On April 9, the Times Colonist carried a story with a headline quoting John Hofsess: “The timing of my death is completely wrong.”
He thought that his death was premature. Hofsess believed that the April publication of a book on assisted death by Sandra Martin, which would explain his role in several deaths, could lead to prosecution or confiscation of his passport.
Hofsess died in Switzerland on Feb. 29, 2016, in the company of Richard Thain, a supporter from Ottawa, Madeline Weld, editor of Humanist Perspectives magazine (also from Ottawa) and Michael Irwin, a retired doctor from Britain who has been a longtime advocate of physician-assisted death.
Over the past year, I met Hofsess many times while working on my own book on the right-to-die movement in Canada, and we became friends. He wanted me to travel with him on his final trip, but for several reasons, including medical ones, I could not do so.
Still, I cannot escape the feeling that I let him down. None of those who attended the death had even met Hofsess before. At least I could have been a familiar presence for him in his final days.
Hofsess was a remarkable man. In his younger years at McMaster University, he became well-known as an avant-garde filmmaker, and later as a noted film critic for Maclean’s magazine.
In the 1980s, he started the Canadian Right to Die Society, collecting many hundreds of members. Among his other accomplishments, he was responsible for bringing the Sue Rodriguez case to public attention in 1992.
When that case was lost, Hofsess became discouraged about the prospects of changing Canada’s punitive laws on assisted death. He decided that the best thing he could do was to help desperate people die.
He started an underground euthanasia service for members of his society (and other such societies); with his assistant, Evelyn Martens, he not only helped people die, he carried out the terminal procedures, which involved administering a sedative and then placing a plastic bag over the head of the unconscious person and filling the bag with helium gas, which then caused death by asphyxiation, but without the sensation of smothering.
This was not simply a matter of assisted suicide, where someone gets help in ending his or her own life; this was what is known as voluntary euthanasia, where the final actions are, at the bidding of the dying person, taken by someone else. While assisted suicide has been punishable by a specified statute in the Criminal Code, with a penalty of up to 14 years in prison, voluntary euthanasia could be deemed to be first-degree murder.
Hofsess and Martens put their own freedom at serious risk to carry out these acts of mercy. If caught and successfully prosecuted for first-degree murder, the minimum sentence would have been 25 years in prison.
Why did Martens and Hofsess take such a risk? Critics have accused them of being ruthless and uncaring “death zealots,” but I spent much time with each of them and am persuaded that they acted out of human compassion, not from some sinister motive.
Both had undergone excruciating experiences with dying friends and relatives, and both believed that such unmerciful treatment of the dying was wrong.
To Martens and Hofsess, laws that caused unnecessary human suffering were cruel and wrong. They thought they had a moral obligation to oppose such laws. While most of us might not choose their means of opposition, their motivation seemed clear.
Hofsess would have preferred it to be otherwise: He wanted a legal, controlled process for assisting death. But in the absence of such a process, he could either let dying people suffer or break the law and help them. He chose the latter.
Martens was arrested in 2002 on two charges of assisted suicide and then found not guilty at her trial in Duncan in 2004. The verdict was based upon lack of proof, although she almost certainly was guilty of at least assisted suicide and probably voluntary euthanasia. (Martens died in 2011.)
Hofsess abandoned his underground railroad after Martens’ arrest and laid low for the next 14 or so years (living in subsidized housing in Victoria). Then, with pending new legislation on assisted death, he thought it was time to tell his story. He decided to reveal the role he and Martens had played in the death of poet Al Purdy who, it was generally thought, had died of natural causes.
Purdy’s wife, Eurithe, still living, was against publishing the story, but Hofsess, who was not in good health and did not want to go on living much longer, wanted the true story to come out, both in the interests of historical accuracy and because Purdy’s example, he thought, might help Canadians become more accepting of the idea of voluntary euthanasia.
Hofsess believed that most people want someone to carry out the procedure for them, not just to assist in their suicide, and he hoped that new legislation would allow for the possibility of voluntary euthanasia as well as assisted suicide. The recent Supreme Court ruling striking down the law on assisted suicide leaves open this possibility, referring to “assisted death” rather than assisted suicide.
Hofsess did not want to stay around when the story came out, and he was adamant about this, though I questioned that decision several times with him. He thought that there was a good chance he could be prosecuted, which would entail, among other things, losing his passport and the opportunity to go to Switzerland.
When I argued that, following the Supreme Court decision on legalizing assisted death, prosecution for past offences would be unlikely, he pointed out that since what he had done was voluntary euthanasia, not assisted suicide, he could be liable for a murder charge, even if assisted suicide were legalized.
The uncertainty about Canadian legislation was also why he thought he needed to go to Switzerland to die: There was no guarantee that he would be eligible for assisted death under new legislation here. And he was determined to die.
Why? He was a lonely man in failing health, and he thought it was wrong for the Canadian health system to spend more money keeping him alive. And aside from the distress of being prosecuted, he thought such prosecution could waste millions more dollars. And, of course, he did not relish the idea of spending his final days in prison.
Perhaps more than that, though, he hated the idea of being at the centre of a storm of publicity and controversy. He always had tried to stay out of the spotlight and was very uncomfortable with that prospect. All in all, he preferred the idea of going to Switzerland, and planned to go there to die last fall.
The story was due to come out in The Walrus magazine last November, with preparations and consultations with the magazine taking place during the previous year. That was when Sandra Martin and I both began writing books on the Canadian right-to-die movement, and we both interviewed Hofsess extensively. His story would be featured in both books.
Our books were scheduled to come out in April of this year, so were mostly written late last year, with both of us expecting the Purdy story to come out in The Walrus article. Martin planned to extend her coverage of the story by attending Hofsess’s death in Switzerland.
Then things got complicated. For reasons that were not apparent to me (and still are not), The Walrus pulled out in the late fall. Another possible publisher did, as well. I realized, as I imagine Martin did, that all of a sudden we were both in the position of breaking the story when our books came out in April.
Normally, for a journalist, this would be welcome, but in this situation, it was tied to John’s determination to go to Switzerland when the story came out. Yikes, I thought. Now our books would precipitate John’s death.
The situation caused a considerable amount of anxiety for several weeks. I talked to Hofsess about the situation, explaining that my book was in final editing and would be difficult to change. He reiterated that if the books came out in early April he would have to leave for Switzerland before that. He was also working on his own book that he wanted to finish before he left and now needed more time to do that.
At the last moment, my publisher asked that the Purdy section of my book be removed from the final proofs.
The moral dilemma in this odd situation became moot when Hofsess agreed with Toronto Life magazine to publish a version of the Purdy story in March, after Hofsess’s planned death at the end of February.
Still, Hofsess believed he was being pressured by the April publication date of Martin’s book, which would reveal incriminating, specific information about Purdy’s death. There was the Toronto Life situation, too, but would he have delayed that deal were it not for Martin’s book?
He spoke of a “gun being held to his head,” but was Martin responsible for the timing of Hofsess’s death, as Hofsess claimed?
As much as I respected and admired Hofsess for his eloquent writing and for the courageous work that he did earlier in his life, I do not think that this is a fair or reasonable conclusion.
Martin wrote her book in good faith, as I did, with information freely provided to us and with the expectation that the Purdy story would be broken by The Walrus in November and that John would be gone by then.
I understand that she was in touch with John after the circumstances changed, and that he never asked her to delay publication of her book or to change its content. He might have felt resentful in his last days, but it was his decision, and his alone, to go when he did.
I do not claim any sort of moral high ground for pulling the Purdy story from my manuscript. I would have gone with it — my journalistic impulses would likely have triumphed over my better judgment. But my publisher, James Lorimer, wisely intervened.
John, of course, did not have to go to Switzerland at all. He was not about to die from his various illnesses. I think prosecution based on his revelations about Purdy would have been unlikely at this point, especially with the new federal Liberal government predisposed to a progressive position on assisted death. I cannot see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sanctioning making an example of Hofsess, especially with new legislation pending. Also, I do not think a great wave of unwanted publicity would have engulfed Hofsess; in fact, the story has barely made the news in most of Canada.
I had hoped he would stay around longer, in part because he had become a friend, and we liked and respected each other. I much admired the courage he had demonstrated in operating his underground railroad.
Those of us who write about him — Martin, me, undoubtedly others — can carry his message forward. But it would be good to be able to hear, again, from the man who was in the trenches. It was his courageous actions, perhaps more than those of any other Canadian, that have led us to our current state of national acceptance of assisted death.
We will hear Hofsess’s voice once again in his book, The Future of Death: True Stories About Assisted Dying, being published this spring by Canadian Humanist Publications. Sandra Martin’s book, A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices, published by Harper Collins, is now available, as is mine, The Right to Die: The Courageous Canadians who Gave Us the Right to Dignified Death, published by James Lorimer and Co.
Gary Bauslaugh is a Victoria writer who has published several books on social issues in the past few years, including Robert Latimer: A Story of Justice and Mercy, and The Secret Power of Juries.