Canadians need more palliative care, not same-day death on demand

National Post, 20 November 2020

Bill C-7 kills off the modest safeguards that were supposedly in place. It will now be possible to be get the lethal injection the same day it is requested.

It’s more than strange during a global pandemic to expand the capacity of the health professions to administer death, but the federal government is hell bent on getting Bill C-7 on expanding medically-administered death passed on an accelerated schedule.

The official acronym/euphemism is “medical assistance in dying”: MAiD. But the new law does not require the candidate for lethal injection to be dying, or at least not any more than everyone is dying. The 2016 MAiD law required that death had to be “reasonably foreseeable.” The new bill, in response to a Quebec court judgment which the federal government declined to appeal, removes that requirement.

A coalition of physicians and vulnerable Canadians rightly calls this “MAD”: “medically administered death.” If the candidate no longer has to be dying, it is no longer a question of “assistance” in dying. This is straight up death for those who do not want to live.

Yet it is more ominous than that. Those suffering from a chronic illness or disability — but who are not dying — would be eligible. And some of those sick and disabled who are eligible will, as certainly as death comes for us all, be pressured into doing just that.

Taylor Hyatt recently testified that her doctor suggested that she might look into the possibility of medically assisted death. She was then in her twenties and had pneumonia, so this would not be the customary indicated therapy. But Taylor was disabled and in a wheelchair. She would eventually recover from her pneumonia, as most twentysomethings do.

“All the doctor seemed to see, though, was a disabled woman alone, sick, tired and probably tired of living,” said Hyatt. A quick injection could take care of all that, especially the “living” part.

Continue reading at the National Post.