Assisted dying bill: The right to die cannot be contained as Canada's experience shows - Miriam Cates

Kim Leadbeater MP and other supporters of assisted suicide have emphasised the "[v]ery strict eligibility criteria" of her Bill in initially restricting the practice to those who are terminally ill. If the Canadian experience is any indicator of what we can expect though, British assisted suicide supporters are being either naive or disingenuous.

For example, the Canadian data makes clear that, since its law was introduced, the number of people citing social and emotional concerns among their reasons for opting for MAID appears to have grown dramatically. A law that was initially focused on those with terminal conditions has now been expanded, leading to people who are not terminally ill citing "isolation or loneliness" and worries about being a "burden” as reasons for wanting to end their lives.

It is concerning that these common emotional experiences - both of which can be alleviated - are increasingly listed among the reasons why people choose MAID. According to the latest report, 22 per cent cite “isolation/loneliness” as a motivation for seeking MAID, a more than 50 per cent increase since 2019. In 2023, nearly half of the more than 15,000 Canadians who opted for MAID said they felt like a burden on family and friends, up from a third in 2019. In the first year of reporting on MAID, just 4 per cent of those opting for MAID cited “loss of independence and autonomy” among their reasons for MAID; just four years later this figure has increased thirteen-fold to 52 per cent.

When MAID was introduced in Canada, there was a requirement for death to be “reasonably foreseeable”, a clear parallel to the Leadbeater Bill, which stipulates that candidates for assisted suicide must have six or fewer months left to live. But given the difficulty medical professionals have in accurately predicting the life expectancy of terminally ill patients, there is a substantial risk that such eligibility criteria will lead to mistakes whereby those approved for assisted deaths might have far longer left than they realise. Unsurprisingly, the safeguard that death be "reasonably foreseeable" was removed in Canada in 2021.

The net effect of the loosening of MAID eligibility criteria is that thousands of Canadians end their lives every year at least partly due to factors that a sophisticated, caring society should be able to alleviate.

One of the principal arguments employed by those who support the introduction of assisted suicide here in the UK is that it will only be available for a narrow group of very sick people who have just months to live. They are being 'assisted to die', so the argument goes. Yet the evidence proves this is not the experience in Canada, a country that is culturally and legally similar to our own. It appears an inescapable reality that, once legislation has been introduced to give some people the ‘right’ to die, such a ‘right’ cannot be contained.

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.