Canada's MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying)

"The implications of Canada's law [on euthanasia] is that a life with disability is automatically less worth living and that in some cases, death is preferable."

Theresia Degener, professor or law and disability studies, Protestant University for Applied Sciences, Germany

 

"[Canada's euthanasia law is] probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis' program in Germany in the 1930s."

Tim Stanton, director, Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, University of British Columbia

 

"[Canadian politicians should listen to the concerns of those facing hardships who believe euthanasia is their only option'."

"In an era where we recognize the right to die with dignity, we must do more to guarantee the right to live with dignity."

Marie-Claude Landry, Ad. E., Chief Commissioner, Canadian Human Rights Commission

The Senate has passed Bill C-7, which expands access to medical assistance in dying, including, eventually, to people suffering solely from mental illnesses. CBC

Disability experts have concluded that Canada has the world's most permissive euthanasia regulations which permit people with serious disabilities to decide to reach out for death, absent any other medical issues. A majority of Canadians in general support the concept of euthanasia for those for whom life is untenable for medical reasons. The advocacy group Dying With Dignity hails the process as being "driven by compassion", to end human suffering. Well and good.

 

Human rights advocates on the other hand, feel the regulations are too loose, lacking required safeguards. In the process lives of disabled people are devalued, inciting doctors and health workers to recommend the procedure to those of their patients who might not otherwise consider ending their lives. According to advocates, troubling instances occur where people seek assisted suicide in direct relation to inadequate government support in living.

 

Euthanasia access is to expand in 2023, against advocacy that insists the system warrants scrutiny at the present time. The euthanasia law "recognizes the rights of all persons -- as well as the inherent and equal value of every life", insists Canada's health minister. Euthanasia protocol sees doctors administer drugs meant to take away life of patients -- meant to be a compassionate response to people's end-of-life requests -- is legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain, along with several states in Australia.

Jurisdictions in several American states permit assisted suicide, with patients themselves under supervision taking the lethal drug that will end their lives. Originally in 2016 when Canada introduced euthanasia legally, the procedure was to be granted to people age 18 and over meeting several criteria, including having a "grievous and irremediable" medical condition that caases unbearable suffering. Death was to be reasonably foreseeable, as a qualification.

Later legislation removed the death-be-imminent restriction, an issue removing a key safeguard, according to critics of the legislation. In Belgium and the Netherlands, euthanasia has been legal for the past two decades, where monthly commissions review potentially troubling cases. Canada lacks this oversight. No restrictions apply to doctors suggesting euthanasia to patients who have not themselves requested it; strictly forbidden elsewhere as a practise.

There is no requirement to have exhausted all treatment options for people seeking euthanasia in Canada, unlike what pertains in Belgium and the Netherlands. Under current Canadian euthanasia law, any adult with a serious illness, disease or disability can apply for euthanasia. Critics say that permitting euthanasia based solely on disability represents a clear human rights violation.

Another issue has arisen, whereby in some instances people finding themselves with mounting medical bills due to their disabilities choose to be euthanized. Canada is preparing to allow people to be euthanized from next year for mental health reasons exclusively. Consideration of extending euthanasia is being given to "mature" minors, children under age 18 meeting the same criteria as adults.

 

The most needily vulnerable people whose lives could be improved sufficiently so as to make them worthwhile living with some thoughtful medical and therapeutic assistance, along with government disability financial assistance surely is far preferable in a compassionate society than offering suffering humanity early death in lieu of life under tolerable living conditions. 

 

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"A few days ago, a 30-year-old patient with very treatable mental illness asked me to end her life. Her distraught parents came to the appointment with her because they were afraid that I might support her request and that they would be helpless to do anything about it. It’s horrific they have to worry that by going to a psychiatrist, their daughter might be killed by that very psychiatrist."

Psychiatrist editor of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health

Death At A Time of Despair

"Decades of studies have confirmed two facts about end-of-life care in Canada. It consumes a vast amount of resources; many people will consume more 'health care' in the last years before death than in the entireity of their lives before that. And most Canadians do not want to spend large parts of that last year in hospital."

"Palliative care, hospice care and home care are what is needed and what is desired. Yet these remain chronically underfunded and delayed while the option for a quick and cheap death is full speed ahead."

Fa.Raymond De Souza, Columnist, National Post

 

"[Under Bill C-7, a mental illness will] not be considered an illness, disease or disability [for the purpose of the assisted-dying law]."

"A provision that applies only to persons with mental illness, without appropriate justification, in discriminatory in nature because it is arbitrary."

"A provision that applies to all persons with mental illness, without appropriate justification, is unconstitutional because it is overbroad."

"Explicitly stating that mental illness is not an illness, disease or disability is inaccurate, stigmatizing, arbitrary and discriminatory."

Canadian Psychiatric Association brief

 

Up to the present in the four years that medically assisted death has been available in Canada, a small number of Canadians with severe irremediable mental health disorders have asked for and received assisted deaths, legally. With Bill C-7, some changes have been made whereby the government now proposes to expressly exclude people suffering from mental illness at the very time it is expanding the law with amendments to make it easier for people with physical failings to apply for assisted death. 

Many doctors are completely averse to the very idea of helping people to end their lives, rather than offering compassionate end-of-life care tailored to the individual. In the first four years of the program, the core measure of suitability for assisted death was an immediately foreseeable death occurring while the individual was suffering from an incurable disease or illness. Now that provision is to be removed. The number of witnesses has been reduced, a requirement that the individual requesting assisted death repeat that request immediately prior to lethal injection has also been erased.

It is easier to die in Canada if you are chronically and irremediably in pain, than if you are a mass murderer being punished for horrific crimes. Canada is fastidious about the death penalty; it simply does not exist in Canada as a civilized democracy; the state does not kill to avenge killing. But it will and does aid people who are suffering from a medical/health calamity to end their lives. This Liberal government led by Prime Minister Trudeau has truly enriched the Canadian experience.

Under this government of progressive democratic liberalism ground-breaking legislation has been passed to enrich the lives of the nation; such as the legalization of drugs, assisted death, and massive, colossal government debt. The three D's that define the government of Justin Trudeau. Included in that group should be gender dysphoria, where it is illegal for parents, doctors, advisers to attempt to change a child's mind when he/she expresses a wish to be regarded as a member of the gender they were not born to.

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Ironically when MAID (medical assistance in dying) was introduced in 2016, the government was quick to assure Canadians that legislation was geared to "safeguard" against abuse; no one would be under pressure to request a lethal injection to end their lives, that the existence of alternatives would be advised to a requester, and offered instead of assisted death where appropriate. That reassurance has degenerated to the point that it now will be possible for lethal injection to be administered the very day it has been requested.

In a country whose medical system is under such strain that it takes months to see a medical specialist upon referral, and months to have available some types of diagnostic imaging, months to a year to have surgeries scheduled, but dying can be readily accomplished. This at a time when surveys regularly show that most people would choose palliative care for  end-of-life situations, not peremptory death. But palliative care is poorly funded and opportunities are rare.

And now the issue of excluding psychiatric patients whose suffering is intense and incurable is deemed a disservice to society, and an offence against human dignity. But the near-death provision under the legislation has been scrapped, widening the opportunity pool for assisted death, while excluding those people with mental illness. Psychiatrists are incensed at the exclusion of those whose weal they are engaged in, considering the amendment a "flagrant violation of Section 15 of the charter"; discriminatory to a class of Canadians.

Canada's Minister of Justice, David Lametti, informed the House of Commons "that the trajectory of mental illness is more difficult to predict than that of most physical illnesses, that spontaneous improvement is possible and that a desire to die and an impaired perception of one's circumstances are symptoms, themselves, of some mental illnesses." At opposite ends of the spectrum, there is push-back from health-impaired Canadians and their physicians that the disabled would welcome death. 

"All the doctor seemed to see, though, was a disabled woman alone, sick, tired and probably tired of living" commented a woman who when she was in her twenties with pneumonia, wheelchair-bound, her attending doctor suggested she might consider euthanasia, rather than wait for recovery. She rejected his suggestion, recovered, and is now an advocate for the disabled who fear euthanasia being forced upon them.They call the program MAD.

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