Since 2016, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, known as ‘MAID’, has been available to all terminally ill patients. Since then, various modifications have been made to the law; the most recent, in 2021, when the law was expanded to include people with chronic and serious physical illnesses, even those that were not life-threatening.
This year a new modification is expected that will include those who suffer from mental illness, a proposal that has caused controversy because It could allow people in a state of vulnerability to easily attend assisted suicide.
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Letting people make this decision (to die) because the state is not complying with fundamental human rights is unacceptable.
Assisted dying came to Canada in 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled that denying this right deprived citizens of dignity and autonomy.
A year later, the ‘MAID’ program was legislated for those terminally ill people whose death was “reasonably probable”.
In the first year, some 1,000 people were helped under the medical assisted dying program. In 2022, this figure rose to 10,000 and represented three percent of deaths in Canada.
In 2021, the law was changed again to include those with serious physical illnesses, even though these did not affect the patient’s life.
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Now, doctors and organizations that are against including people with mental illnesses argue that, although euthanasia is a right that guarantees people relief, in the case of people with mental illnesses it could be considered as if dying was the solution.
Recent reports argue that for some people, death presents itself as an alternative to a broken social security system.
Experts maintain that assisted dying could be used as an escape from the frustration of social problems such as poverty, homelessness or loneliness. “I don’t think death should be society’s solution to its own failures,” said Dr. Madeline Li, who has euthanized hundreds of patients in Canada since its approval in 2016.
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The United Nations has criticized the Canadian proposal to expand euthanasia, considering that it would send the message that death is better than suffering from certain non-fatal diseases.
“Leaving people to make this decision (to die) because the state is not complying with fundamental human rights is unacceptable,” Marie-Claud Landry, chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, said in a statement issued in May.
Opinion polls show that Canadians agree with allowing at least one form of assisted suicide.
It is objectively therapeutic to give someone the choice
The 2021 amendment placed Canada alongside countries like Belgium and the Netherlands on the short list of nations that allow euthanasia for cases other than terminal illness.
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The first critics of the new proposal are three United Nations human rights experts, who warned the federal government in 2021 that the reform could devalue the lives of disabled people by implying that severe disability is worse than death.
Even before the new proposal went into effect, criticisms of its implementation have been raised. Authorities launched an investigation in mid-2022 after at least four ex-servicemen were invited to consider assisted suicide by a Veterans Affairs social worker, who now no longer works for the department.
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One of the cases is that of the veteran and Paralympian Christine Gauthier, who said that the employee he offered her the option of assisted suicide after she requested that a wheelchair ramp be installed at her home.
In the face of criticism, the Canadian legislature maintains that the modifications they will be armored for prevent vulnerable people from going to euthanasia as a way to solve social problems that the State must guarantee.
Applicants with serious and incurable but non-life-threatening conditions will need to be evaluated by two independent physicians and go through a 90-day waiting period.
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However, the Canadian government postponed the modification scheduled for March 2023, with the aim of carrying out more studies around the case and evaluating its suitability.
Santiago Andres Venera Salazar
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
TIME
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