A pamphlet circulating on Prince George social media groups recently advocates for people to take action against medical assistance in dying (MAID) but frequently provides incomplete or inaccurate information about the state of the program in Canada.
Titled “Euthansia in Canada” and dated summer/fall 2024, the pamphlet was produced by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
The organization’s website states it “is the national association of evangelical Christians in Canada. Since 1964 the EFC has provided a national forum for Evangelicals, fostered ministry partnerships, conducted research on religious and social trends and provided a constructive voice for biblical principles in life and society.”
The pamphlet discusses the potential expansion of MAID to so-called mature minors and those suffering from mental illness, argues for the need for MAID-free medical facilities and asks people to help advocate towards these goals as well as the expansion of palliative care in Canada.
Here’s a look at the claims made by the pamphlet and the state of MAID in Canada.
MAID for mature minors
The brochure states: “a special committee of MPs and senators studying MAID has recommended allowing MAID for mature minors.”
It further claims that allowing this would “essentially remove the minimum age of eligibility” and that the committee “suggested parents may not be consulted and wouldn’t need to consent to their child’s death via MAID.”
In February 2023, the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying issued a report reviewing MAID legislation and making recommendations on how it should be further studied and amended.
This included seven recommendations regarding MAID access for mature minors.
“The term ‘mature minor’ refers to a common-law doctrine according to which “an adolescent’s treatment wishes should be granted a degree of deference that is reflective of his or her evolving maturity,” the report said.
The report further notes that senior counsel for the federal Department of Justice suggested that Parliament needs to adopt a definition of mature minor if MAID is expanded to the group.
Witnesses who spoke to the committee are cited as saying that there are many contextual factors in determining whether a minor has decision-making capacity beyond just age.
Some of these witnesses proposed a specific minimum age, while other said there should be a minimum age
The report references another report completed by the Collège des médecins du Québec in December 2021, which said minors aged 14 and older should have access to MAID with parental consent.
Ultimately, the report recommends that “Government of Canada amend the eligibility criteria for MAID set out in the Criminal Code to include minors deemed to have the requisite decision-making capacity upon assessment,” though it acknowledges safeguards are needed.
It also recommends that the federal government consult with minors on the topic of MAID and provide research to Health Canada to study the subject both within five years of the report being tabled.
The report also recommends that MAID for mature minors be restricted only to those whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable, that the federal government consults with provinces, territories and indigenous groups to establish standard for minors seeking MAID.
If royal assent is granted to legislation extending MAID to mature minors, the committee recommends that the federal government appoint an independent panel to review it within five years.
No timeline is recommended for the actual implementation of MAID for mature minors.
The brochure’s assertion that the committee said parents may not be consulted and they wouldn’t have to give consent if their child applied for MAID is only half-true.
Recommendation 19 said that parents or guardians should be consulted, where appropriate, but that the will of a mature minor found to have the requisite decision-making capacity would ultimately take priority.
In an opinion piece for Al Jazeera in February 2024, London, Ont.-based family doctor Ramona Coelho objected to the expansion of mature minors for several reasons, including the inadequacy of assessments, the fact that children’s brains are still developing, that treatments for their illnesses could still be developed and that the children applying for MAID might have grown up in circumstances where they see their illness or disability as a burden.
The non-profit Dying With Dignity Canada bills itself as “national human-rights charity committed to improving quality of dying, protecting end-of-life rights, and helping people across Canada avoid unwanted suffering.”
On its website, it argues that “in many jurisdictions across Canada, mature minors already have the right to make important decisions regarding their health care. This includes the right to consent to or refuse lifesaving medical treatment. With special eligibility criteria in place, and appropriate safeguards, Dying With Dignity Canada believes mature minors should be allowed the right to choose MAID.”
Even though the committee made these recommendations, it does not necessarily mean that the government will implement them.
Mental illness
The brochure said that MAID for mental illness is set to take effect in March 2027.
On Feb. 29, 2024, royal assent was given to a bill that delayed the expansion of MAID in cases where mental disorders are the sole underlying condition until March 17, 2027.
However, it’s important to note that the federal government has delayed the implementation of MAID for mental health cases multiple times in the past and could do so again.
MAID was first legalized by the federal government in June 2016, after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the sections of the Criminal Code of Canada prohibiting medical assistance in dying were inconsistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms the previous year.
On March 17, 2021, Parliament approved amendments to MAID legislation that changed the eligibility criteria and the process through which applicants are assessed.
At that point, MAID eligibility for people suffering solely from mental illness was temporary postponed for two years.
The preamble for the bill said that further consultations and deliberation were required to determine whether it was appropriate to agreed MAID for people solely suffering from mental illness given the risks involved.
On March 9, 2023, legislation extending the mental health exclusion by another year received royal assent.
Then, in February 2024, the deadline was extended for a further three years.
When that last piece of legislation was under consideration, the federal government proposed that a joint committee made up of members from both the House of Commons and the Senate complete a comprehensive review regarding MAID eligibility for those suffering solely from mental illness within two years.
“This measure would further serve to examine progress made by provinces, territories, and partners, in achieving overall health care system readiness,” a Health Canada news release dated Feb. 1, 2024 said.
A previous iteration of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying issued a report in January 2024 that concluded “that the medical system in Canada is not prepared for medical assistance in dying where mental disorder is the sole underlying medical condition.”
The brochure also said that “one in 10 people will wait more than four months for counselling. The waiting periods for MAID is only three months.”
The information about the waiting periods is correct, but incomplete.
While there was previously a 10-day “reflection period” for people applying for MAID whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable, it has been removed.
For people whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable applying for MAID, they must go through eligibility assessments taking at least 90 days though the periods can be shortened if the applicant is about to lose their decision-making capacity.
These applicants, according to a federal government website, “must be informed of available and appropriate means to relieve their suffering, including counselling services, mental health and disability support services, community services, and palliative care, and must be offered consultations with professionals who provide those services.”
No sources are listed for any of the information in the brochure, including the claim about the wait times.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported statistics in December 2024 staying that half of Canadians wait about a month for ongoing counselling services in their community while one in 10 people wait more than 20 weeks.
The institute’s data, though, is incomplete. There are no results listed at all for British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Nunavut “due to incomplete data submission.”
Data for Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Yukon is considered to only be partial.
MAID-free safe spaces
One section of the brochure states that “there is pressure to eliminate MAID-free, safe spaces where patients and doctors are not pressured to end life via MAID.”
Last year, The Canadian Press reported that the Catholic archbishop of Montreal filed a legal challenge against Quebec’s MAID legislation on the grounds of religious freedom.
“The lawsuit says the Catholic Church should be exempted from a section of the law requiring all palliative care homes in the province to offer medical assistance in dying,” the outlet reported.
“It says the law is forcing the Catholic Church to choose between allowing a procedure it finds morally unacceptable or abandoning its palliative care centre, called St. Raphael's. Since 2019, St. Raphael's has sent patients requesting MAID to provincially run facilities, but the church says it should not be forced to provide medically assisted deaths on its property.
“The office of Archbishop Christian Lépine says palliative care homes should have the same right as medical practitioners to refuse to offer services they are morally opposed to.”
A similar battle has been simmering in BC since 2020, when the provincial government announced Fraser Health would stop funding the Delta Hospice Society effective Feb. 25, 2021 after the society’s board refused to comply with BC’s policies on MAID.
Ultimately, Fraser Health took over operations of the Irene Thomas Hospice the next year, the CBC reported in April 2021.
That article also stated that the BC Supreme Court had ruled the Delta Hospice Society could not hand-pick members who supported their Christian views on MAID while rejected members who did not, and that the Supreme Court of Canada had rejected an appeal of that decision.
Currently, the society has received intervenor status in a lawsuit filed by the estate of Sam O’Neill and a group called Dying with Dignity Canada against the Province of British Columbia, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and the Providence Health Care Society.
In a decision issued on April 1, 2025, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia Ronald Skolrood wrote that the plaintiffs are looking to challenge certain MAID-related policies by the defendants in facilities they operate.
Skolrood said that O’Neill was admitted to St. Paul’s Hospital in early 2022 with advanced cervical cancer. The hospital is run by Providence, which is affiliated with the Catholic Church.
Though O’Neill was approved for MAID in February 2023, St. Paul’s does not offer MAID services and she was transferred to another facility.
“The plaintiffs allege that this transfer caused her considerable pain and distress,” Skolrood wrote, which they claim violate some of her rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Several groups applied as intervenors on the case, both religious and non-religious: the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the British Columbia Humanist Association, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Christian Charities, Canadian Physicians for Life, the Christian Legal Fellowship and the Delta Hospice Society.
Also applying for intervenor status was the author of the brochure: the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
All these applications were accepted except for the Canadian Constitution Foundation’s.
Another of the intervenors, the CCLA, said on its website that it wants to “provide a principled framework for assessing whether, and to what extent, faith-based organizations can claim standalone freedom of religion protections that would be independent from the medical staff’s individual right to conscientious objection.”
“CCLA will argue that when an organization’s primary purpose is not worship or the promotion of religious beliefs and practices, ascribing independent religious rights to the organization will pose inevitable difficulties,” the April 1 news release stated.
Many of the concerns listed in the EFC’s brochure are either recommendations or items that aren’t yet in place.
However, concerns over MAID are not isolated to religious concerns.
In a section titled “the need for sanctuary,” the brochure said that “people with disabilities have been pressured to end their lives via MAID.”
In an April 2024 opinion piece for Policy Options titled “Reality, not religion, is the reason people need MAiD-free health care,” disabled writer and policy analyst Gabrielle Peters discussed the impact of ableism on the health-care system.
She wrote that disability is frequently viewed in medical spheres as “as deficiency, tragedy, and the opposite of health.”
“Suffering is assumed and, because disability is understood entirely as a problem with an individual’s body, knowledge, power, and authority are placed within the medical field,” Peters said.
“The result of this is our entire humanity is compressed into our diagnoses. There is no examination of the inherent political oppression or the bias in treatment because the medical model assumes the inequity disabled people experience is a logical result of being disabled.”
Health-care professionals, she said have more over more than just a disabled person’s essential medical care, their signature also controls access to other aspects of life like housing, transportation, income, education, mobility and more.
Describing her own experiences, Peters described how at one point, before MAID was legal, that she had been offered a chance to sign a do-not-resuscitate order at one hospital when she still wanted to live.
“Affirming support for the belief of ‘better dead than disabled’ in health care is dangerous and cruel,” Peters said. “Canada has made disabled people a killable class, and hardly anyone has considered the impact this would have on us. This country must maintain MAiD-free health-care spaces.”
In testimony given to the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying in November 2022, Peters said that disabled people are not provided with the freedom to live in their community and not be forced into institutions “should our needs exceed those deemed appropriately human.”
“I came to put it in on the record: Canada's expansion of MAID to disabled people whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable reifies and builds on the existing dehumanization of disabled people in Canada, breathes new life into the goals of never-dismantled eugenics and is based on the ableism that formed this country's foundation, and as such, represents a serious threat,” Peters told the committee.
As court cases go on and the federal government continues to study the subject, it looks like the discussion over MAID and who should be eligible for it is not yet over.
One local elected official's position
In a Thursday, June 12 phone interview from Ottawa, Cariboo-Prince George Conservative MP Todd Doherty said his party has been consistent that it doesn’t approve or accept the expansion of MAID to youth or people struggling with mental illness.
He said it can be easy for people with struggling with mental illness or live with a disability to give up hope and as a society, we should instead break down barriers so they can access treatment and supports.
Doherty pointed to a private member’s bill his caucus colleague, Abbotsford MP Ed Fast, unsuccessfully proposed in 2023 that would have stopped the expansion of MAID to people where mental illness is the only condition.
Bill C-314 failed in its second reading in the House of Commons when 136 Liberal MPs. 30 Bloc Quebecois MPs and one independent MP voted against it. Eight Liberal MPs voted with the 155 Conservatives, 24 NDP MPs, one independent and two Green Party MPs who voted in favour of it.
“We also sat on a committee where we had experts there talking about how the expansion of MAID for mental illness can’t be implemented safety,” Doherty said.
“It is absolutely impossible to determine that an individual’s mental illness will never respond to treatment. We don’t believe that MAID is an acceptable solution to mental illness and psychological suffering. We believe that we should always support treatment and recovery wherever possible.
The MP said he had a loved one facing a long battle with a terminal illness who initially chose to proceed with MAID before declining it at the last minute.
When the issue first came up in Parliament, Doherty said he spoke with people within the faith-based community, his own pastor, constituents who were facing their own battles with terminal illnesses and people who said they wished that MAID had been available for their loved one.
“It’s a deeply personal choice,” Doherty said. “I think we need to be making sure that whatever the case is, the checks and balances are in place because MAID is a slippery slope.”
In the last term, Doherty had a private member’s bill passed that created the 9-8-8 national suicide crisis hotline.
He said one of the events in his life that spurred him to champion suicide prevention was the death of a friend 39 years ago.
“We need to make sure that we are providing help to those that are struggling in the darkness,” he said. “We’ve got 9-8-8 up and running for a little over two years and we need to make sure that the government continues to fund that.”
After the federal election on April 28, Doherty was named the Opposition critic for addiction. He said that his party’s election platform would have provided 50,000 for addictions treatment and recovery beds and that’s something they’re still looking to champion during the current minority government.
Recently, Doherty said, he and his colleagues had a meeting with representatives from Health Canada as well as Health Minister Marjorie Michel and hopes that they can work collaboratively with them on mental and physical health.
