Is Canada ready to expand medical assistance in dying? Liberals will face that choice with deadline closing in
CBC
The federal Liberals face a choice early in 2024: They can allow a sunset clause to take effect so that eligibility for medical assistance in dying expands to adults whose only reason for seeking it is a mental disorder.
Or they can do what they did in 2023 and postpone it further, even indefinitely.
Justice Minister Arif Virani says the government is weighing its options as the March deadline looms.
The first step, he says, will be to see what members of Parliament and senators recommend after committee hearings that probed the issue this past fall.
To find answers, The Canadian Press spoke with many of the medical and legal experts who participated in that process.
Here are five questions that strike at the heart of the debate.
Assessors and providers of medical assistance in dying, as well as medical regulators, say they are ready for eligibility to be widened.
"Our hope is that government will not be influenced by the concern that the regulators will not be ready," said Gus Grant, the CEO and registrar of Nova Scotia's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Since medical assistance in dying became legal in 2016, many voices have sounded the alarm about whether the medical profession was ready to handle changes.
"Those voices proved to be wrong at each occasion," Grant, who is also a past president of the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada, said in an interview.
"The medical regulators and the involved health-care professionals were ready."
The argument that the system can't handle change usually comes from those who would rather not see the program expand at all, Grant and others said. It also ignores the reality that some patients with mental illness can already access assisted dying if they have other medical conditions.
"It's a bit like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football, right?" said Jocelyn Downie, a professor at Halifax's Dalhousie University.
"You put the football down, 'OK, we're gonna get this ready, boom.' And then the next time, the football gets pulled out from under you."
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