Canada’s euthanasia regime was set in motion by judicial fiat, not democratically elected legislatures. Just over 10 years later, it is fitting legislatures are reclaiming their rightful role and having their say. Since the Supreme Court of Canada read a right to death into the Charter’s guarantee of ‘life, liberty, and security of the person’, Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide regime has grown to be one of the most permissive in the world. It is now the 5th leading cause of death, with the cumulative total set to surpass a world-leading 100,000 this year.

The regime is governed by vague terminology, including concepts like ‘reasonably foreseeable death,’ that are not clinical terms and cannot be applied with real precision. Combined with expansive eligibility criteria and weak safeguards, it puts vulnerable people at risk and tilts the system toward expedient death over the proper care and treatment that can demonstrably alleviate suffering.

Alberta’s bill is therefore an important and necessary corrective. No one should be eligible for euthanasia when death is not reasonably foreseeable. This standard wrongly treats pain and suffering as fixed and unchangeable, rather than realities that can be alleviated through proper medical, psychological, social and spiritual care.

The bill also rightly rejects advance requests and maintains the exclusion for mental illness as a sole underlying condition – areas where true consent, and sound judgment are necessarily fraught. Importantly, it introduces meaningful safeguards so that vulnerable people are not steered toward death as part of routine care, whether through unsolicited MAiD discussions, or the advertising of MAiD in health settings.

Medicine is not about the provision of death, but of health and healing. The bill properly protects healthcare workers and institutions that understand medicine to be in the service of life and healing in line with its venerable origins in the Hippocratic oath to ‘do no harm.’

This is an important bill, and it will help shift the national conversation. I am very proud to say that Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow Ramona Coelho was instrumental in its development and drafting.

Thanks to her and Premier Danielle Smith, Minister Mickey Amery, Danielle Hartung, Keith Pridgen and doubtless many more for such important legislation. May other provinces, and the federal government follow their lead.

The full press release is here