Should public institutions be able to opt out from MAID?

Bill C-14, Canada’s law concerning medical aid in dying (MAID), became effective in June 2016. It allowed persons who were mentally competent, whose death was reasonably foreseeable and who were suffering greatly from a serious and irremediable medical condition to ask for and to receive assistance in ending their lives.

Practitioners who chose to provide such assistance could do so secure in the knowledge that they would be free from prosecution providing they acted according to the letter of the new law. It also recognized the right of practitioners to refuse to take part in the procedure on conscientious grounds. There was no mention of institutions being allowed to opt out for similar reasons.

Dying with Dignity, Canada, (DwDC), a non-profit organization that has a 30-year history of advocacy in this field, is running the Shine a Light campaign aimed at highlighting all barriers to access to medical aid in dying. It hopes to compile a database of institutions: hospices, aged-care homes and assisted living residences, that permit the procedure to take place on their premises as well as those that refuse to allow it. Local representatives of DwDC have discovered that St. Michael’s Health Centre and St. Therese Villa, both operated by Covenant Health, are the only such institutions in the Lethbridge and area that refuse to allow the procedure for reasons of religious conviction.

DwDC freely acknowledges the right of physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists to abstain from participation in medical aid in dying because of conscientious objection so long as they do not abandon their patients who request it. It does, however, question whether any institution that is publicly funded, such as Covenant Health, has the right to refuse to allow a legal medical procedure to take place on their premises. Surely, if Covenant Health accepts financing from Canadian governments it should follow Canadian laws.

David R. Amies

Dying with Dignity Canada, Lethbridge Chapter