Final stand
Late Halifax woman led charge for changes in consent for medically assisted death
It may be more than a year too late, but Audrey Parker finally got her dying wish.
Days before her medically assisted death on Nov. 1, 2018, the Halifax woman — who had terminal breast cancer — recorded a video calling on Canadians to fight for change to medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation that she said robbed her of more time with her loved ones.
She took issue with the requirement for double consent — a stipulation that patients have to be conscious and mentally sound at the moment they gave their final consent for assisted death.
“I would like nothing more than to make it to Christmas, but if I become incompetent along the way I will lose out on my choice of a beautiful, peaceful and, best of all, painfree death,” she said in the video.
Parker’s supporters are calling new federal legislation tabled Monday amending assisted dying legislation a win for families.
If passed, the set of amendments would remove the necessity that one’s death must be immediately foreseeable, excluding eligibility for individuals suffering solely from mental illness as a safeguard, in order to access medical assistance in dying.
But for those whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable, the changes allow a person who may later lose capacity to consent due to their illness to sign a waiver of final consent prior to that point so their wishes for a medically assisted death can be carried out.
This small but important change, which has been affectionately dubbed Audrey’s Amendment by her supporters, is something academics, doctors and advocacy groups such as Dying With Dignity Canada have for years been calling for.
The legislation also has broad public support — a poll by Narrative Research last fall revealed 75 per cent of Atlantic Canadians say they completely or mostly support changing the law to allow for early assisted dying requests.
“Some have chosen to end their lives prematurely, sacrificing their chance to spend more time with their families because this was the only way to guarantee that they could still have access to MAID. This was the story of Audrey
Parker and others,” Justice Minister David Lametti said Monday when introducing the legislation. “No one should be faced with such an impossible choice.”
The federal government says more than 300,000 Canadians provided input on the amendments through online public consultations.
Kim King was a close friend of Parker’s and agreed to carry the torch after Parker’s death in fighting for Audrey’s Amendment.
In the last year that has meant travelling to Ottawa, circulating petitions, talking to media and more.
Speaking with SaltWire Network on Tuesday, King emotionally described how much this change would have affected her friend’s final weeks.
“Had that restriction been removed, Audrey's end of life would have been different,” she said.
“If Audrey were still alive today, she could have signed that declaration and she could have lived, she could have lived right to her last moment, right to her last breath, whether it was with capacity or not.”
King said it’s hard enough on family and friends of a terminally ill person to have to deal with these difficult decisions without having to choose between prolonging suffering and losing precious time with loved ones.
“With that legislation, the way it was written previously it robs people of time at a time of their life when time is pretty much all you have,” she said.
OTHER AMENDMENTS
The foreseeability of natural death clause is being removed from assisted dying legislation following a September Quebec Superior Court Justice ruling that it violates the charter rights of Canadians.
According to the federal government, the amended procedural safeguards — specifically excluding eligibility for those suffering solely from mental illness and only removing the final consent clause for those whose death is reasonably foreseeable — “would require practitioners to take appropriate steps to ensure that, in non-end-of-life cases, the request for MAID is fully informed and considered, and that individuals making the request have given serious consideration to reasonable and available treatment options.”
Speaking with reporters on Monday, federal ministers faced many questions on the decision to exclude those suffering from mental illness from the legislation.
“There is such a degree of complexity with regards to the varying kinds of mental illness. While there is increasing understanding of the various kinds of mental illness, we still need to know more,” Lametti said.
“We need more evaluation and analysis. The only thing we’ve excluded is mental illness as the sole criterion. That’s a very small number of cases.”
Health Minister Patty Hajdu added that the exclusion is mental illness only as a presenting factor.
“Many people live with concurrent illnesses. There are many illnesses that cause mental illness and many mental illnesses that cause physical illness. The challenge for us was around people with a mental illness that often the symptomology is a desire to die, making sure that we understood that more deeply before we put that into the proposed legislation,” she said.
However, the federal government has not ruled out more thorough changes to the legislation in the future, such as advance requests for persons newly diagnosed with a condition that could eventually affect their decisionmaking capacity, eligibility for persons suffering solely from mental illness and eligibility for mature minors, and these areas could be considered during a broader parliamentary review of MAID legislation expected to begin by June.
King said these initial amendments are a great first step and offer some closure to Parker’s loved ones.
“Yesterday I got to call her mom and say, ‘Shirley, this is what’s happening today because of the work Audrey did, and her courage,’” she said.
“It’s pretty bittersweet, there’s no question about it. There were tears, but at the same time it just made her very proud to think her daughter did something in her life to make a real difference to a lot of Canadians.”