Practical Ethics and Law Lectures: Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying

Abstract: Canada’s rapid rise in deaths from euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, termed Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in the country, now ranks it second only to the Netherlands in terms of MAiD deaths as percentage of overall deaths, with one province already hosting the highest rate of all jurisdictions in the world. Analyzing Health Canada’s annual MAID reports, which show that up to 336 out of 1837 providers are likely responsible for the majority of MAID deaths in a given year, we discuss how the rapid increase likely reflects not a broad Canadian consensus but the capture of a policy-making and implementation process by a small group of activists and clinicians colonizing medicine to become an ideologically driven vehicle for expanding MAID access and delivery. As a remedy and to reprioritize patient safety and protection against premature death, a more transparent, relevant, and safeguarded compliance regime based on evidence-based, multi-perspective policy-making is needed.

Paper: See open access article in AJOB https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2024.2441695#d1e142

Speakers: Professor Trudo Lemmens (Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto); Dr Christopher Lyon (University of York)

Venue: Uehiro Oxford Institute, Suite 1 Littlegate House, 16-17 St Ebbe’s Street, Oxford OX1 1PT (buzzer 1)

Booking: not required. In-person only.

Trudo Lemmens (LicJur KULeuven; LLM Bioethics & DCL McGill) is Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Bioethics at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, with cross-appointment to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He has written and lectured extensively on a wide range of legal, ethical, and policy issues related to health, in particular biomedical research and innovation, pharmaceutical governance, knowledge production, new genetic technologies, health profession regulation, mental health, and end of life care. His work has particularly focused on human rights dimensions of these topics. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto and at other institutions in this area since 1997. Professor Lemmens has been a visiting scholar and fellow at academic institutions in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His publications include the co-authored book Medical Law in Canada, the co-edited volumes Unravelling MAiD in Canada: Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide as Medical Care; Law and Ethics of Biomedical Research: Regulation, Conflict of Interest, and Liability; and Regulating Creation: Law, Ethics and Policy of Assisted Human Reproduction, and more than 150 chapters and articles in national and international law, policy, science, medicine, and bioethics journals. Professor Lemmens has testified before national and international parliamentary committees and courts on his areas of expertise. He has chaired and been a member of various advisory, ethics, and governance committees, including for Health Canada, the World Health Organization, and the Pan American Health Organization. In the last decade, he was a member of two Council of Canadian Academies’ expert panels, on medical assistance in dying and on governance of health data.  He recently co-authored (with Richard Huxtable and Alex Mullock) an ethics report on options for Assisted Dying for the Jersey Government and he was a member of a Content Committee for the Nuffield Council’s recent public engagement project on assisted dying. He is currently a member of the Ontario Chief Coroner’s MAiD Death Review Committee. 

Dr Christopher Lyon (MSc Alberta; PhD Dundee) is a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and a Department of Environmental and Geography staff member at the University of York. His main research is focused on the social dimensions of environmental change. Since his father’s death in 2021 under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) regime, he has published on assisted suicide and euthanasia policy and practice in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Death Studies, and the American Journal of Bioethics and provides commentary in the Canadian, British, and American media. He has held postdoctoral positions at McGill University and the University of Leeds, and holds a doctorate in Geography.

Respondent: Professor Dominic Wilkinson (Professor of Medical Ethics, Director of Medical Ethics at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, and Consultant Neonatologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital)

Dr Binesh Hass (binesh.hass@law.ox.ac.uk)