Health Law

MAID Bill Is an Affront to Equality

Archibald Kaiser, Isabel Grant, Trudo Lemmens & Elizabeth Sheehy

Toronto Star editorial March 11, 2021

Canada’s legal system has an ugly track record on mental illness: exclusionary immigration laws; involuntary sterilization; restrictive marriage and voting statutes; debacles of institutionalization, deinstitutionalization and criminalization; and casualties of the war on drugs. Our nation has abandoned Canadians with mental illness to poverty, isolation and substandard living conditions. Now, based on a misguided interpretation of equality, Parliament intends to pass Bill C-7 and provide medical assistance in dying (MAID) to those suffering from mental illness.

In extending MAID to persons with disabilities whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, Bill C-7 exposes the shallowness of Canada’s commitment to the human rights of persons with disabilities. And while people with mental illness were initially protected, Parliament will further destabilize the equality and security of people with mental illness by including them in the legislation through a sunset provision in two years.

Our government is asking parliament to ignore its statutory-based commitment to evidence-informed policy making under the existing MAID law

If the majority of Canadian Senators, some psychiatrists, and our government have it their way, physicians in Canada will soon be asked to offer patients with mental illness the option to end their lives as a therapy for their mental health related suffering. The Canadian Senate removed the clause that excluded mental illness from Bill C7, a bill which extends “medical assistance in dying” [MAID] (the increasingly less accurate Canadian euphemism for euthanasia and assisted suicide) to persons who have a disability or chronic illness but who are not close to their natural death. The government just announced it largely accepts the Senate’s amendment for inclusion of mental illness, which would enter into force with a sunset provision of two years. What is extraordinary is how the government thereby allows an unelected Senate to introduce a sweeping broadening of MAID, and this while the House of Commons itself had no detailed evidence-informed review and debate on this specific issue, since it was not part of the original Bill.