To say “not in my backyard” to a hospice is the worst imaginable form of Nimbyism, whether the underlying reason is the alleged “cultural sensitivities” of some Chinese Canadians or something else.
“It is all about cultural sensitivity,” says Janet Fan, whose home is near the proposed site of a 15-bed hospice on the campus of the University of British Columbia. “We came here as new immigrants with our own belief system. And in our beliefs, it is impossible for us to have dying people in our backyard.”
Not in my backyard, for the dying?
It would surely be an unreasonable accommodation to banish the sick, the gasping, the frail, for the sake of someone’s cultural values, taboos or superstitions. Ms. Fan and other opponents ask for a kind of legally sanctioned discrimination against a group that, to borrow from human-rights terminology, is “historically disadvantaged” and always will be. To permit such discrimination would be repugnant and ridiculous.
It would be wrong, though, to assume the Chinese-Canadian community is homogeneous in its views on hospices, or on death and dying. For instance, the Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care is planning to build a free-standing hospice in Toronto. More traditional objections – the fear of declining property values – may play a role in opposition to the hospice at the UBC campus. (Making the opposition even more unseemly, the hospice is meant to be a research facility that will lead to improvements in palliative care.)
Whatever the critics’ motivations, petitions have been circulating and the plans for the hospice have been put on hold. Perhaps a delay is sensible; sometimes it’s better to win over people with reason than simply to barrel ahead. But certain principles should be clear.
First, hospices will, and should, play a growing role in palliative care. The dying (and their families) are entitled to dignity, the raison d’être of hospices. As one nurse who has worked in a hospital and a hospice put it, people die differently in a hospice. Second, in a collision between Canadian values and those of subgroups within Canada, if that is indeed the case here, it is not always Canada that needs to give way.
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