July 2021 survey shows 85% of Ontarians are supportive of legislation to make participation in MAID (medical assistance in dying) voluntary for healthcare professionals.
We are concerned that patients, particularly vulnerable ones with disabilities, chronic illness and persons with mental health concerns, will choose or be forced into MAID because of a lack of options, social support networks or available services. In all cases, the opinion and clinical experience of the primary healthcare professional provides an important check and balance against hasty, ill-informed, or improper MAID requests.
Please write the Ontario government today using the letter on our website to encourage them to create legislation to protect doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals so they can continue to properly care for patients. Even if you have written before – including recently – please write Ontario legislators today to let them know you want conscience legislation this fall.
The non-partisan campaign was launched to oppose and raise awareness about regulations that force doctors to refer for assisted suicide and euthanasia against their moral convictions.
By the end of March, people who have signed up during the campaign should receive instructions about how to e-mail all the candidates in their ridings in the run-up to Ontario’s June 7 provincial election. . . [Full text]
Assisted suicide has been legal in Canada since June 2016. Discussions are already taking place to expand the criteria to minors, people with psychiatric illness and those with dementia. This puts people who are lonely and isolated at risk of choosing euthanasia simply because they don’t have anyone who cares and can give them hope.
Today in Ontario:
Physicians and other caregivers are forced to participate in euthanasia against their will, by referring their patients.
Pro-euthanasia groups are threatening to sue faith based hospitals unless they allow euthanasia on the premises.
Only a third of the population has access to adequate palliative care, so they are being denied real choice on end of life issues.
This places physicians, nurses and other health professionals in an impossible situation – assist in the killing of their patients or lose the ability to care for patients at all.
This is happening despite constitutional protections for freedom of conscience and religion in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (s.2).
The Coalition for HealthCARE and Conscience represents more than 110 healthcare facilities (with almost 18,000 care beds and 60,000 staff) and more than 5,000 physicians across Canada. Our members are unable to participate in taking a patient’s life due to moral or ethical convictions.
The Solution
The Ontario legislature has the power to protect conscience rights for individuals and facilities and to provide adequate palliative care and mental health services so that people will not see assisted suicide as their only option. Our efforts in Manitoba helped to ensure the province passed conscience protection legislation in November 2017.
In advance of the June 2018 provincial election in Ontario, we have the opportunity to ask candidates from all parties three important questions:
Will you support legislation to protect doctors, nurses and other health care providers who are being forced to participate in assisted suicide/euthanasia through making a referral?
How will you protect facilities from being forced to offer euthanasia/assisted suicide on their premises?
How does your party plan to address the lack of quality palliative care in our province?
To get involved, please participate in your Church’s Sign Up Sunday. We will be collecting contact information to help mobilize a large database of people to contact candidates for the 2018 Ontario provincial election.
Dr. Frank Ewert wants protection from having to help a patient die — but Dying with Dignity Canada doesn’t want that to happen at the cost of patients receiving full access to end-of-life options.
“When I started back a number of years ago and vowed to follow the Hippocratic oath, I meant it. It was very profound to me, it resonated with my core beliefs, that I would always respect life, that I would do nothing to harm a patient,” Ewert told a legislative committee on Monday evening. . . [Full text]
VOICE 1: Bill 34 is being introduced by the Manitoba government to protect conscience rights for health care professionals, so that health care providers would not be required to participate in assisted suicide.
VOICE 2: While I cannot participate in assisted suicide for a couple of reasons. The first is I made a vow as a medical student 40 years ago that I wouldn’t kill patients, okay? And I’m not willing to cross that line.
PC: It has been less than 18 months now since medically assisted dying became legal in Canada. And health care workers are still adapting to that paradigm change. We just heard part of a video produced by the Coalition for Health Care and Conscience. It’s a national umbrella organization of religious groups, and as you heard it is lobbying for Bill 34 a proposed piece of legislation in Manitoba that was drafted to help health care workers with conscientious objections to helping end patients’ lives. Here’s Manitoba’s health minister Kelvin Goertzen. . . [Full episode transcript]