TORONTO, April 13, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The co-chair of the special joint parliamentary committee on assisted suicide and euthanasia defended his group’s radical recommendations at a Toronto town hall last week, stating that Canada’s physicians need to look at “assisted dying” as part of a “continuum of care” and to see medicine as “not being about preserving life, but about caring for life and ending suffering.”
“We have to find a way to normalize this discussion, encourage physicians to get better at it, because some of them are very worried about this, and to look at this as part of the continuum of care,” MP Rob Oliphant told a standing-room-only crowd at an April 6 town hall for Arif Virani, rookie Liberal MP for Parkdale-High Park.
He recommended doctors read Being mortal by Atul Gawande, which suggests physicians be more concerned with alleviating suffering than preserving life.
“Patients’ rights will eventually trump the doctors’ rights and we believe that is the covenant that physicians made.”
The parliamentary committee tabled 22 recommendations for a new law governing assisted suicide and euthanasia on February 24 after the Supreme Court’s Carter decision striking down the current law as unconstitutional. That ruling that takes effect June 6, 2016.
Joining Oliphant at the frequently highly charged town hall was co-chair of the provincial and territorial expert panel, Dr. Jennifer Gibson.
A third-term MP for Don Valley West, Oliphant noted that the committee looked at “preserving the rights of physicians to morally object” to assisted suicide and euthanasia, but “we have a patient-centred approach.”
“We said that patients’ rights will eventually trump the doctors’ rights and we believe that is the covenant that physicians made.”
“So we suggested that the government require an effective referral from physicians to another doctor, who might not necessarily do assisted dying, but doesn’t have conscientious objection, because we don’t think that a dying patient should have to search the Yellow Pages or do a Google search to try and find a doctor.”
“We also suggested that hospitals that receive public funding should make this medical care available in their facilities,” he said. “We think, again, if it’s a publicly funded institution they may not do it, their staff may not do it, but the patient should have the right to have it done.”
The committee also recommended that physicians who kill consenting patients by medical means report the cause of death as “the underlying illness, not assisted dying, because that affects some insurance issues and that kind of stuff,” Oliphant said.
“The method of death would be different from the cause of death,” he said.
Psychological suffering and mature minors considered
The committee decided psychological suffering alone can be grounds for assisted suicide or euthanasia because “we couldn’t have a list of diseases that were in, and and diseases that were out: MS is in, cystic fibrosis is out, ALS is in, muscular dystrophy is out,” he told the crowd.
“Physicians said, you can’t do that because everyone’s experience of those diseases is unique. We had to honour that,” Oliphant said.
“We couldn’t further stigmatize people with psychological suffering by saying they weren't eligible, but it does put a burden of proof to make sure they have capacity to understand the ramifications of the decision and for someone with psychological illness, that burden will be high.”
The committee recommended that mature minors be considered eligible for euthanasia or assisted suicide after a “three year trial and understanding about how the system would work … just to give us some consensus practice guidelines that physicians could develop.”
“The question becomes capacity, not chronological age,” he said. “What if a seventeen-and-a-half year old could be totally competent and an eighteen-and-a-half might not be competent?”
Attendees at the town hall raised several concerns including that a lack of palliative care may lead people to opt for assisted suicide or euthanasia, with one participant pointing to the 2010 federal report Raising the Bar by Liberal Senator Sharon Carstairs that expressed the same fear.
A palliative care doctor said she was one of only three in west Toronto giving end-of-life care to people at home, “and I do take some exception to the idea that we do deliberately kill people in their own homes… what I do is I journey with family and patients in their homes, help them reach an end that is peaceful.”
“We are the doctors going into the homes of the frail elderly,” she said. “I am concerned about the burden that we bear and the responsibility.”
Oliphant said that four ancillary motions were appended to the committee’s recommendations, including a national strategy palliative care, a national mental health strategy, a strategy on dementia, and to look into the particular needs of indigenous communities.
Euthanasia part of health care continuum
“We were cautious, however, not to make, and it was a tough one, not to make the right to assistance in dying dependent upon those things happening right away,” he said.
“What we’re looking at is a permissive regime that is compassionate and balances the rights of people seeking assistance at the end of their life and ensuring that no one is taken advantage of in that practice,” he said.
But two women at the town hall argued against including psychological suffering as a criteria for assisted suicide and euthanasia based on their own experience, and David Robinson, a senior pastor at Westminster Chapel, questioned the negative effect of euthanasia on society over time.
“I was disturbed by some of the trivializing of it,” Robinson told LifeSiteNews later, and the “haste” in which the law is being pushed through.
While there was little discussion about money at the town hall, “euthanasia is cost effective” and the cultural and social effect over time in other jurisdictions where it is legal, such as the Netherlands and Belgium, is that people think they “are better off dead,” noted Robinson.
Christians can respond to the coming euthanasia regime by providing hospice care and offering a “ministry of hospitality, broadly speaking” that is based on a “biblical view of suffering,” he said. That means letting vulnerable, often lonely people “know we are there, to hold their hand, and suffer with them.”
“Euthanasia is hopeless by definition; a person that wants euthanasia has given up hope,” Robinson observed. “A short, simple word that I didn’t hear once last night was ‘hope’.”
Correction: This article originally identified Senator Sharon Carstairs as a Conservative, but she was in fact a Liberal.