Hear Me Out: Maybe Retailers Shouldn’t Advertise Assisted Dying
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: YouTube
Content warning: This newsletter contains references to ableism, suicide and MAiD (medical assistance in dying).
The commercial starts with a shot of a person sitting in a wooden chair on a sandy beach, watching the water while a woman’s voice says, “Last breaths are sacred.” Then, the scene changes to forest. The person is now staring up at a huge paper lantern in the shape of a whale. Then, a close-up—it’s a young white woman wearing a thick woollen hat, with a tear rolling down her cheek. Next, she’s surrounded by a group of people on a beach during golden hour, blowing bubbles. Then holding a cello; serving cake at a table packed with loved ones; back on the beach, again surrounded by people; then cradled in someone’s arms, spinning in circles beside a huge bonfire. The voiceover continues: “When I imagine my final days, I see bubbles. I see the ocean. I see music. Even now, as I seek help to end my life, there's still so much beauty. You just have to be brave enough to see it.” And then she’s gone, replaced with a shot of the ocean and the words “For Jennyfer, June 1985 – October 2022.”
Am I describing the fictional ad for Quietus, the government-distributed suicide kit featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian sci-fi thriller Children of Men? I am not! This is actually a 30-second video produced by Canadian retailer La Maison Simons, though that only becomes clear at the very end, when the words “All is Beauty” appear on screen just above the Simons logo.
The person in the video is Jennyfer Hatch, a B.C. woman who chose to pursue assisted death due to complications and chronic pain stemming from her diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Hatch died on Oct. 23, the day before a three-minute version of the video was released on Simons’ website.
That video has been scrubbed from simons.ca and is now private on YouTube, but it hung out there for more than a month without attracting too much attention outside of a CBC article and a few interviews in advertising and marketing-focused publications. That is, until this week, when a shorter version gained traction on social media and with conservative media outlets… which is why we’re talking about it.
I think we can all agree that corporations promoting assisted dying just feels weird
Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge that this is a very thorny issue. Every person deserves the autonomy to decide how they live and how they die, and dignity as they make those decisions. I also agree with experts who say it’s important to be sensitive when discussing how people navigate the end of their lives. As David Kenneth Wright, an associate professor in the school of nursing at the University of Ottawa who specializes in end-of-life care, told CBC, “it's really important to remember that this video is about a real person's end-of-life experience and any time a dying person chooses to spend their energy on changing the social conversations we're having about death, that needs to be treated with profound respect. Any disagreements that someone might have with her message, and I have some, need to be offered from a place that honours her choice to contribute something meaningful in the short time that she had left before dying.”
So, I’m not disturbed by Hatch’s decision or even her desire to spark more conversations about Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD). My concern is really the Simons piece of the story. In a five-minute video that has also been made private on YouTube, Peter Simons, the company’s former president and CEO and current chief merchant, explains the company’s decision to wade into the issue of MAiD by saying, “it’s obviously not a commercial campaign. It’s more an effort to use our freedom, our voice, and the privilege we have to speak and create every day in a way that is more about human connection. And I think we sincerely believe that companies have a responsibility to participate in communities and to help build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”
But this is a commercial campaign, even if it’s not advertising specific pieces of clothing. According to The Message, a digital publication focused on Canadian marketing and advertising, this was a full campaign developed by Toronto ad agency Broken Heart Love Affair that included the three-minute film that was posted to YouTube, as well as 30- and 60-second spots that have been running on TV. There is apparently even a print component, though I couldn’t find it myself. The CBC article adds some more context: it sounds like Simons connected with Hatch via a MAiD program and travelled to Vancouver to meet her. Then, when they decided to work together on this project, the company “gave Hatch ‘complete control’ in telling her story as they set up unique scenes and experiences for Hatch and her closest friends in Tofino, B.C.”
MAiD is a really complicated issue, especially right now
All of this indicates a strategic brand decision to focus on the issue of assisted dying in a way that positions Simons (the company) as progressive, compassionate and boundary-pushing, which the internet and I both agree feels super dystopian. But… while I’m a little uncomfortable that a company is using a person’s decision to end their life as a brand-builder, I’m significantly more uncomfortable with how Simons (the person) has presented the issue of assisted dying in general.
“I think there's something lost perhaps in the corporate world today of understanding that privilege comes with responsibilities and participating in the communities where we work,” he told CBC. “Sometimes it won't be necessarily easy art. It will be harder art and that's part of engagement. Jennyfer’s life was a piece of art. We were heading into sort of uncharted territory for us. I think everyone was just proud that she felt that we’ve done justice to her philosophy in life.”
This speaks to the idea that assisted dying is unfairly stigmatized and that any controversy is between people who believe in bodily autonomy and those who believe in the sanctity of life. But… I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. MAiD was legalized in 2016 when Bill C-14 passed. At the time, it had a fairly limited scope. Among other things, it required applicants to have,
“a grievous and irremediable medical condition, which means:
1. the patient has a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability, and
2. the patient is in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capabilities, and
3. the patient is enduring physical or psychological suffering, caused by the medical condition or the state of decline, that is intolerable to the person and cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”
At the time, it did not include a proposed amendment that would extend assistance to people who were suffering but weren’t necessarily dying. However, in March 2021, the government passed Bill C-7, which repealed the “stipulation that an individual's death has to be ‘reasonably foreseeable’ to qualify for medical assistance.” That means people who were suffering intolerably but whose illnesses were chronic, not acute, could now qualify for assistance. Some advocates consider that a win, and I understand how that could be the case.
Are the people who are applying for MAiD really making informed and free choices?
But here’s who I keep thinking about, when I think about assisted death in Canada: Denise, a 31-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair and has a condition called Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. She spent seven years unsuccessfully applying for affordable housing in Toronto before losing hope of ever securing an apartment that she could afford and wouldn’t make her sick. Her MAiD application is now in its final stages. Madeline, a 54-year-old Vancouver woman who has been unable to work for two decades because of myalgic encephalomyelitis. She receives some government support, but estimates she’d need $75,600 every year to pay for healthcare that’s not covered by the government. Her annual income is $16,300. She is considering MAiD. And Amir, a 54-year-old St. Catharines man who can’t work because of a back injury sustained years ago. He lives in a rooming house that’s up for sale and says there are no other affordable housing options for him. “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” he told CityNews in October. “I know, in my present health condition, I wouldn’t survive it anyway. It wouldn’t be at all dignified waiting, so if that becomes my two options, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.”
This was also an issue in Hatch’s case; on Thursday, CTV News revealed that she spoke to the outlet anonymously in June about how difficult it had been to access treatment for her illness. “From a disability and financial perspective as well, I can't afford the resources that would help improve my quality of life,” she said at the time. “Because of being locked in financially as well and geographically, it is far easier to let go than keep fighting.”
In each case, it’s clear: these people didn’t feel their health issues caused enough suffering to consider MAiD. The culprit was actually poverty. In fact, we can draw a direct line between Denise, Madeline and Amir’s ‘intolerable suffering’ and failures at every level of government to provide them with their basic human needs: housing, medical care, food and again—dignity. So… this actually isn’t about their conditions. It’s about ableism within our healthcare system, housing system, government and society at large.
That raises serious questions about how MAiD is being used in our society, and whether it’s actually serving the needs of our most vulnerable members. As Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician and assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Family & Community Medicine, told Global News in October, “when people are living in such a situation where they’re structurally placed in poverty, is medical assistance in dying really a choice or is it coercion? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves.”
I’m still not sure why Simons chose to focus on this issue
I should also mention that, in addition to these examples, we also recently learned that a Veterans Affairs Canada caseworker offered MAiD to Canadian military veterans, some of whom were seeking help with their mental health. I know I’m not an advertising exec, but I promise it would have taken exactly one Google search for me to understand that this issue is much more complicated than just stigma against assisted death, and that it probably wasn’t one I’d recommend a client wade into. But clearly, no one in the room really thought about what exactly they would be endorsing—or which sides of this issue they’d be leaving out—when they decided to tell this very specific story of assisted death.
There’s also another dynamic at play here. Corporations are inextricably linked to capitalism, a system that devalues people with disabilities. According to a 2002 essay published in Socialist Register by late writer and disability rights activist Marta Russell and lawyer and University of Ottawa associate professor Ravi Malhotra, “the primary oppression of disabled persons (i.e. of people who could work, in a workplace that was accommodated to their needs) is their exclusion from exploitation as wage labourers... Industrial capitalism thus created not only a class of proletarians but also a new class of ‘disabled’ who did not conform to the standard worker’s body and whose labour-power was effectively erased, excluded from paid work. As a result, disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem and a justification emerged for segregating them out of mainstream life.”
That is to say, people who corporations cannot exploit are considered less valuable by those corporations and by society at large, which justifies their exclusion from society. I’m not saying Simons is consciously advocating for the extermination of people with disabilities, but rather that it is perhaps not surprising for a profit-driven company to create a campaign that uses cinematic, poetic storytelling to promote assisted death to disabled people. So yes, MAiD is an important step forward in terms of bodily autonomy, but if it exists without progressive values and a robust social safety net, it can also be exploited by those who would benefit from fewer poor people.
That’s not to say I think Hatch’s story isn’t worth telling; it actually feels very similar to a powerful essay published by The Cut back in September, and I would have appreciated an equally sensitive, honest and nuanced treatment. I just don’t think Simons should have been the one to tell it.
And Did You Hear About…
The Cut’s very smart analysis of the workaholic journalist trope in She Said.
Cocaine Bear: The Movie, which is not only a real thing, but also based on a true story (????).
This New York Times longread about a U.S. soldier who ‘adopted’ (read: stole) a baby from her Afghan family.
The British royal family’s latest racism-related blunder, plus some additional context.
The cheating Good Morning America co-anchors. (Please read this entire thread if you, too, love mess.)
Bonus: Fishtopher the Cat. (FYI, Fishtopher now has an Instagram and a Twitter account, for all of your endorphin-related needs.)
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