Two days before Remembrance Day, Ezra Levant opened Monday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show with Rudyard Kipling’s poem Tommy, about a country that cheers its soldiers in wartime and forgets them in peacetime.
“But simply ignoring or underfunding veterans is one thing,” Ezra said. “But how about actively proposing to veterans that they should kill themselves or be killed by doctors.”
His guest was Catherine Christensen of Valour Law, who is working toward a class action on behalf of Canadian veterans who say Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) steered them toward medical assistance in dying (MAID).
Christensen said the practice is “a lot more prominent than Veterans Affairs would be willing to admit.” Younger veterans are being offered MAID over the phone, she said, “in an unexpected way, so they’re not able to record it.” But in the last few months, she said, older veterans have started receiving letters from Veterans Affairs suggesting it.
She said more veterans have contacted her since the Daily Mail covered her clients’ stories, including a senior veteran who told someone at a service that he was appalled to have received a letter offering him MAID. She said a copy of one such letter is on its way to her.
One of her clients is Corben McGown, who says a VAC caseworker raised MAID as his first option for treatment when he was a 22-year-old veteran with PTSD. He is now 26 and suing the federal government in Federal Court.
Christensen said Veterans Affairs’ defence was that the call never happened, so her team set out to prove it did. She told Ezra that McGown is physically healthy. “This is a big problem with Veterans Affairs and it needs to stop,” she said.
The government disputes McGown’s account. A 2023 VAC investigation confirmed four cases in which one employee inappropriately raised MAID with veterans, and said it found no further validated incidents.
Asked whether the push is ideological or about money, Christensen said she believes it is about cost. “As gross as it sounds this close to Remembrance Day, the truth of it is that dead veterans are cheaper than live ones, especially young veterans,” she said. “It’s a budget thing, in my opinion.”
Christensen, a former registered nurse, also questioned how informed consent is possible when a veteran with a severe brain injury can be lined up for MAID within a couple of days.
The biggest challenges in the class action, she said, will be defining the classes and getting documents out of the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs. She pointed to the case of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, whose emails were hard to find because officials used a code name. “I’ve never seen defendants fight discovery harder than the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs,” she said.
She said veterans have been afraid to come forward because they fear losing their benefits, and that she is in talks with members of the opposition. Veterans can learn more at the Valour Legal Action Centre, a nonprofit.
“Veterans are very vulnerable and they deserve better treatment than this,” she said.
