Category: Countries

Canada Catholic head: ‘Unjust’ to force doctors on assisted suicide

The Gobe and Mail

Ethan Lou

TORONTO — Reuters.  The head of Canada’s biggest Catholic group opposed the country’s pending doctor-assisted suicide legislation in a statement to be read at 225 Toronto churches on Sunday, saying it was “unjust” to force doctors to act against their conscience.

“It is unjust to force people to act against their conscience in order to be allowed to practice as a physician,” Cardinal Thomas Collins, head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, said in the text of his statement.

Canada’s Supreme Court struck down a ban on assisted suicide in 2015 and gave lawmakers a year to come up with legislation to regulate the practice.

The newly elected Liberal government was given a four-month extension this year to a develop a national law for the practice, under which doctors opposed to assisted suicide have to recommend someone willing to perform it. . . [Full text]

 

Doctor affiliated with Catholic hospital speaks out against assisted-death ban

  The Globe and Mail

Laura Kane

A doctor affiliated with a Catholic hospital in a small British Columbia community says the facility’s likely ban on assisted-dying is a violation of terminally ill patients’ charter rights.

Dr. Jonathan Reggler said St. Joseph’s General Hospital is the only hospital in the Comox Valley and as a Catholic facility it generally forbids doctors from helping patients die, although a formal policy has not yet been adopted.

Reggler said terminally ill patients in hospital who want a doctor’s help to die will either be denied that right or have to be moved 50 kilometres to the nearest hospital in Campbell River. . . [Full text]

 

Judge rules doctors’ identities in assisted-dying case can remain secret

The Globe and Mail

Sean Fine

Doctors supporting a Toronto man’s request for a physician-assisted death can keep their names private after a judge called their interest in shielding their identities “obvious.”

An 80-year-old man with advanced-stage, aggressive lymphoma is seeking a court’s permission for an assisted death, with the support of his family, doctors and a psychiatrist. Canada’s Criminal Code ban on physician-assisted death is set to expire on June 6, but the Supreme Court of Canada this year authorized Superior Court judges to approve applications from mentally competent adults who are suffering unbearably and irremediably from disease.

The ruling helps define how courts that are normally open and public will accommodate the intensely personal applications for an assisted death. . . [Full text]

 

Canada’s largest Catholic archdiocese mobilizing against assisted-dying law

The Globe and Mail

Affain Chowdhry

Canada’s largest Catholic archdiocese is mobilizing its members to pressure federal politicians tasked with shaping new doctor-assisted dying legislation by June to protect vulnerable groups and to exempt doctors, nurses and Catholic hospitals from having to provide those services because it goes against their religious beliefs.

Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, used a sermon on Sunday at St. Paul’s Basilica in downtown Toronto to argue that forcing Catholic doctors to refer patients to medically assisted dying services was a “violation of conscience” and amounted to religious discrimination. . . [Full text]

 

Assisted death: Recognize this new right, but carefully limit it

The Globe and Mail

Editorial

Suicide is not the answer, generally speaking. But we are not speaking generally when we talk about drafting a law legalizing and regulating physician-assisted suicide – a law the Supreme Court of Canada has told Parliament to enact by June 6.

The new law will ease and enable suicide, normalizing what in most circumstances is a harmful, undesirable act by fitting it into a compassionate health-care system through the exculpatory power of legislation. As such – as a necessary exception to all the rules and norms that constitute our traditional sense of collective good, which focuses on extending life rather than ending it – the coming law on physician-assisted dying needs to be extremely specific and tightly defined. . . [Full text]