Weighing the costs of euthanasia in dignity, dollars

Some reports suggest that euthanasia is already practiced in Québec, and this week's public hearings in the province could be the first step to decriminalizing the practice in the rest of the country.

This week public hearings on euthanasia began in Québec, reigniting the debate over assisted suicide that will only become more important as our population ages. Several countries in Europe have already decriminalized euthanasia, but what are the implications for Canada?

If euthanasia does become decriminalized, writes Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star, it will be only the latest progressive social cause that Québec has been at the forefront of, following its role in the legalization of abortion and gay marriage. The current hearings won’t change euthanasia laws (that’s Ottawa’s job), but it’s precisely because the hearings are “mandated to explore territory that is outside the legislative purview of a provincial government” that they have a chance to make progress, and “by embracing an emotionally divisive issue that most other Canadian legislators would not touch with a ten-foot pole, Quebec’s elected officials” are showing real leadership.

Despite a growing consensus in Québec that supports euthanasia, the Montreal Gazette says it’s the “wrong solution.” An editorial in today's paper states, “we suspect that lurking behind this debate, perhaps even below the conscious level, is awareness of the steadily-growing cost of end-of-life medical care.” But is cutting costs as the baby boomer generation ages “a reason to authorize MDs to become … ‘society's executioners’?” There are “real alternatives to euthanasia” that include better pain management and improving the health care system to ensure all patients live their final days with dignity.

Part of that solution could involve moving many of the ailing patients currently crowding our hospital beds into long-term care facilities or allowing them to live at home, as advocated in an Ottawa Citizen editorial. “Using hospitals as human warehouses is good neither for the hospitals” nor ageing patients, and while “home care is indeed not without its problems,” which include major stress for families and caregivers, Ottawa should look into it as a way to give dignity to the final days of elderly patients as well as free up desperately needed hospital beds for younger patients.