Give bill careful consideration

The debate around the federal government’s new medical assistance-in-dying legislation is sure to be spirited, as is fitting for a matter of such import. Parliament is precisely where a law about life and death needs to be hashed out, and the time for waiting is past.

A January appeal for public input into the proposed legislation garnered more than 300,000 responses. Clearly, amended legislation is what Canadians want.

People, across this country, are in pain. Canada deserves a law that provides access to medically assisted death to as many people as possible, while preserving the safeguards to prevent abuse.

Bill C-7 is a move in that direction. Its strengths are many.

A Quebec court last year ruled that one of the provisions of the initial assisted-dying legislation — that a patient can only receive medical help in dying if their natural death is “reasonably foreseeable” — was unconstitutional.

The new federal legislation, designed to amend the law to follow the Quebec court ruling, scraps reasonably foreseeable death as a requirement.

The bill also makes access easier for those considered to be “near death,” by dropping the 10-day waiting requirement between the time that a person is approved for an assisted death and the moment they receive the procedure.

It would also cut the number of witnesses to an assisted-dying request from two to one.

These provisions cannot come soon enough for those of us who find the pain of living too much to bear.

The same goes for the so-called “Audrey provision,” named after our own Audrey Parker.

She was the Halifax woman who received national attention by choosing to die with medical assistance in November, 2018.

That was weeks, perhaps even months, before she would have wanted to die. But Parker, who suffered from terminal cancer, knew that the existing legislation required that she give such consent in the moments just prior to the procedure.

Parker worried that the advancing disease could rob her of that ability to give the go-ahead, so she had the procedure done when she was certain of being able to consent.

The new proposed legislation would drop the requirement that a person must give consent a second time just before receiving a medically assisted death procedure.

Thanks to Parker, more Canadians would exercise ultimate control over the timing and manner of their deaths.

Hopefully, that provision and others will remain intact by the time the new law is enacted.

One aspect of the proposed legislation, though, deserves reconsidering: a prohibition against assisted dying in cases where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition.

Is suffering from a mental disorder less intolerable and deserving of relief than suffering from a physical ailment?

Then there is the matter of what exactly constitutes a mental illness.

In the days ahead, Canadians hope that these questions will be debated in a measured and thoughtful manner.

They have filled out their questionnaires. They have had their say. Now it is time for our lawmakers to act.