EXPANSION OF MAID DELAYED FOR A YEAR
Comes amid pushback from health providers
The option of medically assisted death for people with mental illness will be delayed by a year, under a new piece of legislation introduced into the House of Commons on Thursday.
As part of expanded medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation passed in 2021, people seeking help to die who are suffering with only a mental illness would have been allowed to seek the procedure beginning in March of this year.
The bill set a two-year deadline to figure out standards and work with medical boards to determine how to handle such cases. Justice Minister David Lametti said there were concerns physicians and hospitals weren't ready for the change and he wants to ensure everything is in place before the program is expanded.
“The safety of Canadians must come first. That's why we're taking the additional time necessary to get this right,” he said.
An expert panel has reviewed the issue and developed guidelines, but many mental health advocates said that safeguards were not in place and that doctors were simply not ready for this expansion. Lametti is hoping to have the bill granting an extension pass before the deadline in March and said he has worked with opposition parties who he hopes will swiftly pass the legislation.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre denounced the entire MAID legislation during Question Period, saying people with mental illness shouldn't be getting government help to end their lives.
“Will they recognize that we need to treat depression and give people hope for a better life rather than ending their lives?” he asked of the government.
Mental Health Minister Carolyn Bennett accused Poilievre of misrepresenting the legislation and said the MAID assessors were trained to ensure people who were suicidal would not be eligible.
The original version of MAID legislation passed in 2016 allowed only those with a reasonably foreseeable death to get assistance taking their own lives.
A Quebec court ruled that restriction was unconstitutional, because many people live with painful medical conditions, but can't say when they will die.
The Liberals brought in new legislation which explicitly prohibited people from taking their own lives if their sole reason for doing so was a mental illness, but did away with the reasonably foreseeable death clause.
The Senate pushed back on that and the government relented to allow mental illness as a reason for MAID, but put in place a two-year delay.
Lametti said that even though these changes were not the government's original intent, he is committed to seeing them through.
The majority of people who use MAID now do so for cancers and other conditions from which they have next to no chance of recovery and little time to live.
But there have been concerns that the mentally ill would be steered toward MAID when the new rules came in. A Veterans Affairs employee was fired last year, after being accused of steering several veterans towards MAID.
A joint House-senate committee is studying the legislation and discussing possible safeguards, as are provinces, medical schools and colleges and other groups trying to ensure appropriate guidelines are in place.
Lametti said he is confident the bill could have gone ahead, but wanted to be prudent so the expansion is appropriately managed.
“We want to be sure, we want to be safe. We want everybody to be on the same page. We want, in particular, those health practitioners, those faculties of medicine, colleges, who had some concerns to have time.”
Bennett said a lot of good work has been done to ensure physicians can handle the new provisions in the law, but there is still more work to do training and educating physicians.
“They're ready. But it is a matter of does everybody understand them. And have they been disseminated in a way that everybody really understands what the safeguards are.”