MAID in Canada

Summary

Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an incredible article about nine years of Canada’s euthanasia laws (called MAID) in The Atlantic. In the past nine years, MAID has expanded from an option for patients with ​“reasonably foreseeable” deaths into Track 2, which allows for people who don’t have reasonably foreseeable deaths to request it anyway. Over 5% of deaths in my country are now clinically assisted. It took Canada just a few years to reach that number; it took Belgium over twenty to do the same. And the number continues to climb. In Quebec, 7% of deaths are assisted. The laws surrounding MAID are unclear and mostly assign responsibility to medical practitioners to determine if patients qualify, which means the entire thing is basically one giant loophole allowing legally assisted death. One of the things it means to be Canadian is to honour the rights and wishes of other people. That’s part of what makes it a wonderful place to live: most people genuinely believe in equality and respect for others, including people who don’t look like them. I think it’s good to respect the wishes of other people and honour their requests. But I also think it’s far too easy for political leadership in Canada to lean on the pretence of respecting a person’s right to die how they want. This country has major accessibility problems in its free health care systems. Some of these problems are provincial. Some are federal. It is irresponsible for the federal government to lean on assisted death, instead of providing more universal access to healthcare. In fact, the provision of MAID without adequate universal health care causes predictable, knowable problems. Calabro writes: For these critics, the ​“reasonably foreseeable” death requirement had been the solitary consolation in an otherwise lost constitutional battle. The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 [note: an option for MAID despite no reasonably foreseeable death in the patient’s future] reinforced their convict...