Last month I tabled in Parliament Bill C-314, the Mental Health Protection Act, which would reverse the federal government’s attempt to extend Canada’s assisted death regime to the mentally ill. When Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) was first introduced in Canada, it was limited to those who were suffering from an intolerable, incurable illness where natural death was foreseeable. My bill would not repeal that policy.
More recently, the government eliminated the “foreseeability test” and then accepted, without protest, the unelected Senate’s demand that MAID include those whose mental illness was the sole underlying reason for requesting assisted death. Canada’s justice minister also signalled his desire to extend euthanasia to “consenting” children. As many of us had predicted when assisted death was legalized in 2016, we now find ourselves on a steep slippery slope that jeopardizes the lives of society’s most vulnerable.
By attempting to extend the availability of MAID to those with mental illness, our government has taken our society to a very dangerous place. There is absolutely no consensus across our country that the current MAID regime should be expanded to include mentally ill Canadians. Yet we have a woke-inspired prime minister and a “hell-bent-for-leather” justice minister who have placed ideology above compassionate, fact-based policy-making, putting far too many vulnerable Canadians at serious risk of unnecessarily losing their lives.
My bill would allow Canadians to properly assess where our government’s overreach on its assisted death agenda is taking us. As citizens who believe the government is there to protect and nurture life, we must ask: Who’s next? The poor and homeless who are already approaching our food banks to ask for MAID? The drug-addicted who have lost all hope of recovering because treatment beds aren’t available? Veterans who have been offered MAID as a preferred alternative to the more expensive mental health supports they need to battle PTSD? Seniors in care homes who have become a financial burden on our crumbling health-care system?
The process undertaken to study and examine this literal life-and-death issue has been flawed from the get-go. The expert panel struck by the government to review expansion of MAID was not permitted to study the underlying merits of extending assisted death to the mentally ill. The panel even failed to deliver on its mandate to propose additional MAID safeguards. In fact, two of the panel members quit, noting that the outcome of the deliberations appeared to have been pre-determined. In other words, the fix was in. What has been completely missing is any meaningful consultation with experts, including members of the psychiatric profession and the mental health community, many of whom oppose the government’s policy direction on MAID.
Rather than a “pause” in the government’s campaign to expand the right to assisted suicide and euthanasia, we need an unequivocal full stop — a full stop to an ideology that encourages death as a “treatment option” for those struggling with the difficult challenges of mental illness. Our government should be laser focused on respecting the inherent dignity of every human life and defending the interests of its most vulnerable citizens.
Instead of normalizing assisted death, let us redouble our efforts to provide the mental health, social and palliative supports that our government has repeatedly promised but never delivered. The Mental Health Protection Act is an urgent call to arrest our inexorable slide from a culture of life to a culture of death.
Life is precious. The mentally ill members of our Canadian family are counting on us to stand in the gap for them.
Special to National Post
Ed Fast is the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, B.C.
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