Dignity in Dying does not campaign for a law like Canada’s in the UK. We are campaigning for assisted dying as a choice for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.
Canada
The law in Canada
Canada’s MAID law permits voluntary euthanasia. The law is available to people who meet the following criteria:
- They have a serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability.
- They are in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability.
- They have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.
People who are not terminally ill can request MAID if they meet the other criteria. In this scenario, they must also undergo a 90-day assessment period.
What we’re campaigning for in the UK
The background to Canada’s MAID law
The law changed in Canada because a Supreme Court ruling found that the existing law was unconstitutional.
In 2015, there was a legal case — Carter v. Canada — in which the Supreme Court found that banning assisted death infringed upon the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This led Canada to a widely defined law, where the eligibility criteria allowed assisted dying for people with ‘a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability)’. This is similar to the law in Belgium and the Netherlands. Find out more about the law in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Canada’s parliament took an incremental approach to implementing the Court’s decision. It began in 2016 with a more restrictive law than the Court intended. That law was subsequently amended to make it consistent with the 2015 judgement.
Data on assisted dying in Canada
Canada publishes regular reports on its MAID law. The data from the report published in 2022 shows that:
- MAID represents 4.1% of deaths in Canada. The overwhelming majority of deaths do not involve assisted dying at all.
- 96.5% of MAID patients in Canada were people whose deaths were ‘reasonably foreseeable’. Regardless of the treatments they received or if they opted to use assisted dying or not, their death was inevitable.
- Almost 8 in every 10 people opting for MAID in Canada were receiving palliative care.
Source: Fourth annual report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2022
Get campaign updates
We’re close to winning a new assisted dying law – but we may need to take further campaign actions together. Can we email you updates and vital actions?