Assisted Dying in Canada Has Been Captured by a Medical Ideology
Scott Kim Now that the Canadian government has introduced a bill to delay implementing psychiatric MAID – assisted dying for people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness – this is a good time to step back and reflect on how Canada got here. Last week’s release of a joint parliamentary committee’s report on […]
Trudeau Caught with His Euthanasia Pants down with Assisted Suicide Program
David Krayden “Justice” Minister David Lametti is putting the brakes on the expansion of his government’s assisted suicide program, known under the euphemism of the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Sounds almost innocuous doesn’t it? Why are Trudeau and Lametti apparently losing their enthusiasm for a program that is fast becoming legalized euthanasia after they announced it […]
Pain Medicine and Palliative Care as an Alternative to Euthanasia in End-of-life Cancer Care
Michael Erdek Patients suffering from terminal cancer often have pain. Some have advocated euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide as a potential way of alleviating this suffering. Further examination of this topic, however, shows this approach may be essentially utilitarian and fail to consider the inherent value of human life. There has been significant development in recent […]
Canada Releases 2021 Euthanasia Report. More than 10,000 Deaths Representing 3.3% of All Deaths
Alex Schadenberg Health Canada recently released the Third Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (2021). The data is gathered from the reports submitted by the medical or nurse practitioners who carried out the euthanasia death. There is no requirement that a third party or neutral person submit the reports to ensure their […]
Canada’s Euthanasia Law is a Moral Outrage
Alex Schadenberg “Canada has the dubious honour of being the global capital of euthanasia. Through its medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme, Canada killed more people with lethal injections last year than any other country on Earth – many of them poor, homeless or hopeless. And soon, from March 2023, lethal injections will be offered […]
Lack of Palliative Care is a Failure in Too Many MaiD Requests
Romayne Gallagher When a person with a failing organ, stroke or other chronic life-limiting disease has persistent suffering that goes untreated, they can become depressed and hopeless. It’s a common pathway to severe distress that can lead people to request Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). This is a medical error. The error is not in […]
How Bill C-7 Will Sacrifice the Medical Profession’s Standard of Care
Trudo Lemmens, Mary Shariff, Leonie Herx As Parliament discusses Bill C-7’s expansion of the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Act, one issue has been conspicuously absent from public debate, even though it has major implications for medicine and for patients: the impact of the bill on the role of the medical profession in determining the […]
First, Do No Harm: New Canadian Law Allows for Assisted Suicide for Patients with Psychiatric Disorders
Mark S. Komrad Canada just passed a law that radically changes the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable medical practice and has opened a path to euthanasia for patients with psychiatric illness who find their conditions unbearable. Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. Several countries allow psychiatric patients who are suicidal to voluntarily receive death […]
