In March 2023, medical assistance in dying (MAiD) will be offered to the mentally ill in Canada..The Trudeau Liberals expanded MAiD to include people with mental illnesses. This opens many ethical questions, as people needing psychiatric care are the only individuals who can be held against their will in a treatment facility.. Justin TrudeauJustin Trudeau .In 2021, when the Canadian MAiD program expanded to include the mentally ill, it was condemned by three United Nations human rights experts as having a “discriminatory impact on disabled people and running contrary to international human rights standards.”.Ellen Cohen, National Network for Mental Health co-coordinator, said it's hard to understand consent for the mentally ill..“MAiD requires a person to voluntarily consent to it, but how do we understand consent for people with mental illnesses who may be forcibly confined and treated against their will? Do we need a special set of safeguards in those situations?” said Cohen..READ MORE 3.3% of all Canadian deaths were doctor assisted suicide.Cohen resigned from the federal government’s MAiD panel because she said she felt the panel was a rubber stamp as they could not recommend against including the mentally ill, just how best to apply MAiD..“Canada will legalize MAiD for people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental health disorder. I believe this expansion of the MAiD law would be a serious mistake,” said Cohen.. Tim StaintonTim Stainton .“The panel was not permitted or designed to reject MAiD for mental illness. We were supposed to consider how to do so safely before March. But to do our job effectively, we needed to engage seriously with complicated issues concerning decision-making, consent and capacity, privilege and vulnerability, and accountability and monitoring. In my experience, the panel failed to do so.”.Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, said the expansion to include the mentally ill is the greatest threat to disabled people since the Nazis..“This is probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s,” Stainton told the Associated Press..MAiD was legalized in 2016 and updated in March 2021 to allow anyone to use the MAiD program regardless of whether or not they had a life-ending illness, but did not include the mentally ill. These individuals are called “no reasonably foreseeable natural death.”.Unlike other countries that offer MAiD, Canada offers MAiD as a “treatment” option, whereas the other countries put MAiD in a “silo” separate from treatment options..READ MORE Manitoba woman chooses assisted suicide, claiming lack of healthcare.There have already been examples of disabled people picking MAiD because they could not get sufficient healthcare treatment..“People with disabilities have already been applying for and getting MAID because they are living in poverty, don’t have appropriate housing or can’t get the health care they need … reasons that are supposed to be outside the scope of MAiD laws,” said Cohen..Cohen said the federal government’s MAiD panel failed and Canadians “deserve better.”.“In my view, the expert panel on MAiD and Mental Illness did not meaningfully deliver on its responsibilities. On such high-stakes matters of life and death, we all deserve better,” said Cohen.
