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Lorne Gunter: Alberta right to consider restrictions on MAID

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Canada needs to pump the brakes on MAID — Medical Assistance in Dying.

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I am a libertarian, so basically on this subject I believe a person’s life is his or hers to do with as he or she pleases.

But MAID is out of control, so much so it’s no longer clear that death is an informed choice by the individual in many cases. There is too much evidence of coercion, or at least encouragement by medical institutions.

Doctor-administered suicide has become the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada behind cancer, heart disease, accidents and stroke and ahead of lung diseases, diabetes, the flu, Alzheimer’s and liver disease.

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Roughly the same number of Canadians die each year through MAID as died of COVID during the peak year of the pandemic.

And yet there are efforts to expand its usage.

Last year, 5.1 per cent of deaths in this country resulted from MAID (7.3 per cent in Quebec), but that’s not good enough for its supporters. A little more than a week ago, the Canadian Senate announced a bipartisan committee whose chief goal is to examine whether to make MAID more readily available — or not.

Unless Parliament renews its ban, next March it will become legal to provide MAID to people whose only underlying condition is a mental illness.

We’ve already switched the criteria from “unbearable pain” or a terminal condition from which death is “reasonably foreseeable” to excuses such as old age. Famously, last December, a 26-year-old Ontario man suffering from Type-1 diabetes, partial blindness and seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a depression-related condition causes by lack of sunlight in the winter, was euthanized.

Kiano Vafaeian was denied MAID several times in his home province but found a doctor in B.C. who has prepared to carry out the procedure, presumably without the required 90-day waiting period.

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Of course, Parliament changed the official name from assisted suicide to medical assistance in dying to remove any stigma. And unlike in other jurisdictions where a doctor may prescribe lethal drugs, but the patient must administer themselves, in Canada a doctor may administer a sedative and a set of lethal injections so the patient doesn’t have take their own life.

Part of the MAID push is the pressure applied on politicians to compel medical professionals or hospitals with moral objections to perform the procedure anyway, against their consciences.

This is especially the case with Catholic hospitals. They typically refuse to perform MAID themselves but will transfer patients to a facility that will. That’s not good enough, though, for zealous MAID activists.

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Given the way this is going, this ghoulish trend could easily push MAID past strokes as a cause of death.

So the Alberta government is right to try to limit the access of MAID, not to ban it outright but to introduce some “guardrails” against its easy and common use.

In a bill introduced in the legislature on Wednesday, the Smith government sought to prohibit those under 18 from receiving MAID (already not a big problem).

The prohibition, too, would apply to vulnerable people — those whose only underlying condition is a mental illness, and those lacking capacity to make their own health care decisions.

The procedure would also be forbidden to those who, despite having a chronic illness, are not in danger a natural death within the next 12 months.

The province would also ban advanced requests for MAID, such as in a personal directive that outlines the health-care decisions you wish made on your behalf if you lose mental capacity.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this latter provision — the ban on advanced requests made when a patient is perfectly lucid.

Speaking at the Rural Municipalities of Alberta conference in Edmonton this week, Premier Danielle Smith heard overwhelmingly from delegates that wait times for ambulances in rural communities are far too long.

That is probably a bigger concern to a greater number of Albertans than limits on MAID. But given that Canada will likely register its 100,000th MAID death this summer, Alberta is not wrong to reconsider the rules.

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