Assisted Suicide available in Canada with death delivered in just 11 days
A new report on assisted suicide in Canada – which the country’s government labels as “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) – has found that the practise has risen thirteen-fold since legalisation in 2016 and has become a “routine” practise. It also found that the average time between request and an “assisted death” being carried out is about 11 days.
Published on 7 August, the report titled “From Exceptional to Routine: The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada” says Canada is now far beyond the limitations expected or that were recommended to safeguard against potential problems when the practise was legalised.
“The growing number of MAiD deaths, and the continued expansion of eligibility criteria, is far beyond the expectations set in Carter v. Canada, the court case that decriminalised assisted dying in 2015,” states the report.
“Consequently, MAiD is now far more than exceptional: It is routine. Almost no MAiD requests are denied by clinicians, and the median time between written request and death from MAiD in 2022 was merely eleven days. Despite judges’ and policymakers’ claims or expectations, MAiD is no longer an option of ‘last resort’,” it continues.
The report was complied by Alexander Raikin, a visiting fellow in bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and advocacy group that aims “to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics”.
The report highlights that in 2019, the Superior Court of Quebec judge in Truchon v. Canada ruled that Canada’s MAiD program was unconstitutional because it did not allow for the assisted dying of persons who were not facing an end-of-life situation.
As a result: “Existing safeguards were weakened. The minimum ten-day assessment period for MAiD was removed entirely, allowing for the same-day assessment and provision of assisted dying for almost all MAiD requests,” the report continues.
“The requirement that the patient give final consent before administration of MAiD was no longer mandatory. Moreover, MAiD became available to persons whose death is no longer ‘reasonably foreseeable’ but who consider that their physical suffering, from a disability for example, is intolerable to them,” the document states.
It also notes, MAiD has been expanded further through the Senate, without any additional legal safeguards, to include mental illness as a qualifying condition. However, this clause has since been deferred to 2027.
“To be clear, warning lights have long been flashing that MAiD assessors and providers are not treating MAiD as a last resort. Even before Bill C-7, which removed the provision that death had to be ‘reasonably foreseeable’ to qualify for MAiD, the Attorney General of Canada did not contest expert evidence that ‘some clinicians gained comfort with extending prognostic timeframes out to many years’,” the report states.
“Also not contested by the government was that patients could qualify for MAiD on the basis of ‘intent to refuse treatment’ as opposed to actual refusal of treatment. This also implies, according to the Health Law Institute at Dalhousie University, that the mere intent to stop eating or drinking could qualify a patient for assisted dying, compromising the efficacy of safeguards,” it continues.
The report says Canada’s model is similar to that of Belgium and the Netherlands, in that it now allows assisted death for persons with non-terminal illnesses, which expands eligibility to those living with disabilities whose death is not reasonably foreseeable.
England’s bishops have highlighted these changes in assisted suicide laws in other countries while warning British Catholics that the same could happen in the United Kingdom given the ongoing push to change the law on euthanasia, and which before the 4 July election was endorsed by now Prime Minster Keir Starmer.
