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CV NEWS FEED // Despite knowing about “a pattern of noncompliance” regarding criminal law and administering euthanasia in the province, the death investigations office for Ontario, Canada, has not reported any instances to law enforcement, according to an investigative report.
Leaked documents indicate that the Office of the Chief Coroner, which oversees the province’s euthanasia regulation, tracked 428 instances of potential criminal violations within the past five years, Alexander Raikin, a visiting fellow in bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in an article for The New Atlantis. Three physicians, whom the publication did not name, shared the documents with the publication.
Of the 428 compliance violations, “only four cases triggered a report to a regulatory body. All others were deemed lower-level offenses, and not a single case was reported to the police,” Raikin wrote.
He wrote that despite the country’s criminal laws related to euthanasia, the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario decided that “euthanasia practitioners’ ongoing failures to comply are best resolved through emails.”
According to Raikin, the compliance violations included instances of “broken safeguards” and euthanizing patients “who may not have been capable of consent.”
Raikin also alleged that in 2023, there were some instances that involved euthanasia deaths for persons who were not terminally ill in which “practitioners reported that they were not experts in the illness that caused the person’s suffering, and no outside expert was consulted — violating a safeguard mandated by federal criminal law.”
Raikin reported that Dirk Huyer, who has been the head of the Office of the Chief Coroner in Ontario since 2014, has said that his office regularly communicates with law enforcement.
According to Raikin, Huyer said over email: “We do have regular intersections with Ontario regulatory bodies and law enforcement organizations relating to MAID and no concerns have been expressed regarding our review and leveled response approach.”
Canada legalized the deadly “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) program, or euthanasia and assisted suicide program, in 2016. An August Cardus study revealed that MAID is tied with cerebrovascular diseases as the fifth-leading cause of death in the country.
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Huyer announced in 2018 that his office was starting a new system related to “respond[ing] to concerns that arise about potential compliance issues” regarding administering euthanasia, according to Raikin.
Raikin reported that two months after this announcement, Huyer explained at a webinar for Ontario nurse practitioners that the system is intended to ensure “the proper legislative rules were followed, the College [of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario] policies were followed, the diagnosis makes sense to be meeting criteria, and that the full data was reported.”
The Office’s response depends on the individual noncompliance incident’s severity. An instance determined to be a level five severity, the worst ranking, would merit a police report. Level four would merit a report to an “applicable regulatory body,” according to the webinar presentation. Levels two and three would warrant emails. A level one instance would merit an “informal conversation.” According to Raikin’s article, no violations have been determined to be above a level four.
Raikin reported that in the 2018 webinar, which is available on YouTube, Huyer said that “in the vast majority of cases,” the rules are followed, but they have found that a “very small handful” of clinicians have repeatedly not followed the rules.
These clinicians “are not responding to our educational input and are maintaining the same practice repetitively,” Huyer said in the webinar. “And so we see a pattern of noncompliance, we see a pattern of not following legislation, a pattern of not following regulation, and frankly we can’t just continue to do education to those folks if they’re directly repeating stuff that we’ve brought to their attention.”
Toronto University law professor Trudo Lemmens commented to Raikin about his concern for the lack of police reporting.
“[T]his is a criminal law,” he said, “and I’m worried that the lack of referring for prosecution and for investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons reflects a kind of normalization of MAID as some kind of inherent beneficial practice.”
Raikin’s full report can be read here.
