— Unlike Belgium and the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal for two decades, Canada doesn’t have monthly commissions to review potentially troubling cases, although it does publish yearly reports of euthanasia trends.
— Canada is the only country that allows nurse practitioners, not just doctors, to end patients’ lives. Medical authorities in its two largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, explicitly instruct doctors not to indicate on death certificates if people died from euthanasia.
— Belgian doctors are advised to avoid mentioning euthanasia to patients since it could be misinterpreted as medical advice. The Australian state of Victoria forbids doctors from raising euthanasia with patients. There are no such restrictions in Canada. The association of Canadian health professionals who provide euthanasia tells physicians and nurses to inform patients if they might qualify to be killed, as one of their possible “clinical care options.”
— Canadian patients are not required to have exhausted all treatment alternatives before seeking euthanasia, as is the case in Belgium and the Netherlands.
The comparison to abortion is instructive here. Canada is famously the only country in the world with no legal abortion restrictions whatsoever. In practice, this works because medical boards have their own non-legislative restrictions and in practice difficult cases are outsourced to the United States. As is often the case in Canada, the politically efficacious solution is to not talk about it.
That seems to be what is happening here, too. The unstated assumption is that rather than using the political process to work out the sort of restrictions and regulations on euthanasia that exist in other countries, Canadian politicians can leave the tough decisions to non-political actors. Most Americans (and, I would imagine, most people in general) would find this abhorrent, but it does mean that nobody in particular can be held accountable and this never becomes an issue in the Canadian media.
