Panel to review assisted dying

The Harper government has appointed a doctor who has publicly expressed profound unease with euthanasia to head an expert panel on options for dealing with the Supreme Court of Canada’s historic lifting of the prohibition against assisted suicide.

But Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, a world leader in palliative care, says his personal views are not at issue now that the legislative landscape has changed.

“I don’t think any of us on the panel were chosen on the basis of our opinions, but really on the basis of our skill, expertise and experience,” Chochinov, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba and Canada Research Chair in palliative care, said Friday.

“I think my opinion is a matter of public record,” he added. “I’ve said that I certainly have concerns about how (doctor-assisted dying) could be operationalized. But the court has now said, with the lifting of the prohibition, that some legislative and regulatory things are going to need to be put into place, and we need to sort out what those are going to be.”

The panel, announced Friday by Justice Minister Peter MacKay and Health Minister Rona Ambrose, will conduct online consultations with Canadians and “key stakeholders” on possible options to the high court’s ruling. It is to report back to the government by late fall, likely after the October federal election.

The panel will focus on which forms of assisted-dying should be permitted — assisted suicide, where a doctor prescribes a lethal dose of a drug the patient takes herself; and voluntary euthanasia, or death by lethal injection — eligibility criteria and safeguards to protect a doctor’s “freedom of conscience” not to participate against his or her moral or religious objections.

Chochinov’s fellow panellists are disability rights lawyer Catherine Frazee, professor emerita at Ryerson University and former chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and Benoit Pelletier, an expert in constitutional law at the University of Ottawa and former Quebec cabinet minister.

Both Chochinov and Frazee were witnesses for the B.C. government in the original case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

In an article published in the Ottawa Citizen in October, Frazee said state-sanctionedassisted death raises questions over how far personal freedoms should extend.

“At the heart of this debate, we must choose between competing visions of our social fabric. Shall we uncritically submit to the voracious demands of individual liberty no matter what the social cost?” she wrote.

“Or shall we agree that there are limits to individual freedom, limits that serve us all when we are vulnerable and in decline.”

In February, the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code prohibitions that consider physician-assisted death tantamount to murder. The court suspended its ruling for one year to allow Parliament time to legislate new rules, should it choose to do so.

If Parliament does not act, there will be no federal law, as is the case with abortion.