Ontario’s death review committee wants to add pro-euthanasia members

(LifeSiteNews) — The committee that oversees euthanasia, or Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), is planning to expand in Ontario with new “diverse” people who hold extreme pro-euthanasia views and are “interested” in “supporting” the deadly procedure.

A recent report from the Globe and Mail noted that Ontario’s MAiD Death Review Committee (MDRC), which looks at all deaths by the procedure in the province, wants to diversify. This means that, in essence, the committee is looking to stack itself with pro-death people.

Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner says the committee will be cut in size from 16 to eight people who all hold “diverse viewpoints.” The new members will be experts “interested in supporting MAiD practice.”

The committee only began reviewing cases about two years ago and no less than two former members of the MDRC say the new committee will be less thorough with less oversight.

Removed from the language about the committee was wording that called its members “independent expert review,” and was replaced with the term “guidance to practitioners” who “support emerging MAiD practice.”

Euthanasia is the sixth-leading cause of death in Canada, but it was not listed in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.

Former committee members share concerns over new format

Dr. Dirk Huyer, Ontario’s chief coroner, said the committee “is evolving in response to the changing landscape of MAiD in Ontario and will continue to be a means of providing independent expert review of MAiD deaths to assist in evaluating public safety concerns and identify opportunities for continued broad system improvements.”

However, according to one family doctor, Ramona Coelho, who was previously on the committee, the new changes will risk the independence of the committee and possibly its credibility.

“When the MDRC is reconstituted to include only MAiD clinicians or those supportive of the practice, it will become a closed loop,” she noted.

“Oversight bodies are meant to critically evaluate systems, not align with the communities they oversee.”

Trudo Lemmen, also a former MDRC committee member and a law professor at the University of Toronto, said, “The (coroner’s) office has also justified the overhaul by citing the difficulty of managing diverse viewpoints and lack of consensus within the MDRC.”

“If diversity of perspectives is itself treated as a liability, the inevitable result will be an artificial consensus in an area where profound ethical disagreement persists,” the doctor noted.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the reality is that in Ontario deaths by euthanasia cannot include any reference to MAiD and can only list the illness, disease, or disability leading to the request.

As LifeSiteNews’ Jonathon Van Maren recently put it, “when someone is killed by a euthanasia practitioner via lethal injection in Ontario, the lethal injection is not recorded as their cause of death.”

“Instead, the cause of death is recorded as whatever the ‘MAiD assessors’ decided made the patient eligible for a lethal injection in the first place.”

MAiD has become more rampant in Canada thanks to the Liberal Party being in power. However, the Conservative Party is trying to do what it can to limit MAiD’s expansion.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Montreal Dr. Peter Blusanovics recently called on the Liberal government to support Bill C-218, a private members’ bill that will stop a planned expansion of euthanasia to those with mental illness in Canada.

The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and current Prime Minister Mark Carney, however, has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized in 2016. Canada now has the fastest-growing assisted-suicide program in the world. Meanwhile, Health Canada released a series of studies on advanced requests for assisted suicide.