Canada is delaying a plan to offer people with mental illness the option of medically assisted death, two cabinet ministers said Monday.
The announcement by Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani came after a special parliamentary committee looking into the plan concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to assess patients with mental illness who want to end in their lives and help them do so.
“The system has to be ready and we have to get it right,” Mr Holland told reporters. “It’s clear from the discussions we’ve had that the system is not ready and we need more time.”
Neither minister offered a timetable for the latest extension. After a previous delay, the extension was scheduled to take effect on March 17.
Canada already offers medically assisted dying to the terminally and chronically ill, but the plan to expand the program to people with mental illness has divided Canadians.
Some critics say the plan is a consequence of the inability of Canada’s public health care system to provide adequate psychiatric care, which is chronically underfunded and facing demand that outstrips its availability.
Many psychiatrists say the plan would undermine efforts to prevent suicide and have expressed fear that patients with complex problems will forgo treatments that can take years to produce results in favor of a medically assisted death.
Advocates say denying people with mental illness the choice to end their suffering through death is a form of discrimination.
Canada introduced medically assisted dying after its Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that requiring people to endure intolerable suffering violated fundamental rights to liberty and security.
The law was extended in 2021 after the Quebec Supreme Court struck down the government’s original assisted dying law on constitutional grounds because it only applied to people whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.”
The 2021 law expanded eligibility to people facing “severe and irreparable” conditions. Its separate provisions for people with mental illness, which were added to the law by Canada’s unelected Senate, were initially delayed for two years.
Members of the opposition Conservative Party have accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government of promoting a “culture of death.” Some politicians on the left have also opposed the mental illness expansion and said they want to focus on further expanding psychiatric care.
Michael Cooper, a Conservative MP who sat on the select committee, said the government should postpone indefinitely.
“I see no indication that the fundamental issues at the heart — or should be at the heart — of pausing this expansion will be resolved,” he said.
Dying with Dignity Canada, a group that supports the right to medically assisted death, said in a statement that it was “disappointed” by the latest delay.
The health and justice ministers said the new implementation date would be included in soon-to-be-introduced legislation that would formally extend the delay.
About 13,200 Canadians had an assisted death last year, a 31 per cent increase over 2021, according to a report by the federal health department. About 3.5 percent of these patients were not terminally ill but had other qualifying medical conditions.
Both Canada and the United States have a three-digit suicide and crisis hotline: 988. If you are having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 and visit 988. approx (Canada) or 988lifeline.org (United States) for a list of additional resources. This service offers bilingual crisis support in every country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
