This Week in Canada: MAID Hits a Mental-Illness Snag

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Parliament slams the brakes on psychiatric MAID, some trees in Quebec have rights too, and the “fun police” are rolling into the Calgary Stampede. Let’s get to it!

During my four years of reporting about Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide regime, I have spoken with patients, physicians, ethicists, and families wrestling with impossible choices. Again and again, I found myself confronting the same question: Can doctors ever know with confidence that someone suffering from mental illness is truly beyond hope?

Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying delivered a surprising answer to that question last week. After years of study and delays, the committee recommended that the government change its criminal law to “indefinitely exclude persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness from eligibility” for MAID.

Canada was preparing to become one of the few countries in the world to explicitly allow MAID for mental illness. That was supposed to happen as soon as 2027. Canada already does not require that a person be terminally ill. MAID patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”