The Law Courts building, which is home to B.C. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, in Vancouver, on Nov. 23, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
A Vancouver doctor at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of federal medical assistance in dying regulations is once again under scrutiny after a B.C. Supreme Court judge granted an injunction, suspending the request for death the woman’s own doctors denied.
The 53-year-old Alberta woman, who is not being named in court and reportedly suffers from bipolar disorder and a condition known as akathisia, had her death planned for last Sunday. But the procedure, which she pursued from a Vancouver doctor, was halted the day before by a B.C. judge who found her common-law husband and good friend had raised serious questions about “whether there should be judicial oversight” when someone chooses to die this way.
The injunction application filed last week alleges the Alberta woman could not get her own doctors to support her assisted death, so she began searching online and found Ellen Wiebe in British Columbia.
The application names Dr. Wiebe and the Willow Reproductive Health Centre she founded in 1997 as respondents, alleging Dr. Wiebe breached her statutory duty by approving medical assistance in dying (MAID) for a condition that does not qualify, while failing to review the patient’s medical history or conduct a full health assessment.
None of the allegations has been proven in court and her clinic said Dr. Wiebe was unavailable when contacted by The Globe and Mail early Thursday afternoon. A receptionist said the clinic had no comment.
The husband’s West Vancouver-based lawyer told The Globe she has not been authorized to speak to media about the case.
Justice Simon R. Coval agreed to the husband’s injunction request despite recognizing that his 30-day order imposed “a severe intrusion into [the woman’s] personal and medical autonomy.”
“I can only imagine the pain she has been experiencing and I recognize that this injunction will likely make that worse,” he said.
Justice Coval said there is an “arguable case” about whether the MAID criteria were properly applied to the woman, whom the application says was diagnosed with bipolar disorder years ago. According to the affidavit of her husband, who was also granted anonymity by the court, her mental health began worsening in the summer of 2023 starting with a manic episode that led to insomnia. Later she soon came to believe she had akathisia – an underlying feeling of horror coupled with an inability to sit still that is linked to certain types of medication.
“As I’ve said, the evidence suggests [her] situation appears to be a mental health condition or illness without a link to any physical condition and it may not only be remediable, but remediable relatively quickly,” the justice said.
The case is at least the second this year in which a judge was required to grapple with how MAID applications are approved and what rights family members have to challenge them.
In March, an Alberta judge refused to grant a father an injunction against his 27-year-old daughter’s MAID application. The daughter, who had autism and lived with her parents, argued the court does not have jurisdiction to review Alberta Health Services’ approval of her MAID application. The reasons why the woman was seeking MAID were not revealed.
In Canada, MAID is only legal for people on the basis of a physical health condition, but the law was broadened in 2021 so patients could apply even when their deaths were not “reasonably foreseeable.” This secondary group of patients make up a small percentage of MAID deaths and often involve people suffering from a chronic illness or disability but are not classified as terminal.
Applicants whose medical condition is mental illness will remain ineligible for MAID until at least March, 2027.
As of this Wednesday, Quebec became the first province in the country to approve advance MAID requests – for a medically assisted death that could take place months or even years in the future. These advance requests for MAID will be authorized for those who have a diagnosis of “a serious and incurable illness leading to incapacity to give consent to care.”
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In May, 2022, Dr. Wiebe testified before a parliamentary committee on MAID that she had assessed about 750 people and provided about 430 medically assisted deaths at that time.
Dr. Wiebe said in a BBC documentary earlier this year that she had been involved with patient files “where I find someone not eligible or eligible when another person won’t, because of the way our law is written.”
In 2019, Dr. Wiebe went public with a decision made in her favour by her regulator the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, which cleared her of any wrongdoing for entering an Orthodox Jewish nursing home in Vancouver that forbids assisted death and ending the life of an 83-year-old resident who wanted to die in his own bed.
Dr. Wiebe allegedly asked the Alberta woman to obtain and e-mail her own medical records, but, the notice of civil claim alleges, the woman’s psychiatrist said her psychiatric records were never requested.
After an online video call at the end of July, Dr. Wiebe approved the woman’s MAID request, according to the court documents. The woman didn’t have a second doctor needed to approve her application and finalize her request, so Dr. Wiebe allegedly arranged for another B.C. doctor to assess her, which happened at the end of September, according to the notice of claim. (The second doctor, who is semi-retired and based in B.C.’s Gulf Islands, did not immediately respond to a Globe request for comment Thursday.)
With a report from The Canadian Press