Assisted-dying bill sparks ferocious debate among Canadians with disabilities

The determination of two Quebecers with disabilities to decide when their suffering had become intolerable persuaded the federal government to rewrite the law on medical assistance in dying.

But now advocacy groups for persons with disabilities are the most fierce opponents of the legislation.

Bill C-7 attempts to strike a balance between an individual’s right to personal autonomy and self-determination and the need to protect vulnerable people who might feel pressured – either directly or indirectly by societal attitudes and a lack of support services – into seeking medical help to end their lives.

It would make it easier for people whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable to receive an assisted death. But it would impose added eligibility hurdles for those who are not near death – safeguards added specifically to help protect the vulnerable.

Those safeguards have done nothing to mollify disability advocates who believe the bill sends a message their lives are not worth living.

“Our biggest fear has always been that having a disability would become an acceptable reason for state-provided suicide,” Krista Carr, executive vice-president of Inclusion Canada, told the House of Commons justice committee Tuesday.

“Bill C-7 is our worst nightmare.” Catherine Frazee, professor emeritus at Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies, argued that the government is making it possible for people with disabilities to kill themselves while doing whatever it can to prevent suicide for everyone else.

“Why only us?” she asked.

“Why only people whose bodies are altered or painful or in decline? Why not everyone who lives outside the margin?”

Roger Foley, a 45-year-old with a neurodegenerative disease that has left him hospitalized, unable to move or care for himself, recounted how he’s been denied home care and allegedly been pressured by hospital staff to seek an assisted death.

“My life has been devalued. I’ve been coerced into an assisted death by abuse, neglect, lack of care and threats,” she said.

He has launched a court challenge based on his right to an “assisted life.”

Carr told the committee that “every national disability organization is opposed” to Bill C-7 but their voices are “are getting drowned out by people who do not experience the systemic marginalization, the poverty and the very difficult lack of supports and life circumstances that people with disabilities experience that lead them into situations where MAID (medical assistance in dying) is either promoted to them or they feel like it’s their only option.”