{"id":5005,"date":"2020-11-13T13:36:08","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T18:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/?p=5005"},"modified":"2020-11-16T11:27:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T16:27:06","slug":"the-five-year-review-of-maid-will-parliament-do-its-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/2020\/11\/the-five-year-review-of-maid-will-parliament-do-its-job\/","title":{"rendered":"The five year review of MAiD: will parliament do its job?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In its 2015 decision in <\/span>Carter v. Attorney General<\/span><\/i><\/a> that struck down the prohibition on physician assisted dying, the Supreme court said that protecting \u201cvulnerable\u201d people (like elders, women, LGBTQI, disabled folks, indigenous and racialized people) would require a \u201ccarefully designed system imposing stringent limits that are scrupulously monitored and enforced.\u201d This makes sense. If society is going to reverse public policy and allow doctors to kill people rather than helping them live, it would seem logical to put all possible safeguards in place, then to look carefully at how that program works in practice, to be sure the safeguards work as advertised.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would seem logical, unless you are the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois. These champions of individual liberties have determined that it\u2019s appropriate to go ahead and expand access to euthanasia <\/span>before<\/span><\/i> doing the five year review required by the 2016 medical assistance in dying (<\/span>MAiD) law<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 They want to limit the mandated scope of that five-year review to only look at expanding eligibility to new populations, and to blow off any examination of how the law works in practice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill C-7<\/span><\/a>, which is being fast-tracked by the liberal government to meet a court-imposed December 18 deadline, would expand access to euthanasia beyond what was called for in the <\/span>Truchon<\/span><\/i> c. procureur g\u00e9n\u00e9ral<\/span><\/i><\/a> decision. The Qu\u00e9bec superior court in <\/span>Truchon<\/span><\/i> struck down the requirement that the person\u2019s natural death must be \u201creasonably foreseeable,\u201d and the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau chose not to appeal. In doing so, Trudeau\u2019s government signaled it\u2019s approval for euthanasia of people with disabilities who are not near the end of life, whether or not the 90-day \u201cwaiting period\u201d ends up in the final version of Bill C-7 and withstands judicial scrutiny. Bill C-7 would reduce the number of witnesses required to sign the written request from two to one, and allow that person to be a care provider, thus setting the stage for an abusive caregiver to coerce a person to ask for death, and then serve as the only witness to the request. Rather than clarifying what it means for someone\u2019s natural death to be \u201creasonably foreseeable\u201d (or dispensing with the slippery and malleable term altogether), the bill puts those folks (pushing 20,000 deaths already) on a fast-track to death.\u00a0 The bill would eliminate the ten-day reflection period, as well as the requirement that the person be able to verify their consent when the lethal injection is given, creating a <\/span>de facto<\/span><\/i> advance directive. So even if you have to wait months for psychiatric care, you can get the deadly dose right away.\u00a0 That person with the abusive caregiver mentioned earlier; no one will even blink if they\u2019re euthanized the same day they\u2019re approved (as happened <\/span>in Qu\u00e9bec<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Having put the statutory amendment cart before the five-year-review horse, the Liberals further propose to limit the scope of what will be considered in the mandated review. Instead of looking at \u201cthe provisions enacted by this Act\u201d the Liberal government has decided that it will focus instead on expanding eligibility \u201cto requests by mature minors, to advance requests and to requests where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition.\u201d\u00a0 Those questions definitely need to be aired in a public forum, since the working groups of the Council of Canadian Academies didn\u2019t make it easy for the public to have input into their <\/span>2018 studies<\/span><\/a>. However, doing so is not a substitute for an in-depth review of the law and its impact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Parliament must determine whether the MAiD law satisfies the mandate set out by the Supreme Court in the <\/span>Carter <\/span><\/i>case, whether the monitoring system is robust enough to detect problems, prevent the deaths of ineligible persons and impose consequences for those deaths. The five-year review could also answer the question whether it\u2019s possible to enforce the MAiD law, let alone if it\u2019s being enforced. Anything less would be a betrayal of the democratic process and the public trust.<\/span><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\nAnything less would be a betrayal of the democratic process and the public trust.\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “The five year review of MAiD: will parliament do its job?”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “The five year review of MAiD: will parliament do its job?”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[784,354,845,701,735,511,729,95,834,788,785,741,738,731,739,733,742,805,99,94,727,97,62,740,499,846,96,98,101,468,373,847],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-library","tag-assisted-suicide","tag-autonomy","tag-bill-c-14-disability","tag-bill-c-7","tag-choice","tag-continuous-palliative-sedation","tag-degenerative","tag-dignity","tag-disability-support-services","tag-end-of-life","tag-euthanasia","tag-external-pressure","tag-grievous-and-irremediable","tag-hospice","tag-incurable","tag-informed-consent","tag-irreversible-decline","tag-maid","tag-medical-aid-in-dying","tag-medical-assistance-in-dying","tag-nursing-home","tag-pain","tag-palliative-care","tag-quality-of-life","tag-reasonably-foreseeable","tag-reflection-period","tag-safeguards","tag-suffering","tag-suicide","tag-terminal","tag-vulnerable","tag-waiting-period","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5022,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/5022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tvndy.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}