After intense public criticism, the Canadian government is seeking to delay for one year its extension of assisted suicide to the mentally ill.
“It is clear more time is needed to get this right,” Justice Minister David Lametti said February 2. “The proposed one-year expansion is necessary to ensure that we move forward on this sensitive and complex issue in a prudent and measured way.”
According to the National Post, “As part of expanded medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation passed in 2021, people who are suffering with only a mental illness would be allowed to seek the procedure beginning in March of this year.”
The law gave the government two years to establish standards for such cases, and while Lametti claimed the government “could have gone forward with the original date,” the disruptions caused by Covid-19 “slowed everything down.”
“The safety of Canadians must come first,” he said. “That’s why we’re taking the additional time necessary to get this right.”
The Post provided some background on the situation:
When MAID first became legal in 2016 it was limited to only those with a reasonably foreseeable death. A Quebec court ruled that restriction was unconstitutional because many people live with painful medical conditions, but can’t say when they will die.
The Liberals brought in new legislation that did away with the reasonably foreseeable death clause but explicitly prohibited people from taking their own lives if their sole reason for doing so was a mental illness. The Senate pushed back on that, and the government relented. It amended the legislation to allow mental illness as a reason for MAID, but put in place a two-year delay.
Canada’s MAID law has already taken its toll. In its first five years, the law enabled the deaths of over 30,000 people — more than 10,000 of them in 2021 alone, accounting for 3.3 percent of all deaths that year.
The law, as all such laws do, has metastasized from a limited grant of accelerated death for the terminally ill to “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis,” University of British Columbia professor Tim Stainton told the Daily Mail. The mother of a 25-year-old woman with cerebral palsy, for example, told the paper that “a hospital doctor in Newfoundland actually told her she’d be ‘selfish’ if she didn’t consider pursuing the euthanasia option.” A 52-year-old disabled veteran, unable to get Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) to install a wheelchair lift in her home, was instead offered the option of MAID by an employee who was fired after making similar suggestions to other veterans.
It’s not difficult to imagine how adding mental illness — which, the CBC notes, “refers to conditions that are primarily psychiatric, such as depression and personality disorders” — to the list of acceptable reasons for assisted suicide could go horribly wrong. Apparently, enough people raised red flags about it that even the far-Left Trudeau government couldn’t ignore them. Lametti said one of the purposes of delaying the MAID expansion was to enable medical schools and doctors “who had some concerns to have time.”
Conservatives were quick to pounce on the Liberal government’s hesitancy to expand the MAID murder machine further.
Conservative MP Michael Cooper deemed Lametti’s announcement “an admission of failure on the part of the Liberals.”
“The issues that have been identified with expanding MAID in cases of mental illness are not going to go away,” he said. “They are not going to change between March of 2023 and March of 2024.”
Likewise, House of Commons Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said, “They’ve announced that a year from today they will introduce measures to end the lives of people who are depressed. Will they recognize that we need to treat depression and give people hope for a better life rather than ending their lives?”
Parliament will have to pass a bill by March 17 to enact the delay. According to the CBC, “Lametti said he’s confident the legislation will pass in time.”
Another year of life for perhaps thousands of Canadians is to be welcomed. Better still would be to take Cooper’s suggestion and scrap the MAID expansion. Best of all would be to repeal the entire anti-life statute.
