Canada has spent five years trying to do something that many psychiatrists say is impossible: reliably determine when a person who is mentally ill will never get better. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government finally gave up.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser said that officials will introduce legislation this fall to indefinitely halt the expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAID) to people whose sole reason to end their lives is mental illness. Canada was about to become one of the few countries in the world to explicitly allow MAID for mental illness, but an advisory committee recommended in June that the government not go through with the expansion.
As I have documented in my reporting for The Free Press, for more than a decade access to Canada’s government-run MAID regime moved in one direction only: more assisted suicides. One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is triggered by MAID, among the highest rates of assisted suicide in the world, and it has become just another part of the healthcare system. Patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that the person considers acceptable,” not a terminal illness.
Wednesday’s announcement showed that even Canada has its limits. Fraser cited “very real concerns about people who live in communities with inadequate access to mental-health services” and a “lack of consensus over when mental illness is irremediable.”
Read more
