Commentary
Ten years after Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAID), the safeguards Canadians were promised are looking increasingly shaky. Troubling cases and serious questions about oversight should give Canadians reason to pause before the system is expanded again.
Since 2016, there have been more than 100,000 MAID deaths and Canada has gained an international reputation as a prolific provider of death.
From the very beginning, Canadians knew that legalizing euthanasia would push the boundaries of medical ethics. After all, granting autonomy to individuals who then choose their own death is one thing; expecting medical professionals to deliberately take that life is quite another.
But we were assured that guidelines were in place. There would be no “slippery slope,” and MAID would be an “exceptional” procedure for “rare” cases where individuals are suffering from incurable diseases and facing “reasonably foreseeable” death.
But that key criterion (foreseeable death) was removed in 2021 to allow individuals who have serious diseases, disabilities and/or intolerable suffering to end their lives. In addition, there have been discussions about expanding MAID to “mature minors”—people under 18 considered capable of making their own medical decisions—as well as separate discussions involving infants born with severe malformations. Quebec now allows people to make advance requests if they have a serious illness that could lead to incapacity.
Under current law, people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness are scheduled to become eligible for MAID on March 17, 2027.
No slippery slope? Yet … here we are. The guardrails are rapidly falling.
In January, Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old man with Type 1 diabetes and partial vision loss, underwent MAID in B.C. after he was repeatedly denied eligibility in his home province of Ontario.
His family was outraged; they said he suffered from cycles of depression and was “obsessed” with getting MAID, so he went “doctor shopping” until he found a physician who was willing to end his life. That wasn’t supposed to happen in Canada because rules were supposed to prevent that. His death certificate was signed by Dr. Ellen Wiebe, a prominent promoter of MAID who has also been a prolific abortion provider.
Kiano died in a Vancouver funeral home. That’s obviously convenient, but is this really death with dignity?
It’s not an isolated incident. Instead, it confirms comments by psychiatrist Dr. John Maher, who told a parliamentary committee that people are getting MAID for “reasons that are frankly illegal.”
Dr. Maher, who is also editor of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, testified that prolific MAID providers are offering the procedure to veterans, disabled people, people with treatable illnesses and those on waiting lists for treatment. He said a patient with schizophrenia was approved for MAID based on a treatable skin condition and a sore ankle.
A Toronto woman is going through the courts now to seek an exemption from the laws that currently exclude MAID for mental illnesses. But it doesn’t sound like she needs the courts; she just needs to find the right doctor.
There are also questions about how MAID is being administered. It was reported that a doctor had carried out a MAID assessment on a man outside an Ontario Tim Hortons restaurant. The doctor and patient later exchanged emails and, ultimately, the doctor drove the patient to a morgue where he then carried out MAID. The patient was 45 years old; he suffered from inflammatory bowel disease and depression.
In a separate case, that same doctor was censured for failing to administer one of three drugs used in MAID. The patient resumed breathing after he had been pronounced dead.
This is death with dignity?
In July, Canadian Catholic News (CCN) obtained a confidential report by British Columbia’s MAID Oversight Unit.
The unit examined data for 4,169 MAID requests in that province (even though its own bar graph shows 4,190 deaths) and found 2,807 errors. That’s 51.9 percent of cases. Most errors were considered to be “non-critical” paperwork issues. But 12.5 percent of errors required “education to practitioners and pharmacists” about compliance issues. That’s 353 patients where procedures were not followed correctly.
The province’s own oversight data makes it much harder to dismiss concerns about MAID safeguards as a handful of isolated cases.
Perhaps even more concerning is that CCN could not find any agency to be accountable for the high error rate. The B.C. Ministry of Health failed to respond to requests for comment. The Doctors of BC (B.C.’s medical association) said questions about oversight should be directed to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC. The college stated that its mandate was to regulate physicians, not to comment on health system matters. It suggested that CCN contact the provincial health ministry.
Where’s the oversight?
Ten years in, MAiD is clearly not the sanitized and dignified end to life that many had expected. The procedure has reached well beyond the bounds of ethics and, apparently, legalities.
We need to understand and reassess the present rules and realities before expanding MAiD in 2027.
Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. A Vancouver-based researcher and communications specialist, she has written more than 1,500 published columns, articles and reports on health care, bioethics and public policy. She is the author of Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Healthcare Crisis and the forthcoming Patient Rights: Restoring Trust in Canada’s Healthcare System.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
