2024-02-07 04:30:22
Canadian Health Minister Mark Holland in the House of Commons in Ottawa on September 18, 2023. BLAIR GABLE / REUTERS
Canada pauses in expanding its law on “medical assistance in dying”. On February 1, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government announced that it would postpone until 2027 the provision allowing people with mental illness to request euthanasia. This extension of the law was initially planned for March 2024, but “the country is not ready”, argued the Minister of Health, Mark Holland, to justify its postponement until following the federal elections scheduled for 2025.
The Canadian provinces and territories consulted, as well as parliamentarians, notably conservative elected officials, gathered within a committee responsible for issuing recommendations, had all expressed their opposition to this enlargement. Psychiatrists had argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for doctors called upon to evaluate such requests to decide that a mental illness, such as schizophrenia, “might not be treated” to grant the patient’s request, or to judge that it was “rational”. All insisted on the need to guarantee better access to care, throughout the territory, for people with mental disorders, before considering granting them this new right.
Canadian law on euthanasia is already one of the most liberal in the world. It was passed in June 2016 under joint pressure from Quebec, which had legislated on the subject a year earlier, and the Supreme Court of Canada, which ordered the government to comply with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, recognizing that each individual has the freedom to control their own body. Initially reserved for people with “serious and irremediable illness, causing intolerable physical or psychological suffering” and which “natural death is reasonably foreseeable”, the legislation evolved in 2021 by relaxing the eligibility criteria. The applicant’s vital prognosis no longer needs to be compromised in the short term, for example in the case of disabling chronic illnesses, for the request, systematically examined by two doctors, to be deemed admissible.
The reluctance of religious authorities
The Canadian medical assistance in dying (MAID) program authorizes two types of assistance: a patient can be administered a lethal product by a doctor or nurse, or choose to ingest it themselves in the presence of a loved one or a member of the medical staff. THE “assisted suicide”, as it is practiced in particular in the neighboring American state of Oregon, however, remains extremely rare. The latest data established by the AMM annual report reveal that only seven people across the entire country used it in 2022. Finally, you must be of legal age to submit an application, and a Canadian resident – the Insurance system- disease of each province covering the financial cost of this medical procedure.
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