The Right to Live Emergency Fund
A Lifeline When Poverty Pushes Towards Euthanasia
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In Canada, a nation built on the promise of compassion, a quiet crisis is unfolding. A direct, systemic link has been forged between disability, state-enforced poverty, and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). For a growing number of vulnerable Canadians, the "choice" to die is not about bodily autonomy; it's an escape from a life of state-enforced deprivation that has been made unbearable by design.
Our social safety net, intended to support those with disabilities, instead consigns them to deep poverty, consistently providing income thousands of dollars below the official poverty line. This calculated poverty creates the very "grievous and irremediable" suffering that makes a person eligible for a state-assisted death.
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When every path to a dignified life is blocked by bureaucracy and financial hardship, the offer of a peaceful, painless death becomes overwhelmingly seductive. This is not freedom—it is coercion disguised as care. The Right to Live Emergency Fund is being created to intervene at this critical breaking point. It is being designed to provide a tangible, life-affirming alternative when the system offers only death.
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The Anatomy of a Failed Safeguard
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Canada's MAID framework was designed with what appears to be a robust safeguard: two independent assessors, typically doctors or registered nurses, must approve each application. Their mandate is to confirm that an individual's suffering is intolerable and that all reasonable alternatives for relief have been exhausted. This system is logically sound when the suffering is purely medical—a nurse or doctor possesses the expertise to assess clinical conditions and refer a patient to other treatments, therapies, or palliative care options.
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However, this safeguard catastrophically fails when the root cause of suffering isn't a medical pathology, but a social one: poverty.
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When a person with a disability is driven to seek MAID because they cannot afford the support their essential or medical needs, the medical assessor is placed in an impossible situation. They are being asked to solve a complex socio-economic problem for which their medical training is irrelevant.
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The problem is compounded because the applicant has likely already exhausted the correct channels. They have probably worked with social workers and applied for every available form of aid, only to be failed by an underfunded and overwhelmed social support system. The MAID assessor is therefore the last stop after the "right" experts have already proven unable to help.
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Critically, the MAID program itself provides assessors with no internal resources or funds to offer life-saving support. They can only refer to external charities and programs. Yet, because this is such a new and specific crisis, the dedicated funds needed to provide an immediate, life-altering alternative to poverty-driven MAID requests do not exist.
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This leaves the assessor trapped in a profound ethical dilemma. They cannot refer the applicant to resources that have already failed or simply do not exist. To deny the application is to send a person back to the very state of intolerable suffering that qualifies them for MAID, risking their suicide. To approve it is to sanction a death caused not by disease, but by systemic neglect. The system is designed such that the very lack of options makes a person eligible. It is a cruel, circular logic that leads to one place.
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This crisis forces a healthcare professional into an untenable role where:
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'Assessors are expected to use experience and education that they do not have,
to refer resources that do not exist,
at a cost of euthanizing a vulnerable person‘s life if they approve,
or risk their suicide if they deny.'
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Our Engineered Solution:
A Functional Safeguard
The Right to Live Emergency Fund is not charity in the traditional sense. It is a strategically engineered component we are building to fix this critical system failure. It is designed to be the tangible, immediate, and specific resource that MAID assessors have been denied.
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Once launched, when an assessor identifies an applicant as a disabled individual whose primary driver for seeking MAID as suspected to be poverty, they will be able to refer. Once accessed, we provide a tailored solution to the applicants specific needs, utilizing program funds as well as equipped with a network of other organizations and resources, aware and waiting for us to rally. We will provide a lifeline of emergency support to remove the source of suffering, making life a viable choice again.
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Our mission is to build a program that transforms the MAID safeguard from a procedural illusion into a functional reality. By providing a real, life-altering alternative, we will give back the one thing systemic poverty takes away: a genuine choice.
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This intervention is critical, as the crisis has not gone unnoticed. The United Nations has expressed "extreme concern" over Canada's MAID expansion, and our own Human Rights Commission has warned that MAID cannot become a "default for the state’s failure to fulfill its fundamental human rights obligations." Our fund is a direct, non-partisan answer to these warnings.
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You Are the Missing Resource
The system is failing. The assessors are unequipped. The resources that could offer a choice do not exist. In this gap, human lives are being lost not to incurable disease, but to treatable poverty.
While our Emergency Fund is not yet operational, your support today is a direct investment in the essential work required to launch it. Donations are needed now to build the operational capacity, establish the secure infrastructure, and forge the network of partnerships required to make this fund a reality.
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You can help us create the resource that our system so desperately lacks. Your contribution builds the foundation for a tool that will empower medical professionals to offer a choice for life. Every dollar brings us closer to the day we can open our doors and begin saving lives.
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Please, join us. Your contribution today will help us build this last line of defence and uphold the fundamental right to live.