An indefinite pause on the expansion of MAiD

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast. The issue of medical assistance in dying and whether it should expand to include mental illness has been a political lightning rod for years. Yesterday, the Federal Justice Minister, Sean Fraser, announced the government's plan to handle that issue.

Of course, uh, the law currently, uh, excludes, uh, medical assistance in dying, uh, for, uh, people who are seeking it on the basis of, uh, mental illness alone. Uh, that exclusion is set to expire in March of this year without action. I want to share with you that the government will be tabling legislation, uh, this fall, uh, that will maintain that exclusion on an indeterminate basis.

This announcement is effectively the third time a liberal government has halted this expansion of MAID, but as you heard, this time Sean Fraser says the pause will be indefinite. At the same time, the minister announced that the government is planning to, in his words, "Open the door to allow advanced consent for MAID." This is so that people can make advance requests for MAID before their condition makes them incapable of giving consent. All of this happened on the same day as a vote on the conservative private member's bill on the issue of medical assistance in dying. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter in the Global Mail's Ottawa Bureau and has been writing about this. Steph, good morning.

Good morning, Matt.

This announcement about MAID and mental illness is not entirely expected. Explain what led the government to this point.

Yeah, so as, as in the clip everybody heard there with Mr. Fraser talking about how the, the current exclusion for MAID for mental illness expires in March. And so the government was under a clock to have some response to it. This private member's bill, however, because it would effectively do exactly that, there were a lot of questions about, well, what's the government's position then on this private member's bill? Will they ... Why not just vote for it if they're gonna go in that direction? So there was political pressure effectively being applied, um, to the justice minister and the health minister to say what is their plan and what are they going to do going forward.

Advocates for expanding MAID have long argued that to not do so is a violation of the rights of the mentally ill. We have heard that argument made in very stark terms here on this program. How did Minister Fraser explain why he and his government felt comfortable in making this decision?

He talked about h- how, um, all of the different viewpoints on a mental illness and some of the tension there,