Ontario's MAiD Death Review Committee (MDRC), which reviews and evaluates MAiD deaths in the province, is planning on making its committee "diverse" with fewer members.This is according to the Ontario Solicitor General, Michael Kerzner, who says the committee will be shrunk by half, from 16 to eight members, and will include "diverse viewpoints," as the Globe and Mail reports, based on documents dated early April it obtained.The committee began reviewing cases only two years ago and now its term is up.The MDRC began in January 2024 and was the first in Canada to review MAiD cases through experts, scrutinizing and drawing lessons from what they saw.Two former members of the MDRC state the new committee will be less rigorous and provide less oversight..According to an MDRC internal posting, new members will be experts "interested in supporting MAiD practice." The previous language describing members as an "independent expert review” was removed, and replaced by asking them to provide "guidance to practitioners” to “support emerging MAiD practice.”“The MDRC is evolving in response to the changing landscape of MAiD in Ontario and will continue to be a means of providing independent expert review of MAiD deaths to assist in evaluating public safety concerns and identify opportunities for continued broad system improvements,” stated Dr. Dirk Huyer, Ontario's Chief Coroner, in the document.This renovation of the committee was sparked by the committee's two-year term ending..Kerzner says the committee will "keep the transparency 100% as high as possible.”Ramona Coelho, an Ontario family physician, who served on the committee, says this change will risk the independence and credibility of the review process.“When the MDRC is reconstituted to include only MAiD clinicians or those supportive of the practice, it will become a closed loop,” she stated.“Oversight bodies are meant to critically evaluate systems, not align with the communities they oversee.”.Another expert and former MDRC member, Trudo Lemmens, a law professor at the University of Toronto, stated, “The [coroner’s] office has also justified the overhaul by citing the difficulty of managing diverse viewpoints and lack of consensus within the MDRC."“If diversity of perspectives is itself treated as a liability, the inevitable result will be an artificial consensus in an area where profound ethical disagreement persists.”
