The December briefing from the Collège des médecins du Québec describes the Groningen Protocol of the Netherlands as “an avenue worth exploring.”
For minors aged 14-18, the protocol recommends that assisted suicide be included as offered care to which the minor can consent, jointly with parental authority, provided they meet other eligibility criteria.
Canada has already expanded legal euthanasia and assisted suicide.
In 2021 Canadian lawmakers approved legislation that expanded legal euthanasia and assisted suicide to the mentally ill. The legislation is set to take effect in March 2023.
The new law was written in response to a 2019 Quebec Superior Court decision that ruled it was a human rights violation to limit assisted suicide and euthanasia to people with “reasonably foreseeable” deaths.
It will allow for a person to seek legal euthanasia or assisted suicide even if mental illness is their sole underlying condition. The change prompted debate over whether a doctor may reasonably say that patients with depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder have realistic prospects of recovery, and debate over whether they have the ability to consent to end their life.
Canada’s Catholic bishops strongly opposed the 2021 legislation.
“Our position remains unequivocal. Euthanasia and assisted suicide constitute the deliberate killing of human life in violation of God’s Commandments; they erode our shared dignity by failing to see, to accept, and accompany those suffering and dying,” Archbishop Richard Gagnon of Winnipeg, then-president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in an April 9, 2021 letter.