This is fantastic news! The Government of Quebec has just passed legislation to permit terminally ill patients to request an assisted death. This has been a long time coming, and follows from recommendations made by Québec’s Select Committee on Dying with Dignity.(1)
This Committee held a series of public consultations on the topic, back in 2010, and issued its recommendations in March 2012. It concluded that:
we have concluded that we must comply with requests for help to die made in very specific situations. A new option is definitely needed in the continuum of end-of-life care, because palliative care cannot ease all physical and psychological suffering.
We propose that this option take the form of “medical aid in dying”. This assistance involves an act performed by a physician in a medical setting following a free and informed request made by the patient himself.”(1)
This legislation is likely to have an impact on other jurisdictions in Canada, being “the first of its kind in Canada. Its passage comes at a time when the right to die is being heavily debated in the rest of the country.”(2) The 2011 Report by the Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on End-of-Life Decision-Making found support for this:
First, public support for the decriminalization of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia remains high (a substantial majority of Canadians support the decriminalization of assisted dying).
Second, the issue of decriminalization remains very contentious and polarized.
Third, regardless of this support and no doubt in part because of this contentiousness, assisted suicide and euthanasia remain prohibited activities under the Criminal Code of Canada.”(3)
I’m hopeful that Quebec’s new law will be a model for other provinces and territories, so that patients in other areas will be able to benefit from real choices at end of life.
References:
(1) Select Committee on Dying with Dignity (Consultation générale et auditions publiques sur la question de mourir dans la dignité). Government of Quebec. 22 Mar 2012. Legal deposit – 2012. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. ISBN : 978-2-550-64189-6. Online. Accessed 05 Jun 2014. Web:
http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/commissions/CSMD/mandats/Mandat-12989/index.html
(2) Terminally ill patients in Quebec now have the right to choose to die. CBC News. 05 Jun 2014. Online. Accessed 05 Jun 2014. Web:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-passes-landmark-end-of-life-care-bill-1.2665834
(3) End-of-life decision-making in Canada: the report by the Royal Society of Canada expert panel on end-of-life decision-making. Schüklenk, Udo et al. Bioethics. 2011;25 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):1–73. Online. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01939.x. Accessed 05 June 2014. Web:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3265521/