Peter Stockland: Palliative centre a light in darkness St. Raphael’s Palliative Care Home and Day Centre in Montreal’s Outremont borough. Photo from Google Street View Peter Stockland: Palliative centre a light in darkness By Peter Stockland April 24, 2021
Amid the deep shadows of ever-expanding MAiD and examples of hospice care being brutally extinguished, a gesture of transformation by the Archdiocese of Montreal lights a candle in the dark.
To enter St. Raphael’s Palliative Care Home and Day Centre in the city’s Outremont borough is to witness the good that comes when people of the faith combine with bright, imaginative community-ordered minds to turn a dying church into a locus of life.
You might think the middle of a global pandemic is less than an ideal time to disrupt the operations of a hospice where palliative care patients receive comfort as they approach death.
If so, you would not share the apparent thinking of the British Columbian (B.C.) government or its local Fraser Health Authority, which has forced layoffs of staff at the Irene Thomas Hospice in suburban Vancouver. The dismissals are part of the eviction of the Delta Hospice Society that oversees the facility.
In a conversation yesterday, DHS board President Angelina Ireland confirmed for me that the pink slips were to be given out this morning because the Society refuses to administer Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) on its premises. As of February 24, the DHS will have to relinquish the palliative care centre that it raised $9 million a decade ago to construct on Fraser Health Authority land. Its 35-year lease on the property will be nullified, and its other assets expropriated, Ireland says.