Disability Rights Groups Ask Government to Further Delay MAID for the Mentally Ill

A treatment room in the emergency department at Peter Lougheed hospital in Calgary, Alta., on Aug. 22, 2023. The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh

Disability rights organizations are calling on Ottawa to pass legislation that would exclude those suffering solely from mental illness from accessing medical assistance in dying (MAID) for another three years.

The groups are asking Parliament to vote in favour of Bill C-62, an act that would extend the temporary exclusion of those dealing with mental health issues.

“Expanding MAID to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder will lead to even more people contemplating applying for and receiving MAID due to socio-economic suffering,” said ARCH Disability Law Center lawyer Carrie Jaffe during a Feb. 23 press conference.

Parliament passed legislation in 2016 allowing eligible Canadian adults to request medical assistance in dying. Then, in 2020, the government passed Bill C-7, which allowed MAID for Canadians whose natural death is not “reasonably foreseeable.”

The federal government extended the deadline for expanding MAID to mental illness after passing Bill C-39 in February 2023 and announced last month it again intended to expand the deadline.

“The system needs to be ready and we need to get it right,” announced Health Minister Mark Holland. “It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready and we need more time.”

Ms. Jaffe said her organization, which practices disability rights law, supports the passage of Bill C-62 with an amendment that would repeal the expansion to those with mental illnesses altogether. The groups also want subsequent legislation to fully repeal MAID for people whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, also known as Track 2.

Ms. Jaffe said ARCH is “deeply concerned” that MAID Track 2 is an answer to suffering caused by “economic and social inequality that many people with disabilities live with.” According to Ms. Jaffe, several of the organization’s clients are people who do not want to die, but are unable to receive adequate disability support from the province of Ontario.

“They are given the impossible and false choice of living in the community in unsafe conditions, or moving into a hospital or long-term care institution where they will get services, but will have to give up their dignity, independence, work and relationships,” she said.

One-Third of Canadians Disabled

Ms. Jaffe said ARCH believes the MAID expansion violates the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Canada ratified in 2010. She said freedom of choice is a central pillar of the right to life, one of the rights in the convention, but it requires that a person “freely choose assisted death without any coercion or external pressure.”

Council of Canadians with Disabilities chairperson Heather Walkus said a lack of proper supports has led to disabled people seeking out MAID “because of the suffering caused by a society that does not care.”

“The idea that we are using rights in this country, the right to die, instead of the right to live astounds me,” she said.

Ms. Walkus pointed out that according to recent surveys, one-third of Canadians have some kind of a disability. “One-third of us are disposable, and it is cheaper to kill us than it is to support us to live,” she said.

The number of deaths increased by 31.2 percent in 2022, according to the federal government’s Fourth Annual Report on MAID. The procedure accounted for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country that year. The report said there were 463 cases—3.5 percent of the total MAID deaths in 2022—in which the person’s natural death was not reasonably foreseeable.