It would be hard to imagine a more suitable candidate for assisted suicide than Ms. S, the woman whose death Monday was authorized by a Calgary judge. She was a mature person of sound mind, but in the final stages of ALS, a paralyzing degenerative disease for which there is no cure. Rather than end her days choking, she asked the court to let physician provide her with a peaceful death.
Ms. S is exactly the sort of person a majority of Canadians probably have in mind when they tell pollsters that they support the legalization of physician-assisted death across the country.
However if a parliamentary joint committee has its way, not only people in her condition, but the depressed — including, eventually, even teenagers — would be entitled to request help to end their lives. The committee’s report, made public last week, suggested that candidates need not be terminally ill, and that those with mental illness or whose suffering is psychological should not be excluded. The committee would base eligibility on having “grievous and irremediable medical conditions that cause enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.”
Certainly, the committee foresees safeguards to prevent rash decisions. Yet it would seem to view a severely depressed person as fit to decide to ask for help in dying. Such a person might well be physically capable of committing suicide, and they might. But why should anyone assist them in doing so? That is not the help they need. One essential prerequisite should be that a person is of sound mind.
This proposal goes even farther than Quebec’s assisted-death law, which came into effect last December after years of societal debate, in which the issues were examined from all angles. Under Quebec law, patients must not only be in unbearable pain, but be at the end of life and in an advanced state of irreversible decline.
The federal government is grappling with the issue in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that found the Criminal Code provisions prohibiting medically assisted suicide were in violation of Charter rights. To avoid a legal vacuum, the court gave the government a year to come up with a new law, a deadline later extended to June 6. (The Supreme Court did, however, allow for the possibility of requests to a judge for authorization in the meantime, hence Ms. S’s case.)
So the government must proceed with haste; but it should also proceed with caution. A federal law modelled on Quebec’s seems like the most responsible option.