Canada is postponing a plan to give people suffering from mental illness the option of a medically assisted death, two government ministers said Monday.
The announcement by Mark Holland, Minister of Health, and Arif Virani, Minister of Justice, came after a special parliamentary commission examining the plan concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to evaluate patients with mental illnesses who want to end their lives and to help them do so.
“The system has to be ready and we have to get it right,” Holland told reporters. “It is clear from the conversations we have had that the system is not ready and we need more time.”
Neither minister offered any timescale for the latest extension. After an earlier delay, the expansion was scheduled to go into effect on March 17.
Canada already offers medically assisted dying to terminally and chronically ill people, but plans to extend the program to people with mental illnesses have divided Canadians.
Some critics say the plan is a consequence of the failure of Canada’s public health system to offer adequate psychiatric care, which is chronically underfunded and faces demand that exceeds its supply.
Many psychiatrists say the plan would undermine efforts to prevent suicide and have expressed fear that patients with complex problems will abandon treatments that can take years to achieve results in favor of medically assisted death.
Supporters say denying people with mental illnesses the chance to end their suffering through death is a form of discrimination.
Canada subsequently introduced medically assisted dying The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that forcing people to endure intolerable suffering violates their fundamental rights to freedom and security.
The law was expanded in 2021 after the Quebec Superior Court struck down on constitutional grounds the government’s original law on assisted dying because it only applied to people whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.”
The 2021 law expanded eligibility to people experiencing “serious and irremediable” conditions. Its separate provisions for people with mental illnesses, added to the law by Canada’s unelected Senate, were originally delayed for two years.
Members of the opposition Conservative Party have accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government of promoting a “culture of death.” Some left-wing politicians also opposed the expansion for mental illnesses and said they wanted to focus on further expanding psychiatric care.
Michael Cooper, a Conservative member of Parliament who was on the special committee, said the government should make the postponement indefinite.
“I see no indication that the fundamental issues that are at the center — or should be at the center — of pausing this expansion will be resolved,” he said.
Dying with Dignity Canada, a group that advocates for the right to medically assisted dying, said in a statement that it was “disheartened” by the latest delay.
The health and justice ministers said the new implementation date will be included in legislation, soon to be introduced, which will formally extend the delay.
According to a federal health department report, about 13,200 Canadians had an assisted death last year, a 31 per cent increase from 2021. About 3.5 per cent of these patients were not terminally ill but had other qualifying medical conditions.
Both Canada and the United States have a three-digit suicide and crisis hotline: 988. If you are having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 and visit 988.ca (Canada) gold 988lifeline.org (United States) for a list of additional resources. This service offers bilingual crisis support in every country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
