CV NEWS FEED // Almost two weeks later than anticipated, Canada’s virtual “national conversation” on the latest expansion of its euthanasia program has begun.
It commenced with an online questionnaire that the nation’s government says is a way for diverse perspectives on the deadly practice to be heard. The questionnaire, which will be open until Feb. 14, 2025, went live on Health Canada’s website on Dec. 12, weeks later than the originally announced start timeframe. In late October, Canada’s Minister of Health Mark Holland and Arif Virani, the country’s minister of justice and attorney general, had announced that a “national conversation” on the topic of “advance requests” for euthanasia would take place starting in late November and conclude in late January 2025.
The “national conversation” is a consultation process that includes an online questionnaire open to Canadian residents and virtual roundtable discussions among persons who were invited to participate. A report of the findings will be published in the spring 2025, according to Holland and Virani.
Currently, euthanizing a person who has made a request for it in advance remains an offense under Canada’s Criminal Code. In 2023, Quebec’s legislature passed Bill 11, allowing for advance requests to be made by persons diagnosed with illnesses such as dementia. The law went into effect in the province in October of this year.
Holland and Virani said they will not be challenging Bill 11. In their October 2024 statement, they said “it is important to hear the full range of perspectives” on the issue of advance requests, hence the “national conversation.”
The Government of Canada Senior Media Relations Advisor Tammy Jarbeau told CatholicVote in a Dec. 10 email statement that the country’s government “will work with partners to encourage wide dissemination of the questionnaire to allow for as many individuals as possible to participate and contribute to this discussion.”
When asked what steps the government is taking to include anti-assisted suicide perspectives, Jarbeau stated, “The Government of Canada is working closely with all partners to ensure that the roundtable participants represent a diversity of views.”
Members of the virtual roundtables “will include provincial and territorial officials, practitioners, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, experts in bioethics and law, persons with lived experiences and their caregivers,” Jarbeau stated. “The goal is to understand the full spectrum of views with respect to advance requests, including those held by people who do not support medical assistance in dying.”
The questionnaire is also a way for people to state their opinions, she added.
Some pro-life Canadians have expressed concerns over the “national conversation.” Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Executive Director Alex Schadenberg “believes Health Canada has ‘stacked the deck’ to ensure a pro-advance-requests outcome,” the B.C. Catholic reported in early December.
>> Canadian pro-lifers concerned over deceptive ‘national conversation’
The start of the “national conversation” on expanding euthanasia comes shortly after Health Canada published its fifth annual report on its “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) program. The report revealed that there was an almost 16% increase in deaths by MAiD in 2023 compared with 2022.
In 2023, the province of Quebec reported the highest number of acts of euthanasia, accounting for 36.5% of all MAiD deaths in the country. Ontario follows, accounting for 30.3% of all deaths by euthanasia that year.
According to the report, since the country legalized euthanasia in 2016 to the end of 2023, 60,301 people have died by MAiD.
