OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life leaders are criticizing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assisted suicide consultation process, warning that it’s aimed to expand Canada’s euthanasia regime.
In December, pro-life leaders, including British Columbia Member of Parliament (MP) Ed Fast and Dr. Will Johnston, head of the Euthanasia Resistance Coalition of B.C., stressed that the Health Canada consultation on so-called “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) is nothing more than an attempt to standardize “advance requests” for euthanasia.
“I think the Trudeau government are true believers in many radical ideas, and radical when it comes to suicide is one of them,” Johnston told the B.C. Catholic.
“They are scrambling to put advance requests and MAID for psychiatric patients into place, knowing it will be very hard to reverse,” he continued. “But I think they’ve finally made a gamble they may lose.”
Likewise, Fast warned that the so-called consultations aim to “inform” Canadians on the issue rather than listen to their opinions, adding that they will likely increase “confusion and abuse of Canada’s MAID regime.”
“The Trudeau government was likely very surprised when the (parliamentary) committee recommended that Canada was NOT ready for this expansion,” he said.
Fast considered the process “obtuse and opaque,” warning that the public “should expect that the next target will be ‘mature minors,’ presumably without the consent of parents.”
Beginning in November, Health Canada called for a “national conversation on advance requests” for euthanasia.
As it stands, in order for a person to be killed by euthanasia in Canada, they must provide “consent” at the time of their suicide. So-called “advance requests” would allow a person to approve their killing at a future date, meaning it would be carried out even if they are incapable of consenting, due to diminished mental capacity or other factors, when the pre-approved death date comes.
Already, in October, Quebec announced it is taking early requests for assisted suicide, despite the practice currently being illegal under Canadian law.
In September, the province announced it would soon be taking advance requests for euthanasia after the June 2023 passing of Quebec Bill 11.
The decision to enact the legislation came after senior ministers from the provincial government said they would not “wait any longer” for Canada’s federal criminal code to be amended to allow the change.
Since legalizing the deadly practice at the federal level in 2016, Trudeau’s Liberal government has continued to expand who can “qualify” for death. In 2021, the Trudeau government passed a bill that permitted the killing of those who are not terminally ill but who suffer solely from chronic disease.
The government has also attempted to expand the practice to those suffering solely from mental illness but has delayed doing so until 2027 after pushback from pro-life, medical, and mental health groups as well as most of Canada’s provinces.
Health Canada’s consultation process promised an online questionnaire and “virtual regionally focused roundtables” comprising “a broad range of representatives.” While the process is scheduled to remain open until February 2025, the questionnaire is not currently available on the website.
Health Canada insisted that the discussion would include voices with a “broad range of perspectives, including on advance requests.”
However, notably missing from the conversation is Euthanasia Prevention Coalition director Alex Schadenberg, who was not invited to the roundtable discussions but permitted to make a presentation.
Schadenberg recently said that he believes Health Canada has “stacked the deck” to ensure an outcome in support of advance requests, “just like they’ve stacked the deck in every other consultation over the past several years.”
Already in Canada, assisted suicide has expanded 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest-growing euthanasia program in the world.
The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.