Marie Laberge is a popular Quebec author whose books depicting the inner lives of women fly off the shelves in her home province. Over her four-decade-long career, she has demonstrated an uncanny knack for capturing the distinct society’s zeitgeist.
Ms. Laberge’s latest novel, Dix jours (Ten Days), chronicles the final days of a woman as she prepares to receive medical assistance in dying (MAID), reflecting on her end-of-life choice and tending to the unfinished business of her affective relationships.
“I will come like a thief,” the novel’s narrator recalls hearing while growing up in devoutly Catholic, pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec. That Book of Revelation verse also says, “You will not know at what hour I will come against you.” The narrator in Ms. Laberge’s book muses that “we have found a way to divert God’s plans.”
It is no surprise that a province that has wholly rejected the Catholic diktats would embrace MAID. Quebeckers may still practice a form of cultural Catholicism, owing to their nostalgia for Church traditions, but they long ago ditched the dogma. From euthanasia to abortion, Quebeckers do not buy the Vatican’s definition of a sin.
Still, it is striking just how mainstream MAID has become in Quebec. An April Léger poll found that 86 per cent of Quebeckers were in favour of MAID – including 62 per cent who “strongly” supported it. In other provinces, support for MAID hovered in the mid-70s, but much lower proportions were “strongly” in favour of the procedure.
According to Health Canada, MAID accounted for 6.6 per cent of all deaths in the province in 2022, compared to 4.1 per cent nationally. British Columbia, at 5.5 per cent, was the only province that came close to Quebec in MAID deaths. The rate in Ontario was just 3.2 per cent. Everywhere else, it was below 3 per cent.
Official figures for 2023 are not yet available, but all signs suggest that MAID deaths surpassed 7 per cent in Quebec last year, making the province a world leader in the procedure, with a greater proportion of MAID deaths than even European euthanasia pioneers such as the Netherlands and Belgium.
The Commission sur les soins de fin de vie, the body that oversees MAID in Quebec, projects the proportion will rise further as the province moves to allow advance requests for MAID by people diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disorder.
Indeed, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government continues to dither over whether to allow people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia to make a prior request for MAID, Quebec will allow such requests as of Oct. 30. Advance requests would technically violate the Criminal Code. But Quebec says it is tired of waiting for the rest of Canada to catch up with it on MAID.
“It shows that we are a distinct society and that, unfortunately, the Trudeau government, Mr. Trudeau, once again lacks sensitivity toward a Quebec consensus,” Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette said last month in clearing the way for advance MAID requests. His move was widely praised across the province.
Mr. Jolin-Barrette has directed the province’s public prosecution service, Le Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales, to refrain from laying charges against MAID practitioners who administer the procedure to a person who has made an advance request. Under federal law, a MAID recipient must provide consent immediately before receiving a lethal injection. Quebec’s legislation waives that requirement in the case of advance requests.
Quebec has led the way on MAID in Canada from the start. It was the first province to adopt legislation to allow the procedure in 2014, even before the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the Criminal Code ban on assisted suicide in 2015.
Ottawa legalized MAID in 2016. But a 2019 Quebec Superior Court ruling struck down the section of the initial federal law that said only those whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” could be eligible for MAID. The Quebec court also opened the door to MAID for people suffering from mental illness. But Ottawa has since twice postponed the expansion of MAID for the mentally ill, most recently until 2027.
Quebec might not wait.
MAID has come to be considered a basic service in Quebec’s publicly funded health care system. That the shambolic state of that system may lead some Quebeckers to request MAID rather than face subpar care in rundown hospitals should be concerning enough to warrant inquiry. The recent case of a disabled Saint-Jérôme, Que., man who received MAID after the bed sores he developed after spending four days on an ER stretcher became fatally infected should be cause for serious concern.
Still, there is no denying that Quebeckers’ attitudes toward MAID are distinct in Canada, providing continuing proof that the province’s moral pendulum has continued to swing far in the opposite direction since the Quiet Revolution.