ackman warns this trend dehumanizes the vulnerable, citing the 1993 Tracy Latimer case, and urges resistance before societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Leading Activist Against Government-Assisted Suicide00:03:12
Hello, my rebels.
Today we talk to Amanda Ackman, who I think is Canada's leading activist against government-assisted suicide, which is terrifying to me.
You know, it's one of the leading causes of death in Canada now.
Did you know that?
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Canada's number one in the world for euthanasia.
We'll talk with a leading activist who's fighting back.
It's November 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Revoluce has about 30-something staff.
You know, during the height of the pandemic, we had more than 60 people working with us.
We were covering every nook and cranny of that story.
I think 30-something is a great fit because we have reporters across the country in northern Alberta, in Vancouver, in Montreal, in Toronto, obviously.
We have Avi Yamini down in Melbourne, Australia.
And for every person on TV, we need two behind the scenes, whether it's a cameraman or an editor or whatnot.
But if I look back over the sweep of the last 10 years, and you know Rebel News will be 10 in just a few months, we've actually had more than 100 people work with us, and some have gone on to great things on their own, and some have gone on to become disasters.
But it's been a pleasure to meet such interesting people.
And one of our most successful and thoughtful alumna who worked with us when we were just getting started, when we were in an abandoned daycare in the heart of Toronto, is our guest today.
Her name is Amanda Ackman, and she was our community manager at Rebel News in our first few months.
And she's been doing some fascinating and terrifying things.
What a pleasure to see her reunited at Rebel News.
Great to see you again.
Good to be back, Ezra.
You know, we have interesting people who seek to work at Rebel News, and most of them find us.
Consent and Crisis00:15:29
We don't find them.
And I remember with gratitude your work at Rebel News, but you've taken some journalism and some activism that you did at Rebel News, and now you're focusing it on one terrifying issue, aren't you?
What's your focus these days?
That's right.
I am completely focused to preventing euthanasia and encouraging hope across Canada and really now around the world, because Canada has become a complete cautionary tale for the rest of the world of the path not to go down.
We have had about 70,000 Canadians euthanized since it was legalized nationwide in 2016.
And more Canadians have been killed by doctors and nurses in hospitals and homes than the total number of Canadians who died of COVID.
That's crazy.
Why?
I wouldn't think that Canadians are pro-death.
When I think of that, that sounds like the Netherlands and some weirdness they have there.
Why, all of a sudden, has Canada become the death capital of the world?
When Canada first legalized euthanasia, much like the UK is thinking about doing right now, it was ostensibly for those whose death was deemed reasonably foreseeable, people with terminal illnesses, people whose death was imminent.
And of course, we've seen the expansion of euthanasia because if euthanasia is seen as a compassionate means to end suffering, then it cannot remain limited.
How can it?
Why would it?
And so euthanasia, once legalized, always gets expanded on the grounds of equality.
And so what this is really about is an existential crisis, not so much a medical crisis.
You know, I really like how you introduce things in your very first sentence.
It's about fighting euthanasia and giving hope because that's really what it is.
Where there's life, there's hope is a promise that things can get better.
It's darkest before the dawn.
The reason these are clichés is because they're well-worn truths.
They're proverbs that we've deduced over the centuries, really, the millennia of civilization.
And I think if we say, oh, if you're in some pain, the answer is not to bear the pain or to be purified by it or to deal with it or to overcome it or to fix it.
It's just to give up because we should all have pain-free lives.
And by the way, pain can be very subjective.
It could be mental anguish.
It could be depression.
So gross to see that depression is now a trigger for government-mandated government-approved euthanasia because we used to believe in suicide prevention.
Now the government is saying, oh, if you're depressed, go ahead and kill yourself.
That's right.
We have suicide prevention for some and suicide assistance for others, which signals a devaluation of so much life.
And when it comes to choosing this mission of preventing euthanasia and encouraging hope, or really finding the moral urgency in our culture, I was largely inspired by other social reformers who saw a crisis in their own time.
And William Wilberforce was one of them.
And he said that God Almighty has put before me two key objects: the prohibition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
So a kind of classical way of expressing both the evil that he sought to prevent and the good that he sought to promote.
And so I think it's so crucial that anyone trying to reform and bring about change within a society for the common good looks toward the positive good that we try to advance.
You know, I want to ask you again, because I'm not sure if I got an answer.
Why is Canada death central?
I read a stat that was at one in seven people.
Correct me if my stats are wrong.
The percentage of people who are or the seventh greatest cause of death is suicide.
It's tied with the fifth leading cause.
So euthanasia is now the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.
That's crazy.
And in parts of Canada, 5% of all deaths.
In other parts of Canada, for example, Vancouver Island, in the last quarter, it was 11.4% of deaths were euthanasia.
Why?
Why?
Help me out with the why.
Yes, this, again, is an existential problem.
The idea is that once you suffer, once you no longer belong in the human community, you're a problem, you're a burden, you're expensive.
And so the government does a survey each year on the leading kinds of suffering that motivate people to request euthanasia.
And the number one reason that people request euthanasia is not pain or the fear of pain or the fear of being a burden or even financial reasons.
The number one reason, according to people's own admission in Canada, why they're asking for euthanasia is loneliness?
No, that's on the list, but it's not the top.
The top is a loss of ability to engage in meaningful life activities, a loss of ability to engage in meaningful life activities.
And so many people are saying, if I can no longer play bridge, if I can no longer go south in the winter, if I can no longer do this or that, then my life has no meaning.
It's no longer worth living.
Because when we stake so much of our sense of self and identity in what we can do, in how we look, in what we can perform, and all of these things, then it is shattering to no longer be able to do those same things anymore.
You know, a lot of our modern view of medicine comes from the so-called Nuremberg doctor's trial.
And a lot of the perpetrators of the worst horrors of the Holocaust were medical doctors, not soldiers, not SS officers.
And the doctor's trial, part of the verdict is codified into what's sometimes called the Nuremberg Code, which is basically rules for how doctors deal with patients.
A lot of that came back to the fore during the COVID times when people were misled about their injections and compelled to take medical procedures they didn't want.
But I think the world looked with horror at what doctors had become and said never again to use the phrase.
And yet doctors now are doing things that Hitler believed in eugenics, culling those who are not optimal.
The whole concept of the Übermenschen, the Untermenschen, and you're not quite good enough to be alive anymore.
And those ideas spread far and wide.
Tommy Douglas, the NDP, the CCF NDP leader, he wrote his thesis on eugenics for those who were stupid and abnormal.
And a lot of eugenics had to do with racial minorities too.
I thought that we had resolved all these things, but clearly we're falling back into a Nazi-like calculation about human value.
Now, before we turn the cameras on, you told me that you visited some actual Nazi euthanasia centers.
What is that?
In Europe, euthanasia sites have become memorial museums.
In Canada, they're popping up as Maidhouse in Toronto, sites where you can be euthanized.
But I did travel to Germany and Austria, and I visited three former Nazi euthanasia killing centers.
And I did this partly to get to the bottom about what's fundamentally wrong with euthanasia.
What are, and how are those particular victims commemorated?
So when I went to Hardheim Castle, which is in Austria, that was a euthanasia killing site, one of the largest ones, I toured around and there was an exhibit on the value of life.
And throughout this museum, there is a whole tracing of the history of sterilization, of eugenics, of all the underlying ideas that gave rise to euthanasia.
And you're right to point out that there is a whole underlying worldview that drives euthanasia and brings it to that point.
It was a very interesting memorial site.
And after I finished looking around, there were some Austrian high school students having lunch.
And I went up to them to ask what they had gotten out of the day.
And I asked those high schoolers who had spent all morning at the former euthanasia killing center if they thought there was ever a time where euthanasia was appropriate.
And one of the students said, only when the person asks for it.
And all the other students agreed.
That was their conclusion, that the only thing wrong with this Nazi euthanasia killing facility was that they hadn't signed consent waivers.
And I think that reveals what is fundamentally at issue.
Many people think if you consent to it, it's fine.
But in fact, some people think that that makes it less bad if you've consented to it.
But in fact, I think it makes it worse because then you have someone conceding to the dehumanization and participating in their own dehumanization.
There's obviously the technical issue of are you pressured into it?
What exactly does consent mean?
We have a concept in law called capacity.
It's, you know, there's a phrase taking candy from a baby.
You're not allowed to pull a fast one on someone who is under some sort of duress.
If you have a gun to someone's head to sign a contract, it's not binding.
A child cannot engage in certain contracts that are binding because you protect certain people who are in a state of relative weakness compared to...
And what's so astonishing, we were talking about this earlier, is the number of euthanasias in Canada, the killings in Canada, that are not initiated by the victims.
Someone else said, I've got an idea to solve this problem.
And to be offered euthanasia already kills the person.
And anytime a doctor or nurse raises euthanasia, it already deflates and defeats a person's sense of worth.
And here's the other thing about consent.
We all know that it's possible for others to dehumanize us.
I know that someone else can harm me, can do any kind of wrong to me.
Am I willing to have the humility that I can also do that to myself?
Because that's the issue with consent.
Can we consent to our own degradation?
And I think that that signals a moral crisis and a call for intervention, not to concede and capitulate to someone's suicidal ideation.
I think there's a bunch of things going on at once here.
I think without a doubt, money is part of it, because the government would say, oh, the last few years of life are where the majority of healthcare costs are.
Let's just nip this in the bud and get rid of this cost center.
That's why the Veterans Affairs Department in Canada astonishingly, shockingly, grotesquely recommends euthanasia to soldiers with PTSD.
It's completely financial in that case because the government is the decider.
But there's other things too.
I think it's people who, doctors have often been accused of having a God complex, sometimes because they can save a life.
I can only imagine what that does to one's ego.
But there's also God can smite someone also.
And there's too many people with a sickening thrill that they have the power of life and death, not to save a life, but to take it.
And I don't know, and I think there's a general void of a belief in life.
The Jews wear a, there's typically two common pieces of jewelry that a Jew might wear.
One is the Star of David.
The other is the word chai, which is Hebrew for life.
When Jews cheers, they say, Lechaim, to life.
The Pope, you know, John Paul II, where there's life, there's hope.
There's this culture of life and that you've been given life by God and you have to protect it and you should be grateful for it.
If you take that out of there, if you take the religious or faith-based belief in life away and it's just the neutral emptiness of outer space, well, then why not?
Oh, I'm not optimal anymore.
What I have isn't special.
I'm ready to push the exit button.
I think there's a lot of things going on at once.
There are so many things there, and that's partly why it's so convoluted.
I'm glad you mentioned the financial aspect because again, at Hardtime Castle in Austria, one of the hard time.
Okay.
How do you spell that?
H-A-R-T-E-I-M.
Okay, I'll check it out.
Yeah.
Hardtime Castle.
I'll just back up for a sec on that.
When I was traveling around, or when I was walking through the exhibit in Hardtime Castle, there was actually a board, a financial calculation, and it was all in German, so I had to ask the guy to explain it to me.
And he said, oh, this was the calculation of how much money the German state would save if this number of people with disabilities were prevented from living for 10 years longer.
That was the calculation.
And it was so chilling.
And it immediately recalled to my mind the cost savings estimate documents, which are available online for Bill C7, where it was being calculated the savings through so-called medical assistance in dying put on the internet for all to see produced by the parliamentary budget officer.
And we know that those are vastly underestimated calculations of the savings.
And we haven't seen too many of those documents because they've been pointed out for how incredibly sinister they are.
And yet we know that the calculations are playing a role not only on the national level, but also within families.
And so when adult children support their parents' euthanasia death, what's going on there?
And then also, I've heard from older people who say, well, I think my children would like my money.
And so I should get to decide what to do with it rather than wasting away and having their inheritance dwindle and not being able to send my grandchildren to university.
So there are real, if that's not coercion, the financial pressures inherent, then I don't know what we're kidding ourselves on here.
You know, in the recent U.S. election, there was some ads by sort of white dudes for Kamala or whatever, and it was these middle-aged guys, and they were saying how important the abortion issue was for them.
And there's this one middle-aged guy who said, I stand up for my daughter's right to choose.
And I'm just thinking, brother, you just said the most important issue to you is for your child to be able to abort your grandchildren.
This surely cannot be the most important issue in the entire world motivating you.
In fact, it's shocking that you would be on that side at all.
But I think it's this culture of death, I want my daughter to be able to have cost-free access to a boarding life is sort of the other side of the coin to dad's been around long enough.
I'm ready to consent to pulling the plug on him so I can get an early inheritance and don't have the hassle of it.
Future of Euthanasia Society00:03:29
I think it's sort of a two-way hatred in a way.
It's interesting you mentioned this because there was recently, just actually about a week ago, a webinar organized by Dying with Dignity on how abortion and MAID intersect.
The entire webinar was abortion rights coalition and euthanasia doctors and lawyers demonstrating the cohesiveness between the euthanasia and abortion mentality.
And we know that one of the webinar participants was a euthanasia doctor who restricts her entire practice to abortion and euthanasia.
That's pretty much all she does now.
Yeah, and in the earlier generation, that would be called satanic.
You know, there's something desperate going on.
And it's a cultural sickness.
It's a civilizational sickness, I think.
And I don't know how it ends.
I don't know how the story ends.
Well, I think part of the story will be that this isn't going to cut it.
This is not good enough.
I, as a young person, am looking out and thinking, we have so many health crises, we have so many mental health crises, we have so many addictions, so much loneliness, so many effects of the pandemic.
And I'm looking out saying, what is on offer?
Well, you bet the offer better be better than death.
This is so drab.
This is so pathetic.
And I don't think the rising generation is going to accept death as the answer to suffering and other crises.
And so I think there's a lot of hope in that we're not made for this.
We're not going to settle.
We're not cut out for opting out of life.
We are made to be resilient.
And there is no good story without suffering.
That's not an exclusively religious argument.
Everyone has access to the fact that if you think of anyone you admire, any hero, any role model, why do you admire them?
Not because they lived a painless, carefree, decadent existence, probably because they suffered with a kind of nobleness to it.
And so I think when we restore an emphasis on who do we admire, what stories are worth telling, and what story do we want to have of our own lives, we'll see that all of that is antithetical to a euthanasia society.
I think there's a difference between fun and happiness.
I think there's a difference.
You know, I think of the World Economic Forum, and Rebel News goes there every January.
We're never let into any official events, so we just sort of run around the streets chasing these VVIPs.
But we pay a lot of attention to their official outbursts.
Everyone's heard of their essay called You'll Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy.
Yuval Noah Harari, sort of the muse of the World Economic Forum, says the future, which will be AI-driven and tech-driven, most people, he says, will be, quote, useless eaters, useless eaters.
And he says the future for most people is video games and drugs.
And I presume he means pornography as well.
No human interaction.
Just strap on your virtual reality helmet.
Drugs, video games, useless eaters.
That's a very dark view of the future.
That's the view of the future that someone like Bill Gates, who says we have to cut the population by billions.
There's something dark going on.
Perfect Genetic Children00:04:55
And I don't know if it can be explained rationally or theologically, but there are people who want to see, well, I mean, just listen to them.
Al Gore, I mean, there are people who call human life itself a cancer on the earth.
The depopulation activists, if you scratch deeply on environmentalism, extreme environmentalism, reduce, reuse, recycle, reduce everything, including reduce life.
I don't know who is on the other side of that.
Maybe once upon a time, the Catholic Pope would be.
I don't know.
I hear him talking more about global warming than about some issues that I would expect a Pope to weigh in on.
He speaks a lot on euthanasia as a false compassion, and that's one of the signs of dehumanization in our time.
And there was a recent Vatican document called Dignitas Infinita, Infinite Dignity, and it's all about these specific crises of dehumanization.
And there's a very good section about euthanasia and also disabilities in those.
I'm glad to hear it.
I'm glad to hear it.
Maybe I need to read more deeply, including in Latin.
Not in the headlines.
Yeah.
There you go.
I want to mention something about how we got here as well.
You probably remember the Tracy Latimer case.
Yeah.
Tracy Latimer was killed by her father, a young woman who had cerebral palsy.
And her father, in a so-called mercy killing, gassed her.
And it particularly haunted me to realize or reread that he watched her die through the window of the truck.
And when I went to visit these former Nazi euthanasia sites, the Nazis would stand outside and look through a window and time how long it took for those victims to die.
And so in 1993, when Robert killed his daughter while his wife and other children were at church, what happened after that?
In the New York Times and in Maclean's, the way that this was framed was that he was a clean living, honest, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and she was described as a 38-pound, diaper-clad, non-verbal, disabled kid.
And if we wonder how we got to this point of severe dehumanization of persons with disabilities, of the sick, what I have to emphasize is that you cannot have a criteria for euthanasia that doesn't harm everyone who fits it.
As soon as you have criteria, everyone who fits the criteria is ejected from the community of human belonging.
We make ourselves more precarious too by excluding people because anything could happen to us at any time.
And so everyone starts to feel precarious.
Who will still love me?
Will I still be wanted?
And just the other day, a friend was sharing with me about how a family member was tempted to euthanasia because this family member said, well, I don't want to ruin your life.
If that is your attitude, then what does that say to every family who welcomes a child with profound disabilities?
You cannot have these attitudes without them sending a social message to so many others.
And so when we speak about autonomy or independence, it often undercuts the reality that we belong to one another and that all of these valuations of life have a ripple effect reverberating throughout our entire society.
Have you ever watched that movie from the 90s called Gattaca?
No.
I won't take long on it, though.
It was about a moment in time when natural born families were replaced by perfect genetic children.
And sort of there was this time before and after, and everyone born after that was the absolute best genetic possibility that could be.
And everyone before that was sort of written off, and they didn't really have job interviews anymore.
You just submitted a genetic test, and the best person would be hired based on that.
And this story was about someone who was born real and just said, I'm going to be able to fit in.
I want to get to space.
So he got a job at sort of the NASA in the movie.
And he had a million perfect keystrokes.
And he was competing against these perfect people.
And he was imperfect.
And he had to hide his true identity because if they knew he wasn't one of the perfect genetically modified people, they would fire him on site.
And you made me think about that a little bit because there was the deep sorrow in someone who said, well, I can, I can try it.
I can let me try.
No, no, we have a criteria here, and you don't fit it.
You're genetically inferior.
We're just not even going to waste our time on it.
It's called Gattaca Uma Thierman was in it and Jude Law.
Dementia's Dehumanization00:04:29
And how much more sinister does it make any diagnosis?
Right now we know that the majority of patients who are euthanized, their underlying medical condition is cancer.
Well, when you know that, then a cancer diagnosis, then a cancer diagnosis becomes all the more terrifying.
And there was that shocking headline in the Telegraph recently of a Canadian woman saying that as she was going in for her mastectomy, she was asked, well, have you heard about euthanasia?
In the moment of greatest vulnerability, about to entrust yourself to doctors, to again be presented with the suggestion, maybe you're better off dead.
This is so chilling.
You know, the COVID bonfire of our civil liberties and destruction of the Nuremberg Code and the erosion of the Hippocratic Oath destroyed trust in doctors.
Didn't destroy it, but greatly damaged it.
I think a lot of people are much more skeptical.
of doctors and health institutions.
And maybe one upside of that is that they might look with more skepticism on this new death agenda.
Tell me about one last thing.
What's going on in Quebec?
It's extremely important to know that Quebec is expanding euthanasia for persons with dementia.
Already in the 2022 annual report, 9% of the people who were euthanized had dementia.
That's documented in the fourth annual MAID report.
And now, in violation of the criminal code, Quebec has announced that they will not do anything about it if someone submits a request in advance for euthanasia.
And so the person has to be diagnosed with a capacity eroding condition, such as Alzheimer's.
And so you have to have some dementia to qualify to make the advanced request, but not so much dementia that you aren't disqualified from consenting.
And so this is basically a death for dementia policy that Quebec is ushering in.
And because it's Quebec, the federal government is turning a blind eye to it mostly, except that they've actually said they're going to launch a national consultation on advanced requests to maybe consider it nationwide.
I expect that Quebec will be the first province to euthanize children, and it will be similar.
It will be in violation of the criminal code and existing law where the federal government feels that it cannot possibly intervene upon it, and then a national consultation on perhaps expanding this nationwide.
So we need to be extremely vigilant about this further erosion of the value of life and the specific dehumanization of persons with dementia.
When this news broke, I got a request from some mainstream media saying, could you please point me in the direction of someone with dementia who can explain why their life is worth living?
Imagine.
Well, we're in, I won't say we're in new unknown territory because I'm sure in the course of time we've been here before.
I think back to pre-Christian times, pre-Jewish times.
I think to the movie Apocalypto by Mel Gibson, which shows what life was like before Columbus landed in America.
It was a society built on murder and human sacrifice.
I'm sure there were pagan sacrifices in every society.
And it took millennia for there to be a consensus that life is valuable because it was cheap for tens of thousands of years.
Going back to prehistory, slavery itself, if you read the Bible, slavery is accepted in the Bible.
If anything, there's rules and laws about how to do it in the Bible, in the Quran.
And it took centuries or millennia to get out of that to get to some sort of understanding that life is valuable and life should be protected.
And as you point out, it was only a couple of centuries ago that slavery was overturned in a systematic way by the United Kingdom and the British Empire.
I think we are in a darker time than has been known since history.
I'm saying in prehistory, there was this darkness, but we are reaching prehistoric levels of darkness.
A Call to Alarm00:00:44
I don't know if you think that's too dramatic.
Well, this is partly why I feel the need to give myself to this work completely because it is so crucial that we sound the alarm and that we continue to say this is not normal.
And I'm very heartened whenever I speak to people outside of Canada and I see the reactions on their faces when I share things to which Canadians have largely become desensitized.
They are my reminder.
This is not natural.
This is not normal.
And also, this is not going to last.
And so the time outside of this country and speaking with other people really reinforces that to me.
So how do folks follow what you're doing?
So you can follow me on Twitter or X at Amanda Actman and my website, dyingtomeetyou.com.