Canada’s Evolving Assisted Dying Regime – A Country’s Journey from Permissive to Restrictive to Permissive Eligibility Thresholds
Professor Udo Schüklenk
Professor of Philosophy &
Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics
Queen’s University, Kingston
Honorary Professor
Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg & Wenzhou Medical University
Biography
Udo Schüklenk is Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics, and Honorary Professor at both Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (since 2008) and Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou (since 2017).
Schüklenk is the Editor in Chief of Bioethics (since 1997) and the Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of Developing World Bioethics (since 2000). He has written, edited or co-edited ten books and authored or co-authored some 100+ publications in peer reviewed journals and anthologies.
Abstract
A Canadian Supreme Court judgment in 2015 overturned as unconstitutional parts of the Criminal Code that prohibited euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide as a form of homicide. Since then the country has been on a legislative roller coaster starting from the Supreme Court judgment envisioning a permissive access regime, to restrictive legislation to increasingly permission legislation. This increasingly permissive legislation is taken by commentators as evidence that the country has been sliding down a slippery slope toward undesirable eligibility thresholds.
This talk traces the evolution of Canada’s MAiD regulatory regime. It shows that there has been no slippery slope toward an unduly permissive access regime. I will also describe how the rise of social determinants of health arguments has prominently influenced Canadian public discourse on MAiD policies and offer an ethical analysis of this type of argument.