Made in Canada: MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying

"Canada has the least safeguards of all of countries that allow it [assisted suicide]."

"It's a state-funded, state-organized, medical system providing end of life."

"What we see in Canada are rates of assisted suicide and euthanasia that are quickly bypassing Belgium and the Netherlands." 

"We need to know more — I’m concerned because MAID is not what was originally put forward . . . it’s clearly no longer an exceptional procedure."

"We’ve already had cases of mental illness being the reason people asked for it."

"Should we accept it becoming some kind of therapy for all kinds of suffering?"

Trudo Lemmens, researcher, University of Toronto

"We're teaching our youth that the needs of the vulnerable should be taken care of up to a certain point, but when those needs become too intense or burdensome, then death is the preferred option."

Catholic Register editorial

?From a disability rights perspective, there is a grave concern that, if assisted dying is made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are close to death, a social assumption might follow ... that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability."

United Nations special rapporteurs

In this photo from late 2020, Minister of Justice David Lametti gives a thumbs up as he rises to vote in favour of a motion on Bill C-7, a bill which extended medically assisted death to Canadians without a terminal illness. Photo by The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

 

Many years ago, much earlier than Canada's enactment of legislation approving MAID -- Medical Assistance in Dying -- the world was aghast at the runaway assisted suicide/euthanasia being practised in several countries that pioneered the process, notably Belgium and the Netherlands. Most people regarded the excessive nature of the wide net of acceptance of conditions that were not life-threatening becoming eligible for assisted dying were extremely uncomfortable with the concept of dispensing with life in such a seemingly casual manner.

Years later, the plight of some people suffering from potentially lethal medical conditions wishing to end their lives and publicly campaigning for a compassionate view of their wish to have the benefit of assisted suicide, moved the majority of Canadians to agree that under certain conditions people should have the right to end their lives and thus end the agony of pain they suffered while living out the end of their severely health-compromised lives.

Since the legalization of MAID in 2016, the government of Canada has relaxed many of the original, deliberately stringent qualifications for MAID, opening access to the procedure to greater numbers of people whose conditions had formerly not qualified as those living with unrelenting pain, facing imminent death. At present the rate of medically assisted death in Canada has risen and continues to rise at a precipitous rate. As a result Canada has become a symbol internationally of how not to provide the comfort of death.

Medically assisted death was given to 10,064 Canadians in 2021, a ten-fold rise from the first year of the practise to five years on. The greater majority of that number of assisted deaths were patients with terminal illnesses, but the stats from 2021 included 219 Canadians "whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable". The British medical journal The Lancet published an article recently over concerns with the assisted suicide regime in Canada.

The Canadian assisted dying regime was compared in a profile by the Associated Press, to policies enacted infamously by Nazi Germany prescribing mass euthanasia for the physically compromised and mentally ill in the population. According to researcher Tim Stanton at the University of British Columbia, Canada's assisted dying regime is "probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis' program in Germany in the 1930s".

The Supreme Court of Canada struck down criminal sanctions against doctor-assisted suicide on the grounds it was in violation of a constitutional guarantee of "life, liberty and security of the person". In their great collective wisdom, the right to life replaced by the right to death as a constitutional guarantee of 'life, liberty and security'. Limited initially to those Canadians whose death was "reasonably foreseeable", Canada legalized medical assistance in dying following the Court's ruling.

Last year the law was expanded to include those with a "grievous and irremediable medical condition". And a year after that expansion in March of 2021, March of 2022 will herald another extension permitting Canadians whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental condition such as depression or schizophrenia to qualify for assisted death in dying. 

A national debate over the potential of legalizing assisted suicide is to be opened in France shortly, where up to 90 percent of citizens support some liberalization of the country's "right to die" laws. In Britain earlier this year a member of the House of Lords introduced a bill to legalize assisted death for British citizens with less than six months to live, with the support of up to 75 percent of the population.

In Germany last year parliament began exploring the legalization of assisted suicide for the terminally ill, with the proviso they undergo mandatory counselling. Globally, eyes are on Canada's outcome of the relaxation of its original law on assisted medical death, where a publicized string of instances found Canadians with chronic conditions being offered death instead of medical care, including one ex-military patient suffering from PTSD.

"When the government runs the system, the right of citizens to end their own suffering can be twisted to serve the state", observed the libertarian Reason magazine. On the cusp of Canada's expansion of MAID to include patients without a terminal illness, special UN rapporteurs observed the move could place Canada in violation of any number of international agreements affirming the rights of the disabled and the elderly.

Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos has insisted sufficient protections exist to prevent abuses in the system of medically assisted deaths. Photo by Blair Gable /Reuters