The head of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is alarmed by new statistics showing that four per cent of all deaths in British Columbia in 2020 were attributable to euthanasia, the highest rate in Canada, and sharply higher than the national average of 2.5 per cent.
Alex Schadenberg, the coalition’s executive director and an international expert on euthanasia, said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic that new safeguards are needed to ensure that vulnerable individuals are not subjected to unwanted medically assisted death, especially those performed by activist doctors.
“The Canadian law is not designed to rein them in, in any way or form,” Schadenberg said. “The law doesn’t, in any way, have any system for effective oversight.”
B.C. is the only province where “Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)” clinics openly operate, Schadenberg. HemlockAID has an office in Vancouver’s Fairmont Medical Building while Solace B.C. operates in Victoria.
He suspects doctors who work at the clincs “are far more permissive in their decision-making around euthanasia.”
But Solace B.C.’s Dr. Stefanie Green rejected the charge, calling it “a leap” and “not accurate” to say that she is permissive in her medical practice, even though 90 per cent of her work involves assisting with suicides.
In an interview, she said that while all doctors operate under the same federal law and provincial standards, many react with caution or reluctance when asked about MAiD. Her proficiency, on the other hand, allows her to provide answers and guidance. “But I don’t think that makes me permissive,” Dr. Green said. “I believe I am experienced.”
B.C.’s 2020 death-by-MAiD rate is approaching that of the euthanasia-pioneering “Benelux” countries – Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, where euthanasia is approaching 5 per cent of all deaths. B.C. also recorded the highest Canadian rate in 2019, 3.3 per cent, when the national average was two percent.
Overall, 7,595 Canadians died through assisted suicide last year, a 35 per cent increase from 2019. The sharp increase in euthanasia deaths was recorded even before Parliament liberalized access to MAiD through the passage of Bill C-7 in March.
The new Health Canada “medically assisted death” statistics come at a time when new questions are being asked about how much health officials in B.C. are promoting MAiD to patients rather than proposing better hospice care and pain-alleviation practices.
In one case, a Surrey man told The B.C. Catholic that his sick and elderly mother-in-law had been subjected to unwanted and unwarranted pressure to accept being killed through MAiD. After he and his wife complained to the Fraser Health Authority, the MAiD-approval order was dropped. (See Elderly Cancer Patient Was Pushed Toward Euthanasia, at bottom of story.)
The release of the new assisted dying figures also drew concerns about the forum where they were made public, a June 7 meeting of a new joint parliamentary committee studying assisted suicide in Canada. The Senate-Commons committee was to have conducted a mandated, five-year review of Canada’s 2016 MAiD legislation, but it was not struck until after liberalizing amendments were passed in March. That led euthanasia critic Dr. Trudo Lemmens to characterize the body’s work as an unfortunate example of “Parliament putting the cart before the horse.”
Lemmens, professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, made the remark as one of the committee’s first witnesses.
“I therefore have concerns about this review, and particularly about the premise from which it will start,” he said June 21. “In any area of policy-making, it is harder to scale back a practice once there is an official professed confidence in it.”
Lemmens urged the committee to take a step back and re-examine the original 2012 B.C. Supreme Court Carter decision that set in motion the overturning of Canada’s prohibition of medically assisted killing.
The Carter decision, he said, accepted physician-assisted death “only in limited and exceptional circumstances.”
With this in mind, Lemmens urged the committee to question whether “our current practice respects this, and what even further expansion would mean.”
Further expansion is, indeed, a possibility. Committee co-chair Senator Yonah Martin said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic that the committee’s terms of reference mandate that it not only review the existing legislation, but also examine “issues relating to mature minors, advance requests, and mental illness.” (The committee is also charged with looking at the state of palliative care in Canada and the protection of Canadians with disabilities.)
The “advance request” issue refers to “living wills” in which healthy persons may ask to receive euthanasia should they ever be in a state where they qualify but are unable to express consent for it. The practice is currently not allowed.
Significantly, the first written brief the committee received, filed by Wayne Sumner, professor emeritus of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, urged the committee to recommend approval of advance requests.
Martin said that as co-chair she is committed to a fair and impartial review of all issues. At the same time, she said that she has heard from Canadians with concerns that the sick and elderly are being improperly exposed to the concept of euthanasia or even pressured into accepting it. “So, I am concerned as a senator, as a parliamentarian, absolutely,” she said.
In presenting the 2020 MAiD figures to the committee, Abby Hoffman, an assistant deputy minister with Health Canada, said the department’s full 2020 MAiD report will be unveiled this summer.
Even so, the report is not expected to provide the same level of provincial detail that the B.C. government made available before MAiD data was centralized in Ottawa in 2018.
In anticipation of missing data, the B.C. Catholic contacted B.C.’s MAiD Oversight Unit in April with a request for detailed MAiD statistics itemized by health region.
Ministry of Health official Barbara Caldwell answered by email on May 3 that the “request is being considered and further communication will be provided to you at another time.”
No information has since been received.