Assisted Suicide Opponents Celebrate Reprieves in Canada and Abroad

People rally against medically assisted dying legislation on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 1, 2016. (The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Opponents of assisted suicide have something to cheer about this holiday season as proposals to expand the procedure have suffered setbacks.

Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAiD) legislation, Bill C-7, temporarily excludes eligibility until March 17, 2023, for those whose only medical condition is a mental illness. But as of Dec. 15, this moratorium on their eligibility has been extended for an indefinite time.

Federal Justice Minister David Lametti said at a news conference that the provinces, territories, and health-care professionals need more time.

“That includes having the time to implement those practice standards, and to complete and disseminate key resources that are being developed for clinicians and other health-care system partners to address these more complex MAiD requests,” Lametti said.

The two-year moratorium was put in place on March 17, 2021, when Bill C-7 came into force. Bill C-7 amended Canada’s original 2016 MAiD legislation, Bill C-14, to expand the eligibility criteria for access to MAiD by removing the requirement that the requestor’s natural death must be reasonably foreseeable.

The moratorium, which was put in place to allow time for an expert review of the approach to take to handle MAiD requests based solely on a mental illness, can only be extended with the cooperation of other parties in the minority legislature. However, Lametti expressed confidence that this would occur.

Amy Hasbrouck, director of Not Dead Yet, an organization for people with disabilities opposed to euthanasia, welcomed Lametti’s decision.

“That is a good sign. That means that somehow, to some degree, [our] message is getting through, and so that gives me hope,” she said in an interview.

Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada David Lametti, along with Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Associate Minister of Health Carolyn Bennett, hold a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Dec. 15, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Alex Schadenberg, founder of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, also welcomed the decision. He noted that there has been resistance to the inclusion of people with mental disorders in the MAiD regime, which could in part account for the delay in expanding the eligibility criteria.

“The medical community has been pushing back, especially psychiatrists, and there’s been a lot of stories about people with disabilities who have felt compelled to be asking for death, not because they want to die, but because they can’t get medical treatment, or they’re living in poverty, or they’re fearing homelessness, and there’s a multiplicity of other issues,” he told The Epoch Times.

“People with mental illness tend to be in the same boat as people with disabilities, and maybe even worse,” Schadenberg added.

“There’s a lot of people with addictions and mental health problems who are falling through the cracks and ending up on our streets. And then now you’re going to say, ‘Oh, MAiD is an option.' Honestly, it’s pretty disgusting where we’re going with this.”

Douglas Farrow, professor of theology and ethics at McGill University, says that by delaying the expansion, the Liberals “seem to be acknowledging that killing the mentally ill might pose a few procedural problems they haven’t sorted yet. They don’t seem to be admitting that the whole business is morally sick.”

Dutch Court Restricts Euthanasia to Doctors

The Netherlands, like Canada, is one of only six countries where euthanasia of the mentally ill has been legalized. A Dutch group called Last Will Cooperative (Coöperatie Laatste Wil) launched a court case in October to broaden euthanasia laws so that anyone could legally assist a suicide, not just doctors.

Dutch judges upheld existing laws, however, and in their written decision said that those laws offered a “fair balance between the societal interests of a ban on assisting a suicide—protection of life and preventing abuse of vulnerable persons—and the interests of an individual to have access to physician-assisted suicide in the case of unbearable suffering without the prospect it will get better.”

The chairman of Last Will Cooperative, Jos van Wijk, has promoted a “suicide powder” called Substance X in defiance of Dutch law. As such, he was charged in 2021 for participating in a criminal organization. In an interview with de Volkskrant, he admitted distributing the powder to more than 100 people.

“I now openly say here: I did this, and I want to call on other providers to do the same. I want the social unrest to become so great that the judiciary can no longer ignore it,” van Wijk said. “I don’t care if they put me in jail.”

Dutch father Randy Knol launched a campaign to ban Substance X after his 19-year-old daughter, Ximena, died from taking it in February 2018. Schadenberg says that although the criminal charges are separate, the adjudicators of the court challenge likely had Ximena’s death in mind.

“The Last Will Cooperative asked the court to allow anyone to assist in suicide [but] was probably not the group that would achieve that goal in courts because the courts are political also,” he said.

“In the Netherlands, the protocol says that the doctor must follow a one-year waiting period [if] you’ve asked for euthanasia for mental illness ... and you must attempt effective treatment. [Canada] might go that way. We'll see.”

California Judge Blocks Euthanasia

California allows doctors to prescribe a lethal drug cocktail, but those who wish to die must administer the drug themselves. Dr. Lonny Shavelson, supported by assisted suicide lobby group Compassion and Choices, asked the court to force amendments to the state’s assisted suicide law to allow doctors to accommodate people who could not self-administer.

Shavelson lost his case in June, and his subsequent attempt to amend the case was refused on Dec. 7. In his decision, Justice Vince Chhabria wrote, “Setting aside the assistance prohibition would cross the sharp line drawn by the California Legislature between assisted suicide and euthanasia, and thus would fundamentally alter the nature of the program for the same basic reasons discussed in the prior ruling.”

Hasbrouck, herself a person with a disability, said most people with disabilities aren’t looking for the right to die.

“Some disabled people had claimed that they needed euthanasia as an accommodation to their disabilities. That’s certainly not the position that the disability community has taken. And the judge threw out the case, basically saying no, you have nothing. You have no leg to stand on in this case. So that was also a hopeful sign.”

No Consolation From Quebec

Hasbrouck, a resident of Valleyfield, Quebec, was less positive about the seventh annual report from her province’s Commission on End of Life Care, released Dec. 9. Doctors reported 3,663 deaths between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, which was 51 percent more than the year before. This represented 5.1 percent of all deaths in Quebec and raised the province’s all-time euthanasia total to 10,786 deaths.

Fifteen euthanasia incidents were illegal. Of these, six did not have a “serious and incurable” medical condition, three were incapable of consent, and one person did not have Quebec insurance. In four cases, the request form was signed by a non-medical or social service professional, and one request lacked the approval of a second doctor.

Hasbrouck expects no legal consequences for any of the 15 wrongful deaths.

“What’s supposed to happen is that the local police are supposed to take action because there’s no provision, either in the federal law or in the Quebec law, for any enforcement,” she said.

Some discrepancies in the report also caught Hasbrouck’s attention. Euthanasia deaths reported by facilities (3,629) and the Collège des Médecins du Québec (323) totalled 3,952, which is 289 more than were found in doctors’ reports. Also, the commission said that, of 5,321 requests for MAiD, 3,629 resulted in euthanasia and 1,614 did not. However, this still left 78 MAiD requests unaccounted for.

Although Hasbrouck has made it her job to oppose MAiD, she said the issue hits home and hits hard.

“This is extremely difficult work to do because I am a person with a disability, because I could be eligible for MAiD if I applied, and because people are asking for MAiD for reasons that I live with every day—both because of my visual impairment and because of my status as a person with treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,” she explained.

“Those of us who do this work call it ‘soul-crushing’ because every day I have to read things that basically say that life with a disability is a fate worse than death, and it’s very damaging. I can only work part-time, basically, and even so, it’s still very painful and demoralizing.”