EDITORIAL: Another step down the slippery slope

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A recent report by the Ontario coroner has raised eyebrows with revelations about who is receiving assisted suicide and why.

When Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation was passed in 2016, it was regarded as a progressive, humane action that would help people whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable.

After constitutional challenges, the law was expanded in 2021 to allow for “Track 2” deaths by MAiD. These are people suffering from disabilities, but whose demise was not immediately foreseeable.

In the online publication The Conversation, funded by the University of Toronto, psychiatry Professor Karandeep Sonu Gaind said the law that was originally intended to relieve the suffering of the terminally ill has become something quite different.

“I am not a conscientious objector. I am a psychiatrist and previously chaired my former hospital’s MAiD team,” he says.

“However, I believe we’ve experienced a bait and switch: Laws initially intended to compassionately help Canadians avoid suffering a painful death have metastasized into policies facilitating suicides of other Canadians seeking death to escape a painful life.”

The coroner reports on a 59-year-old woman with multiple chemical sensitivities who sought MAiD, saying she could not find the adequate housing and support she needed.

Gaind points out that Track 2 recipients were far more likely to come from the most vulnerable 20% of the population in terms of age and labour force participation.

“People in the lowest 20% of the population with the worst housing instability made up 48.3% of Track 2 MAiD recipients, compared to 34.3% of Track 1 recipients,” he said.

This comes as Quebec moved ahead with its plan to allow early requests for MAiD. The province will now accept requests for MAiD from people suffering from conditions such as dementia before their condition renders them incapable of giving consent. The federal government had asked Quebec to delay that measure but is not expected to challenge its decision.

Assisted suicide is a sensitive, intensely personal issue. All the same, we should pay attention to concerns being raised by the medical community. The issues they raise about protections for vulnerable people should not be minimized. The slippery slope has proven steep and icy. As a society, we must decide how much farther down it we want to slide.