Medical providers question expansion of assisted suicide across Canada as UK advances bill 

In the eight years since Canada legalized assisted suicide in 2016, physicians and other experts across America’s neighbor to the north have grown increasingly concerned over the ease with which Canadians are choosing to end their lives 

Originally passed as a “last resort” option for terminally ill individuals, today Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has become the fifth leading cause of death among Canadians, with assisted suicides increasing from 1,018 deaths in the first year of MAiD’s legalization to 13,241 in 2022, the last year for which data is available. 

While the moral and ethical arguments against assisted suicide for any reason are unavoidable, even doctors who accept it on “humane” grounds for terminally ill patients have expressed dismay over how Canada’s government and the courts have broadened the reasons for allowing people to kill themselves. 

As reported earlier in The Lion, in 2019 a Quebec judge ruled that restricting MAiD to those who had a “reasonably foreseeable death” (ie., the terminally ill) was unconstitutional, compelling Canada’s lawmakers to expand the reach of assisted suicide to individuals who, under normal conditions, could be expected to live out a normal life span. 

The consequences of such action seemed inevitable. From a “homeless man refusing long-term care” and “a woman with severe obesity,” to “an injured worker given meager government assistance and grieving new widows,” reported the Associated Press, there now appears to be no threshold too low for Canada’s bureaucrats to offer the green light to individuals wishing to end their lives. 

On private healthcare forums, Canadian physicians and other healthcare providers expressed personal conflicts over the assisted suicides of individuals who are in vulnerable life circumstances, but who otherwise could lead normal lives. 

“I don’t want [euthanasia] to become the solution to every kind of suffering out there,” commented one doctor on a private forum. 

Another doctor with a patient who had a serious lung ailment, and who was ultimately “euthanized,” wrote that the patient’s suffering was “mostly because he is homeless, in debt, and cannot tolerate the idea of [long-term care] of any kind.” 

Canadians living in poverty appear to be high on the list of those who are dying with the aid of a physician, with the AP noting that data “from Canada’s most populous province suggest a significant number of people euthanized when they are in unmanageable pain but not about to die live in Ontario’s poorest and most deprived areas.” Statistics show that of those Canadians killed when they were not terminally ill, “nearly 29% lived in the poorest parts of Ontario, compared with 20% of the province’s general population living in the most deprived communities.” 

In its research and reporting on the issue, Cardus, a Canadian Christian think-tank, charged that the dramatic expansion of MAiD across Canada has resulted in the “erosion of the ethical principles of healthcare and the ethical provision of healthcare.” The group pointed out that euthanasia and assisted suicide are being increasingly justified as a personal choice, “conflating conceptions of what constitutes suffering and what care should be provided to address it….” 

The group added that “MAiD is the wholesale destruction of human lives, predicated on the notion that death is a solution to the difficulties inherent in living. … The administration or provision of lethal drugs to patients should not be part of healthcare, and its introduction has dramatically eroded the ethical foundations of our very society.  

“Instead, while dying and death are inevitable for everyone, it should be celebrated as a time when we, as a community of humane persons, did all we could to support living well through to life’s completion.” 

Meanwhile, on Friday British lawmakers advanced a measure that would legalize assisted suicide in England and Wales for people “with a terminal diagnosis and a life expectancy of six months or less,” reports NPR. The legislation was approved 330 to 275, but it must now go through a committee before coming back to the House of Commons.