Bill C-14 (2016): Medical Assistance in Dying

Learn more about the issue:

• Watch one or more of the EFC's recorded webinars on the legalization of assisted suicide (e.g., March 31, 2016). After that webinar, EFC staff also appeared on 100 Huntley Street (May 11, May 5), on radio (1, 2) and at a Parliamentary committee hearing (on video, jump to time of 19:43).
• For individual study or small-group discussion, get the free EFC booklet Euthanasia + Palliative Care: A Guide for Canadians. It reprints eight key articles from the EFC magazine Faith Today and adds new discussion questions. Available in print or as a PDF for on-screen reading.
• Read our Briefing Kit to learn about the issues being considered in assisted-suicide laws. You can use the content for background when you contact your MP and Senator (see sample letters for an MP and for a Senator). Our kit consists of several documents you can download, print and email.

Briefs Note:

• Briefing notes on conscience protection for institutions and conscience protection for medical professionals (April 29, 2016)
• Briefing notes that summarize the EFC’s key concerns and collect relevant testimony from medical professionals and others (April 5, 2016)

Submissions

• Summary of the EFC’s submission to the parliamentary committee (April 5, 2016)
• Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.  May 2, 2016
• EFC proposed revisions to Bill C-14 in Submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, (May 9, 2016)

Commentary

• ​Two informative EFC blog posts
• Declaration Against Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

Background

In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, in its decision in the Carter case, that there should be limited exemptions to Canada’s laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide. The court said that patients in specific circumstances, with a grievous and irremediable medical condition that causes enduring suffering, should be able to ask a physician to help them end their life, without penalty. (See the EFC’s summary and commentary on the decision at theEFC.ca/carter.)

The court has suspended its declaration until June 6 in order to give Parliament time to put in place regulations and safeguards on physician-assisted death.

A special joint parliamentary committee made recommendations to Parliament Feb. 25 to provide far more expansive access to assisted death than the Supreme Court provided in the Carter decision. Several committee members wrote a dissenting opinion, pointing out the committee report “falls far short of what is necessary to protect vulnerable Canadians and the Charter protected conscience rights of health professionals.” See a two-page summary of the EFC’s submission to the committee or the full submission, and the EFC's analysis (PDF, 4MB) of some of the committee’s deeply troubling recommendations.

The federal government introduced Bill C-14 on April 14. The legislation aimed to create a Criminal Code exemption to allow euthanasia and assisted suicide for persons who are 18 years or older, with a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability, in an advanced state of irreversible decline and for whom death is reasonably foreseeable. Read the government’s summary of the legislation here. The government intended to have the legislation in place very quickly, by June 2016, and succeeded.

The EFC is completely opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide. As the federal government got ready to allow the practices, we urged the government to put in place very strict limits and safeguards to protect conscience rights and the lives of vulnerable Canadians. In its news release on Bill C-14, the EFC urged Parliamentarians to examine the risks inherent in the practices, and called for strong conscience protection for medical practitioners and institutions to be provided in the legislation. 

The EFC continues to produce and provide various resources on these issues.

Why should Evangelicals care about euthanasia and assisted suicide?

As Christians we believe God calls us to live the life He has given us. We do not need to accept medical treatment, but it is not for us to choose the timing of our death. We are stewards of this life, but it belongs to God.

Part of our Christian calling is to care for our neighbour. The situation of vulnerable Canadians has to be our concern:

• People who may feel pressured to end their lives – because of the cost of their medical care, because their caregivers are tired or because their heirs are impatient
• People experiencing despair who may believe that their lives aren’t worth living
• People experiencing pain whose suffering is not being properly managed by quality palliative care
• People who live with disability and already struggle to receive proper medical care
• People who are afraid of losing capacity or afraid they may suffer.

Many people who are ill or at the end of life are concerned about being a burden and may be afraid of what lies ahead. The compassionate response is to support and encourage them, to provide high quality palliative care, not to end their lives.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide fundamentally devalue human life. They communicate that some lives are not worth living, that people with disabilities or illness are better off dead. If our society believes it is compassionate to offer death to someone with a disability or illness, how long before they extend that so-called compassionate response to those without the mental capacity to request it, and end people’s lives without their consent?

This will shift our medical system from a presumption for life to one in which a patient, amid scarce resources, may feel the need to justify not choosing death. Causing someone to justify their continued care and their very existence denies the dignity we claim to affirm in us all.