OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he won’t take a position yet on whether people with only a mental illness should be able to access assisted dying.
“I like to take informed positions and I’ll wait for the report,” he said before a meeting of the Liberal caucus on Parliament Hill.
A parliamentary committee of senators and MPs is studying whether the country is ready to expand medical assistance in dying, or MAID, to people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness.
That extension is set to happen in March 2027, after it was delayed more than once by the previous Liberal government.
The committee has heard testimony from psychiatrists, physicians and legal experts, a majority of whom say Canada should not go ahead with MAID for mental illness.
At issue for many is a concern about assessing irremediability, or whether a person who is suffering from a mental illness can improve — a key condition on which a person would be assessed for an assisted death.
Dr. Sanjeev Sockalingam, chief medical officer at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, testified at the committee on April 28 and said the institution remains concerned about the planned extension. He said “there are currently no established criteria or consensus among psychiatrists for if — or when — a mental illness should be considered irremediable.”
On Tuesday, the committee heard from a panel of experts from the Netherlands, where MAID is legal for people with psychiatric conditions.
Dr. Jim van Os, a psychiatry professor at the University of Utrecht, said that the Dutch experience offers “a warning for Canada” and that euthanasia for mental conditions cannot be cleanly separated from suicide.
He also said requests from people under the age of 30 have grown in recent years.
“Under Dutch law, physicians must agree that there are no reasonable options. Euthanasia is, in principle, the very last resort,” he said.
“Canadian law does not work this way. In Canada, patient choice trumps the physician’s professional judgment, so a doctor cannot insist that other options be tried first.”
Another Dutch psychiatrist on the panel, Dr. Sisco van Veen, said he believes MAID for terminal illness is “a way to prevent a terrible death,” while MAID for a chronic illness “can be seen as a way to end a terrible life.” He said he believes Canada’s system makes the distinction between those two better than the Dutch system.
Canada legalized medical assistance in dying in 2016 after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down sections of the Criminal Code that made it illegal to help someone end their life.
In 2021, the Liberal government passed a new law in response to a ruling in Quebec Superior Court that found it was unconstitutional to restrict assisted dying to people whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable, or those with a terminal illness.
The expanded law for people with irremediable suffering included a clause that would allow people suffering solely from a mental disorder to be considered for an assisted death, provided they meet a stringent set of eligibility criteria.
Mental health professionals and provinces raised concerns about the complicated nature of those assessments. Ottawa decided to delay the extension to give provincial health systems and health care workers time to prepare.
A special joint committee on MAID presented a report to Parliament in 2024 that concluded Canada was not ready to include mental disorders as a sole underlying condition.
The current committee is supposed to assess whether that has changed.
Committee member and Conservative MP Michael Cooper said the evidence is very clear that the extension should not happen.
“The same issues remain unresolved. They’re going to be unresolved for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Cooper said the government should indefinitely delay the extension.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser said it would be premature to say whether he’s prepared to delay the extension once again, before the committee has written its report.
“My own view is that as time moves forward, the circumstances change, the system’s readiness changes, the perspective of different witnesses who’ve now seen more experiences with medical assistance in dying over time has changed,” he said.
Some members of the committee and a legal expert who was a witness early in the study have raised concerns that its work is biased. Jocelyn Downie, a law professor at Dalhousie University, told The Canadian Press the committee is hearing mostly from people opposed to the extension, and has not heard from people with lived experience with mental illness who would like to access MAID.
Experts do agree that the issue is likely headed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Advocacy group Dying With Dignity Canada filed a Charter challenge in 2024, arguing that the exclusion of people with mental illness as a sole underlying condition breaches their rights. The woman at the centre of that case, Claire Elyse Brosseau, applied to an Ontario court this week for an emergency exemption that would allow her to seek MAID.
The 49-year-old said she is enduring unrelenting daily suffering as a result of severe bipolar disorder and post traumatic stress disorder.
Liberal MP Greg Fergus, who recently joined the committee, said he hopes its final report will be done before the summer. Parliament is set to break for the summer in June.
“Do I expect everybody to be a part of it to be unanimous? No,” he said, adding he does think the majority of the committee will agree on its conclusions.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 6, 2026.
Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press
