By Quinton Amundson, The Catholic Register
[Canadian Catholic News] – Inclusion Canada is mobilizing over 90 disability and mental health bodies across all provinces and territories to sign on to a joint letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney, federal cabinet ministers and the MPs sitting on the special joint committee studying medically-provided death (known as “Medical Assistance in Dying” or MAiD) to permanently abandon plans to expand access to individuals solely living with a mental illness on March 17, 2027
Signatories on this letter include Canadian Physicians for Life, Canadian Mental Health Association, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Easter Seals Canada, L’Arche Canada, and the Living with Citizen Dignity Network.
The letter acknowledges how “the majority of people with a mental illness continue to have unmet needs for therapies and services. Multiple marginalized people continue to experience high rates of mental illness and added barriers to mental health care and supportive services, and death by despair (due to suicide, overdose and alcoholism) is becoming more common.”
Krista Carr, CEO of Inclusion Canada, told The Catholic Register that another difficult reality these entities sought to illuminate is the sheer scale of what a further expansion of medically-assisted suicide could unleash.
“They will be using the definition of mental disorder in the (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition), which includes 297 different conditions, everything from an eating disorder to trauma, anxiety, autism — and most people have no idea of the scope of that,” said Carr. “We’re talking about a huge portion of the population. One in five Canadians do have, or will have at some point in their life, one of those labels that’s in that category.”
Carr warned that rushing to further expand medically-provided death access will remove any motivation to improve mental health and disability support services.
“There will be no impetus to improve those systems for two reasons,” said Carr. “If a (person’s situation) becomes too bad, right, there’s this way out for people. Secondly, there are already studies being done on how much money is saved by the taxpayer.”
A considerable amount of the public debate surrounding euthanasia / assisted suicide is centred around the potentially forthcoming expansion, though the special joint committee has signalled the strong possibility it will again delay expansion of MAiD to the mentally ill.
Inclusion Canada’s advocacy efforts transcend beyond this moment, however, as the organization is also championing against Track 2, which already became law through Bill C-7 in 2021. This law removed the “foreseeable natural death” guardrail from the euthanasia eligibility criteria.
In September 2024, Inclusion Canada filed a Charter challenge with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice against Track 2 MAiD alongside the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD), Indigenous Disability Canada (IDC/BCANDS), DAWN Canada as well as two personally affected individuals.
Carr said autumn 2027 appears to be the earliest time-frame for when the case will be heard in court.
In acknowledgement of Canada reaching the grim milestone of 100,000 euthanasia deaths in less than 10 years this past April, Carr said that “we knew that it would be a slippery slope. We knew we would get to this point, but we hadn’t actually had any idea how fast. I don’t think any of us could have predicted how quickly.”
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