As the Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Australia and New Zealand, and Vice-President of the Conservative Friends of CANZUK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom), there are few matters I’m more passionate about than our relationships with these great countries. I am a staunch advocate of strengthening our ties with our Commonwealth cousins and have also supported proposals for a CANZUK alliance of nations to boost trade and cooperation.
I am of the view that, as four countries, we should learn from each other. More often than not, that will involve the transference of best practice between our countries. Certainly, I have long felt there is much we Brits can learn from our Commonwealth cousins. However, sometimes, we also need to learn from each other’s mistakes. The UK has made many such mistakes over the years, and frankly, over the past two decades or so, there are perhaps too many to list. Right now though, it is these three Commonwealth nations who have made a serious mistake by making assisted suicide and euthanasia legal. We Brits need to learn from these mistakes and not proceed down the same path.
There has been much coverage in the UK of Canada’s experience with such laws. Canada was the first of the CANZUK countries to introduce these laws, and they have by far the most experience with them. When Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) — the Canadian euphemism for assisted suicide and euthanasia — was introduced in 2016, it seems the intention was for it to apply to a reasonably narrow group of people with a terminal diagnosis. However, since the introduction of these laws, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people opting for MAID every year, and the eligibility criteria have been widened.
The latest figures, published in the Fifth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2023, showed that nearly one in twenty deaths in Canada now come about as a result of MAID.
Since the introduction of MAID in 2016, the eligibility criteria have expanded so that the natural death of those applying for euthanasia or assisted suicide need no longer be “reasonably foreseeable”. This has led to a situation in which almost half (47.1 per cent) of people who end their lives via MAID whose death is not reasonably foreseeable cite “isolation or loneliness” as reasons why they opt for MAID. In 2023, nearly half of the more than 15,000 Canadians who opted for MAID cited feeling like a burden on family and friends as a reason for going ahead with MAID. This is up from a third in 2019.
We are considering introducing our own flawed assisted suicide laws at a time when disability benefits are being cut
A statistic in the Fifth Annual Report that really worried me was the proportion of those who opted for MAID citing “Loss of independence” as a reason. In the first year of reporting (2019), only 4.1 per cent cited “Loss of control/autonomy/independence”, but this figure has now ballooned to 52 per cent. It worries me that many disabled people, who often do not get the support they need, will likely fall into this category. Some may feel like life is not worth living as a consequence of inadequate support in helping them to live, whether that is insufficient disability benefits or inadequate adaptations to their home to help them to be independent.
The parallels to the debate here, where we are considering introducing our own flawed assisted suicide laws at a time when disability benefits are being cut, is very clear.
Given the bleak picture which assisted dying in Canada paints for the legalisation campaign, Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of the assisted suicide Bill currently before Parliament, has wisely sought to avoid talking about the Canadian experience. She has, however, referenced the Australian experience more regularly. Indeed, of the eight international witnesses who appeared at her Bill Committee’s oral evidence sessions in January, six were from Australian states that had only recently introduced such laws. Each of the six Australian states that introduced such laws has far less experience with them than Canada does. The data available on how things have gone in each of these six Australian states is, therefore, extremely limited.
Interestingly, all of the six states in question have introduced euthanasia as an option alongside assisted suicide meaning that the Bill that Leadbeater is introducing is therefore substantially different. This raises further questions about quite why there was such a focus on Australian states when it came to the oral evidence sessions.
Professor David Albert Jones has produced a report that probes what has happened in Australia to date, not an easy task bearing in mind the paucity of relevant data. However, what the report does establish is that even at this early stage there are worrying signs that a “slippery slope” is beginning to take effect. Professor Jones states that the operation of the assisted dying law in the Australian states is beginning to more closely resemble Canada than Oregon, which has a more restrictive system that Leadbeater herself has cited in the past. As Professor Jones states:
I hope this report will open people’s eyes as to just how quickly safeguards have been eroded or abandoned in Australia. Rather than an example of the law working well it is an example of what happens when you prioritise access over safety. The practice of Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) in Australia is rapidly coming to resemble Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada.
Finally, there is New Zealand, whose law has perhaps received the least coverage over here out of the three countries in question. But, as in Canada and Australia, there are worrying signs. There have already been irregularities with a member of the inaugural “End Of Life Review Committee” resigning due to their inability to get hold of adequate information to review the operation of the law. There are also indications that the uptake of assisted dying has been higher in rural parts of New Zealand, where access to first-class palliative care is far more patchy, fuelling concerns that assisted dying becomes an alternative to receiving proper end-of-life care.
The time has come for my parliamentary colleagues to learn from three of our closest Commonwealth cousins when it comes to this life-and-death issue of grave significance. The lessons are evident in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and, in each case, they are deeply concerning. If MPs heed these lessons, they will reject Kim Leadbeater’s Bill at the next opportunity.
