In the week following the publication of his book (his only book), Neglected No More, journalist André Picard was interviewed by co-host Adrienne Arsenault on a segment of The National, a nightly news program of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). During the course of the interview, Arsenault asked Picard why he wrote a book about elder care. Picard’s reply is unforgettable.

Picard, rather than offer a response designed to promote justice for the constituencies of people in Canada with which he alleges to concern himself, was unabashedly ageist and ableist in his reply; that is, Picard explained that he was motivated to research the topic and write the book because he did not want to be a “burden” to his children in his old age.

That this privileged nondisabled white man rehearsed an ableist and ageist trope that contributes to the isolation and neglect that elders and disabled people in Canada actually confront seemed to go unrecognized by Arsenault and likely appealed to the middle-class nondisabled people that the CBC deems to be its desired target audience.

I want to point out that Picard’s ableism, rather than articulated in a singular event that might be considered a mishap, is regularly (and increasingly) on display in his column for The Globe and Mail and his activity on social media, the latter of which is especially characterized by his repeated harassment and ridicule of disabled academics and activists who (for instance) write X/Twitter posts in opposition to MAiD.

Picard, a “health” columnist/journalist who fancies himself to be a bioethicist/ philosopher of sorts, routinely reiterates the skewed argumentation that philosophers/bioethicists who promote MAiD tenaciously advance, uncritically crusading for the shibboleths of mainstream Eurocentric ethics/bioethics—autonomy, individual rights, and personhood—that the Trudeau Liberal Government relies upon to prop up its neoliberal eugenic policy agenda. (Not wishing to be usurped, Terry Bowman, a bioethicist at The University of Toronto, invoked these mainstays of Eurocentric philosophy when he casually offered his “expert” analysis of MAiD on the CBC early this week.)

Indeed, Picard’s column, once a relatively forgettable distraction in the social milieu of Canadian media, has become a surreptitiously effective mechanism of propaganda in the architecture of the Canadian federal government’s drive to eliminate “useless eaters” through a variety of means, that is, to eliminate disabled people in so-called Canada through the introduction and expansion of MAiD; through the continuation of legislated poverty; through institutionalization and incarceration; and through widespread disenfranchisement in general.

In his most recent contribution to the neoliberal eugenic agenda of Trudeau’s Liberals, for example, Picard predictably (and surreptitiously) served as a stand-in for Senators Stan Kutcher and Pamela Wallin, expressing outrage and indignation on the stage of Canadian media that people “with mental disorders” continue to be “discriminated against” because they cannot access the state-funded suicide with which other disabled people are provided. Why, he asked, should the Canadian government deny some disabled people access to this public good? Why shouldn’t all disabled people have access to the sort of “health care” that state-sanctioned suicide provides? 

By virtue of this column (and its questioning) alone, I submit, Picard demonstrated that he has earned the Order of Canada appointment that he recently received.