The Dereliction of Duty

OPENING SALVOThe Generation That Would Not Recognise This Country

On the morning of June 6, 1944, Canadian soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division waded through neck-deep water under withering machine-gun fire at Juno Beach. They fought house to house through Courseulles-sur-Mer. They bled at Bény-sur-Mer. They held the line at Carpiquet against Panzer counterattacks that should have broken them. They did not break.

At Ortona, they fought room to room in what the press called "Little Stalingrad," breaching walls with explosives because the streets were killing fields. At the Scheldt Estuary, they waded through flooded polders under artillery fire to open the port of Antwerp. In the Netherlands, they liberated a starving nation — and the Dutch have never forgotten it, even if Canada has.

That generation fought under the Canadian Red Ensign — the Red Duster. They fought against a regime that had built Aktion T4: a state programme to murder people the government deemed unworthy of life. The disabled. The mentally ill. The "useless eaters." Between 1939 and 1941, Nazi Germany killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people under T4 before public outcry forced it underground.

Canada's MAID programme has now killed ~98,000 people.

That is not hyperbole. That is not rhetoric. That is the official number from Health Canada's own Annual Reports on Medical Assistance in Dying, first through fourth editions, covering 2016 through 2023. Sixty thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven Canadians are dead — and the programme is accelerating.

The men who liberated Bergen-Belsen, who saw with their own eyes what happens when a state decides some lives aren't worth living, would be incandescent with rage. And they would have a very specific question for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — the same force whose members served in both World Wars, whose officers wore the Stetson in Normandy and Korea:

Three Commissioners. Eight years. Sixty thousand dead. And the RCMP's official position is silence.

Not confused silence. Not "we're reviewing the matter" silence. Not "we've referred it to the appropriate authority" silence. Total silence. As if sixty thousand state-sanctioned deaths don't rise to the level of a single memorandum. As if the national police force of a G7 democracy has no opinion on whether its own Criminal Code — the document it exists to enforce — should contain an exemption that allows the government to kill people who aren't dying.

The Red Duster generation would call that what it is: dereliction of duty.

THE BODY COUNTYear by Year — From Health Canada's Own Reports

These are not estimates. These are not projections. These are not extrapolations from incomplete data. These are the official numbers published by Health Canada in their Annual Reports on Medical Assistance in Dying — the 1st through 4th editions. Every single one is a Canadian citizen, with a name and a family and a life, who is now dead because the state said it was acceptable to kill them.

Source: Health Canada — 1st Annual Report on MAID (2017), 2nd (2020), 3rd (2022), 4th (2024)

Look at that chart. Look at the trajectory. Year after year, the numbers don't just grow — they accelerate. Each year kills more than the last. The 2023 figure is fifteen times the first year. This is not a programme that reached equilibrium. This is not a programme that found its natural level. This is a programme that is feeding — and every year it feeds more.

In 2023, MAID accounted for 4.7% of all deaths in Canada. Nearly one in twenty. A Canadian is now more likely to die by state-sanctioned killing than in a car accident. That is not a statistic that should exist in a democracy. That is a statistic that should trigger an investigation by the national police force. It has not.

WHO WAS ON WATCHRCMP Commissioners — The Men and Women Who Did Nothing

The Commissioner of the RCMP is the senior law enforcement officer in Canada. They swear an oath to uphold the laws of Canada — including the Criminal Code. These are the three individuals who held that office while the state killed ~98,000 of its own citizens.

THE LAWWhat They Changed — And What They Didn't

Understanding how Canada built a state killing apparatus requires understanding what the law said before — and how surgically Parliament carved exemptions into prohibitions that still exist on the books today. The Criminal Code sections they amended haven't been repealed. The prohibitions are still there. They just have holes in them now — holes large enough to drive a hearse through.

THE VOTEWho Voted For This

Every Member of Parliament who voted for Bill C-14 and Bill C-7 is on the public record. Hansard does not forget. The division bells rang, the Speaker called the vote, and 338 Members of Parliament stood up to be counted. Their names are recorded. Their choices are permanent. And sixty thousand Canadians are dead because of what they decided.

• Bill C-14 — Yeas (186):
  Majority Liberal caucus plus some NDP members. This was a government bill with a whipped vote. Liberal MPs who voted against their own government's bill did so at significant political cost — and history will record that they were right to do so. The Yeas created the first state-sanctioned killing programme in Canadian history.
• Bill C-14 — Nays (137):
  Most of the Conservative caucus plus a small number of Liberal MPs who broke ranks. Several cited the Criminal Code conflict directly — pointing out that you cannot carve an exemption into a criminal prohibition and call it compassion. Their objections are preserved in Hansard, June 16, 2016, Third Reading debate. They were outvoted. They were not wrong.
• Bill C-7 — Yeas (180):
  Liberal caucus, NDP caucus, and a portion of the Bloc Québécois. The NDP's support for removing the "reasonably foreseeable death" requirement is one of the most consequential votes in modern Canadian parliamentary history. They voted — on the record, with their names attached — to allow the state to kill people who were not dying. Every NDP MP who voted Yea should be asked, directly and on camera, whether they understood what Track 2 would mean for disabled Canadians who couldn't access housing.
• Bill C-7 — Nays (149):
  Conservative caucus plus a handful of Liberal MPs who again broke ranks. The margin actually narrowed from C-14 — meaning more MPs supported the expansion than supported the original programme. The Overton window shifted, the threshold moved, and people who would have been protected under C-14's "reasonably foreseeable death" requirement are now dead under C-7's removal of it.

The men who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1917 — who went over the top at Vimy Ridge in a country that was barely fifty years old — were volunteers. They didn't have to go. They chose to. And they would have a very direct question for the 180 Members of Parliament who voted to remove the last safeguard standing between disabled Canadians and state-administered death: Is this what we fought for?

→ Full MP-by-MP voting breakdown: MP Voting Records Database

THE WORLD IS WATCHINGThe International Record

Canada's allies and the international human rights community have not been silent — even if Ottawa has been stone deaf. The warnings are on the official record. They were filed in triplicate, translated into both official languages, and ignored with the bureaucratic precision that only a G7 government can muster.

THE RECKONINGWhat the Veterans Would Say

Imagine, for a moment, that the men who fought under the Red Ensign could see this.

The men of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles who waded ashore at Juno Beach into a wall of MG-42 fire. The men of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment who fought room to room through Ortona at Christmas 1943, pulling dead comrades from the rubble between engagements. The men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion who dropped into Normandy in the dark hours before D-Day. The men of the Cape Breton Highlanders who fought through the Gothic Line in Italy. The men of the Algonquin Regiment who held the Scheldt against everything the Wehrmacht could throw at them.

They fought against a regime that had decided — through bureaucratic process, medical authority, and state power — that some human lives were not worth living. That disability was a burden on the state. That mental illness was a disqualification from the right to exist. They saw where that logic ended. They liberated the camps. They saw the bodies.

And then imagine telling those men that eighty years later, their own country — the country they bled for, the country whose flag they carried into battle — had built a programme that:

• Kills people who are not dying. Track 2 MAID has no requirement for foreseeable death. A person whose "condition" is disability qualifies.
• Kills people who are poor. Health Canada's own reports document cases where inadequate housing, lack of social support, and poverty were cited as factors in MAID requests.
• Kills people at a rate approaching Aktion T4. ~98,000 dead in eight years. T4 killed 70,000–100,000 in roughly the same period. Canada is closing the gap with state funding and parliamentary enthusiasm.
• Is planning to expand to mental illness. Not if — when. March 2027 is the current date. The delay is administrative, not moral. The principle has been accepted: the state can kill you because you are depressed.
• Has never been investigated by the national police force. Three Commissioners. Not one inquiry. Not one review. Not one public statement.

Maintiens le droit. Defend the law. That is what the Stetson means. That is what the oath means. That is what "Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police" means. And three Commissioners, in succession, have sat in that chair and decided that sixty thousand dead Canadians don't warrant so much as a press conference.

There is a memorial in Ottawa — the National War Memorial, with the bronze figures of Canadian soldiers marching through an archway. Every November 11th, the country gathers there and pretends to remember what those soldiers fought for. And then on November 12th, the programme runs. The forms are processed. The injections are administered. The numbers climb.

In the Netherlands, Dutch children still lay flowers on Canadian war graves every May 5th — Liberation Day. Eighty years on, they remember. They remember that Canadian boys, teenagers some of them, died to free their grandparents from a regime that killed people it judged unfit to live. Those Dutch children honour a Canada that no longer exists — a Canada that would have been horrified by what its Parliament has built and its police force has ignored.

The Red Duster generation didn't fight their way across Europe for this. They didn't freeze in the Hochwald. They didn't bleed at Falaise. They didn't die on the beaches of Normandy so that eighty years later, their own country could offer their disabled grandchildren a needle instead of a wheelchair ramp, a lethal injection instead of adequate housing, a death certificate instead of a doctor who gives a damn.

And they would not forgive it. Not the programme. Not the Parliament that built it. And certainly not the three Commissioners who swore an oath to defend the law and then sat in silence while the state killed sixty thousand of the people they were sworn to protect.

The Red Ensign flew over Juno Beach. Maintiens le droit is engraved on the RCMP crest. Somewhere between those two facts, Canada lost its way — and the RCMP lost its honour.