Canada October 19, 2020
B.C. MDs among 1,000+ Canadian doctors opposing easier euthanasia
By B.C. Catholic Staff
This story was updated Nov. 18 with current numbers.
More than 1,000 Canadian doctors, more than 100 of them from British Columbia, have signed an open letter that says Canada will become “the world leader in administering death” if the federal government pushes ahead with Bill C-7 to expand euthanasia to “virtually everyone who is sick and suffering in Canada.”
In the Oct. 19 statement, physicians from across Canada express their “dismay” at the “reckless removal” of safeguards previously considered essential, adding the lives of “desperately vulnerable patients” are at stake.
As of Nov. 18, 120 B.C. doctors were among more than 1,000 physicians who signed the document, which notes the irony of governments protecting vulnerable Canadians from COVID-19 with restrictions on personal liberties, while placing the sick, suffering, and elderly “directly in harm’s way” by expanding assisted suicide.
Curtailing freedoms to protect citizens from the spread of disease is regarded as “normal and necessary,” says the statement, and shows “the lengths to which public authorities can and should go to prevent death and to protect the common good.”
Yet, the doctors say, many Canadians aren’t even aware of Bill C-7,” which was re-tabled in Parliament Oct. 5.
“This bill, expanding ‘medical assistance in dying’ to virtually everyone who is sick and suffering in Canada, will, if passed in its current form, make our country the world leader in administering death.”
The doctors say most of the safeguards that were deemed essential to protect wrongful death when euthanasia was introduced in 2016 are being removed.
Bill C-7 would allow someone who is not dying to receive a lethal injection from a doctor or nurse practitioner,” while someone whose natural death is considered to be “reasonably foreseeable” could be “diagnosed, assessed and euthanized all in one day,” said the doctors.
“We are very concerned that removing the 10-day reflection period and other safeguards will lead to an increase in coerced or tragically unconsidered deaths.”
The doctors note that the wait time to see a psychiatrist in some parts of Canada is “four to eight times longer than the 90-day waiting period proposed in the bill for those whose natural death is not considered “reasonably foreseeable.”
Meanwhile, “70 per cent of citizens nearing the end of life still have no access to basic palliative care services. Yet MAiD has been deemed an essential service under the Canada Health Act and palliative care has not. This bill creates the conditions for cheap and easy death through euthanasia or assisted suicide.”
The statement says politicians “who have little lived experience of the realities of medicine” are transforming the profession “into a technical occupation that allows physicians to deliberately end the lives of their suffering patients.”
It also notes that some regulatory colleges are requiring participation in arranging and facilitating euthanasia.
“We watch in utter dismay and horror at how the nature of our medical profession has been so quickly destroyed by the creation of misguided laws. We, the undersigned, declare that the passage of Bill C-7, if left unchecked, will contribute to the destruction of much more than our medical profession, but fundamentally, of a Canadian society that genuinely values and cares for its most vulnerable members. Canadians deserve better.”
Among the signatories of the statement, statement which is being shared as an open letter to MPs and senators, are Dr. Will Johnston, a Vancouver physician and head of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C.; and Sister Nuala Kenny, a Sister of Charity of Halifax, professor emeritus of bioethics at Dalhousie University, and former ethics and health policy adviser to the Catholic Health Alliance of Canada.