Quebec report endorses assisted death
Recommendations could be law by 2013
An all-party committee of the National Assembly has unanimously recommended that doctors who offer terminally-ill patients “medical assistance to die” be sheltered from prosecution – provided they respect a series of conditions Quebec would legislate. The committee wants the government to introduce legislation by June 2013.
QUEBEC – A committee of the National Assembly unanimously recommended Thursday that rules be established to shelter from prosecution doctors who offer terminallyill patients “medical assistance to die.”
The Criminal Code of Canada prohibits euthanasia, making it an offence to counsel or assist someone to commit suicide, or to agree to be put to death.
But the committee, composed of members from all parties in the assembly, has proposed that Quebec’s attorney-general issue a directive so that doctors who help someone die would not be prosecuted – provided the doctors respect a series of conditions Quebec would legislate.
The report noted that this is what Quebec did in 1976, when the province’s attorney-general ordered an end to prosecutions for abortion.
Abortions remained a criminal offence in Canada until 1988, but prosecutions in Quebec ceased 12 years earlier, and other provinces followed its example.
“I think it is possible to do,” Claude Provencher, director-general of the Quebec Bar Association, said Thursday.
Provencher welcomed the report on dying with dignity, while cautioning he does not know what will be the reaction of the federal government, which has been toughening the Criminal Code.
“We are pretty satisfied,” Provencher said, recalling that the Bar proposed to the committee better palliative care for patients who are dying – and “in exceptional circumstances” medical assistance to help them die.
Liberal MNA Maryse Gaudreault, who assumed the committee chair when Geoffrey Kelley was named aboriginal affairs minister, said Ontario MPPS are looking to Quebec for inspiration on this issue.
Gaudreault quoted an Ontario lawmaker telling her: “We’re watching your situation and we want you to go very far because we are very interested in doing the same thing in Ontario.”
The committee wants the government to introduce legislation to make its recommendations law by June 2013 at the latest.
Gaudreault said it took the committee a long time to write its report, not because there were disagreements, but because of the “complexity” of end-of-life issues.
Véronique Hivon, the Parti Québécois member who first proposed the committee in 2009, said “medical aid” to die is “a more precise term” than euthanasia.
The committee proposed that a patient near death would decide to seek medical help to die with a doctor
hen a second doctor, independent of the patient and the first doctor, would review that decision.
The committee proposed that a patient wanting help to die must:
■ be a Quebec resident covered by medicare;
■ be an adult able to consent according to law;
■ express themselves, following a decision clearly made, to seek medical help to die;
■ have a serious, incurable disease;
■ be in an advanced state of weakening capacities, with no chance of improvement;
■ have constant and unbearable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be eased.
The committee stressed the need for Quebec to improve its palliative care, extending it to patients suffering from other diseases besides cancer, and offering palliative care in the home.
It also dealt with the problem of palliative sedatives, meant to reduce suffering in dying patients, without killing them, and noted that veterinarians in Quebec have more training in end-of-life situations than do doctors.
Amir Khadir, of Québec solidaire and the only medical doctor on the committee, said he thinks most doctors will be “very happy” with the proposed guidelines.
Margaret Somerville, a Mcgill law professor who teaches medical ethics and favours palliative care as an alternative to euthanasia, deplores the report’s recommendations.
“What I call it is killing people,” she said.