Member of Parliament for St. Albert – Edmonton Michael Cooper says that January is the perfect time for Liberals to drop the news that people who suffer solely from mental illness will have access to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID).
The expansion to include people with mental illness in MAID was originally planned for March 2023, but it was postponed for a year to conduct more research and create practice standards.
“Just as they brought in Bill C-39, which extended the implementation date by one year, the Liberals could similarly introduce a bill when parliament resumes at the beginning of the new year to permanently scrap this expansion so it doesn’t go forward,” Cooper said.
Cooper sits on a special joint committee that was tasked this fall with investigating the program’s expansion to cover mental illness.
“What the committee heard, loud and clear from experts, including leading medical professionals, is that MAID for mental illness cannot be implemented safely,” he said.
“If it were to go ahead, Canada would be heading down a very dark road, in which we would be very much an outlier … Persons who could recover from a mental illness would have their lives prematurely ended.”
The joint committee’s report on MAID and mental health is tabled for the end of January, but Cooper believes there is bipartisan support to drop the legislation.
Ed Fast, Conservative Member of Parliament for Abbotsford, introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-314, to stop the expansion of mental illness in MAID. It garnered some support from NDP members and a few Liberals but ultimately failed in October during its second reading.
An IPSOS poll released in January found 82 per cent of Canadians supported “the notion that with the appropriate safeguards in place, an adult with the capacity to provide informed consent should be able to seek an assessment for medical assistance in dying for a severe, treatment-resistant mental disorder for which they experience intolerable suffering.”
Cooper believes the legislation is “the result of the Liberals putting ideology ahead of evidence-based decision making.”
“It should never have happened in the first place,” he said.
Proponents of the legislation say that it respects the autonomy of people with severe mental illness.
The fourth annual report on MAID, released in October, found that the use of MAID grew 31 per cent in 2022 to roughly 13,200 deaths from roughly 9,100 deaths in 2021.
The most frequently cited source of suffering by those requesting MAID was not pain, nor the loss of ability to perform the activities of daily living, but “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.”
