Relinquishment
The people who frame dying as dignity will never be asked to demonstrate it.
Deep ecology has always had a population-reduction problem it couldn’t say out loud. MAID solved it. You don’t have to advocate for fewer people. You just say “dignity” and “choice” and the spreadsheet does the rest.
Yesterday I published a 40-year projection of Canada’s MAID program. The structural argument was fiscal: a healthcare system that can’t afford to treat people built a legal mechanism to kill them instead, and the incentives are self-reinforcing. The projection was deliberately clinical. No villains. Just math.
I left something out.
There is a constituency that looks at that projection and sees not a warning but a plan. Not a ratchet but a feature. They won’t say so directly. They don’t have to. They have better words.
Relinquishment. Dignity. Compassion. Sustainability.
The deep green movement has carried a population-reduction current since Ehrlich. The problem was always rhetorical: “fewer humans would be better for the planet” is a sentence that sounds exactly like what it is, and what it is makes people recoil. You can’t build a political movement on “some of you should die for the biosphere.” You can’t even say it at a dinner party.
MAID solved the rhetorical problem.
You don’t need to advocate for fewer people. You advocate for the right to choose. You advocate for death with dignity. You advocate for compassionate end-of-life options. You fund the conferences and the training programs and the research chairs. You produce branded content about how beautiful the exit can be (an actual fashion company did this, with an actual dying woman, on an actual beach). The system produces fewer people as a downstream effect of individual autonomous choices, and nobody’s fingerprints are on the population curve because every death was voluntary.
This is the same move the tech industry made with “disruption.” You don’t say “we’re going to destroy your industry and take your job.” You say “innovation” and “efficiency” and “the future of work” and the pink slips arrive framed as progress. The linguistic structure is identical: take an outcome that would be politically toxic if stated plainly, wrap it in the language of individual empowerment, and let the aggregate effect accumulate without anyone ever having to own it.
The Simons ad was not an accident or an aberration. It was a prototype. A dying woman on a beach in Tofino, surrounded by nature, scored with cello music, filmed by a brand agency, distributed by a fashion retailer. That is not a medical decision being documented. That is a lifestyle aesthetic being applied to mortality. Your death can be artisanal. Curated. Minimal-footprint. Beautiful. Like a tiny house. Like composting. Like choosing not to have children for the planet. Except it’s choosing not to continue living.
The word that connects these is sustainability. The healthcare system is not sustainable with this many old, sick, expensive people in it. The planet is not sustainable with this many consumers in it. The budget is not sustainable with this many obligations in it. MAID makes all three more sustainable. Nobody has to say “we need fewer elderly disabled people consuming resources.” The word sustainable does that work without anyone having to hear what it means.
I keep returning to who holds these views and who dies of them.
The people promoting relinquishment as a virtue are overwhelmingly wealthy, healthy, and young enough that they will never personally face the choice they’re romanticizing. The Green MP advocating for MAID expansion is not the person who will be offered MAID instead of a wheelchair ramp. The sustainability researcher publishing on “end-of-life resource allocation” is not the veteran crawling down her stairs because the ramp hasn’t arrived in five years. The ethicist writing about “the right to a good death” has private insurance and a family doctor.
The relinquishment is always for someone else.
That’s the structural tell. When a moral framework is held exclusively by people who will never be subject to its consequences, it is not a moral framework. It is a class preference dressed in the language of ethics. The Greens don’t want to die with dignity. They want other people to die with dignity, where “other people” means the poor, the disabled, the old, the rural, the “reactionary”, the indigenous, the veteran, the mentally ill (the people who cost the system money and don’t generate the tax revenue to cover it).
This is not a conspiracy theory. I am not claiming the Green Party of Canada sat in a room and said “let’s use MAID to reduce the population.” I am claiming something worse: they don’t have to. The alignment between their values (fewer resource consumers, lighter footprint, sustainable systems) and MAID’s structural output (fewer resource consumers, lighter footprint, sustainable systems) is so complete that no coordination is required. They just have to keep saying “dignity” and the system keeps producing the outcome they want without them ever having to admit they want death (for other people).
The timeline I published yesterday projects 4 million MAID deaths by 2065 under the inertia scenario. I noted that this is the “good” path, the one with no external shocks.
I should have noted who it’s good for.