On May 16, Canadians will mark the first anniversary of the House of Commons' passage of Criminal Code amendments that allow medically assisted death (MAID).
There are now about four persons per day who have MAID. The medical number crunchers caution that the data is not yet comprehensive or reliable.
According to Dying with Dignity Canada, not yet tabulated are refusals for assisted death, the numbers of those whose requests are granted and then change their minds and those who die before MAID is administered.
Medical authorities think that in the future, MAID will take place in five per cent of deaths in Canada.
In 2016 there were 270,000 deaths in Canada and 25,000 in Alberta. The number will increase in future years, however Canada could expect about 13,500 medically assisted deaths, with 1,200 of those in Alberta.
In Alberta in the first months of legal MAID, the leading conditions for assisted death were cancer, multiple sclerosis and ALS and the average age of death was 67, according to Alberta Health Care.
MAID can be granted to a person who is in an advanced and irreversible state of decline due to a serious and incurable disease or disability; is enduring intolerable physical and psychological suffering and whose death is reasonably foreseeable.
Here's where the controversy and the pressure to amend and widen the law begins.
Advanced requests for MAID are not permitted, so dementia and Huntington's patients can't apply to die while they are still of a sound mind and not yet suffering intolerably, or face reasonably foreseeable death.
Serious mental illness which dooms the sufferer to a life-long, incurable unquiet mind cannot ask for a medically assisted death.
The Supreme Court, which in the 2015 Carter decision enshrined MAID and forced Parliament to legislate it, will be asked to decided the right of the mentally ill to have the right to die.
Meanwhile conscience protection for medical professionals who chose not to participate in the new death process is not yet adequately protected.
And palliative care - the best alternative to MAID - is woefully inadequate.
And the right to life movement is not yet galvanized, although MAID is following the legal path than abortion rights did.
Faith is not fashionable, especially for those who don't have it.
However, faith is present at every death. Not necessarily in the spirit of the dying one. Not necessarily in every member of the family or every friend. But someone in the circle of death offers a prayer for the dying or leans on personal faith to cope with the crisis that comes with death. Faith touches every decision to seek medically-assisted death.
There is fixing that needs to be done to the Canadian law that legalizes helping someone die.
All of these fixes take on urgency when viewed though the lens of faith.
Then there is faith for extreme sufferers who are tormented with conditions that no amount of morphine can ameliorate.
Is assisted dying such a grave sin that God leaves the bedside of those who chose to have medical help with dying?
If faith is not to be accounted for in every life on the threshold of eternity, we might as well let the judges and members of parliament have the last word.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
