Health Law

The deluge of op-eds, blogs, commentaries, media interviews and news reports about Bill C-14 on Medical Assistance in Dying has created a level of over-saturation. More careful, reflective statements are increasingly hard to find. What now dominates the debate are bold statements about the constitutionality of the Bill—University of Ottawa’s Amir Attaran apparently even inventing a new constitutional qualifier of ‘unconstitutional by the bucketfull’--and reports of difficult and emotional end-of-life situations, which Bill C-14 may indeed not necessarily solve. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that the eloquent, respectful and wise intervention in the Senate by the Honourable Murray Sinclair, former judge and former Chair of the Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did not receive much attention in the media.

Just when the federal government is about to table its bill on medically-hastened-death (or medical-aid-in-dying, physician-assisted dying, euthanasia, or physician-assisted-suicide), a new extensive poll of what Canadians want to see in new legislation suggests that Canadians support a more prudent approach than the open-ended access approach put forward by the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) report and, prior to that, a Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group (PTEAG) report. Canadians continue to support access to ‘physician assisted suicide’ (PAS), the term used in the poll, but a majority (51.8%) opposes the idea of providing access to PAS when the request is based on psychiatric conditions and purely psychological suffering. A majority also appears opposed to PAS for mature minors (in the poll: 16 to 17 year olds).  The 1,000 people polled were also asked about what they preferred as review mechanism. 59% of those polled support the recommendation by the committee of a review by two physicians, while 41 % supports a review by a ‘panel of independent experts’.