Health minister takes first glance at assisted suicide numbers in Quebec
By Agnieszka Krawczynski
The B.C. Catholic
The number of Quebeckers who have sought assisted suicide in recent months is in, and has shocked even that province’s health minister. According to Gaetan Barrette, 262 people in Quebec died by assisted suicide between December, when the practice was legalized, and the end of August.
“A year ago, two years ago, I mentioned many times that I was expecting about 100, and it’s almost three times that,” he said at a press conference Oct. 27. “That, in itself, is surprising to me.”
He told reporters he expected the number to be 300 by the end of the year.
The number of deaths comes from a report by a provincial commission that collects data from assisted suicide reports filed by doctors. It shows most of the people who requested assisted suicide got it. Barrette said 87 cases, or about 25 per cent of all requests, did not end in assisted suicide.
He broke down the numbers for reporters: 36 people didn’t meet the criteria, 24 people changed their minds, 21 people died before assisted death, five applications are still in process, and one person asked to postpone assisted death.
Barrette maintained that the report shows “the law has been implemented correctly in the field.”
However, his own numbers may prove him wrong. He said the commission has so far finished evaluating 148 of the 262 cases and they found not all were legal.
“There are 148 for which there was a decision. This means that it conformed or did not conform, and of these, 127 are totally in compliance, and for 21 there was non-compliance.”
In three of the 21 cases not in accordance with the law, two people were not at the end of life and the other was not suffering a serious and incurable disease.
In the other 18 cases, the question had to do with getting a second opinion from an independent doctor who did not know the patient.
“It was not an issue where we had a non-observance of the law, but it was difficult to apply the law,” especially in small villages where a patient may know all the doctors in town, he said. He spoke in terms of compliance and non-compliance, rather than legality and illegality.
“This is something that I think we will have to address,” he said, suggesting the doctors’ college would have to come up with a solution.
The commission has yet to give its answer about the legality of the other 114 deaths by assisted suicide in Quebec.
Alex Schadenberg, head of the Ontario-based Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, worried that the numbers painted a bleaker picture than Barrette admits.
“Since the Quebec euthanasia law is based on the Belgian law, and since nearly half of the assisted deaths in Belgium are not reported, we wonder: how many euthanasia deaths have actually occurred in Quebec?”
