Canada plans to make permanent in duration a rule that was supposed to expire in March: people whose sole underlying medical condition is mental illness would remain ineligible for medical assistance in dying. Justice minister Sean Fraser says legislation is coming, though he has not given a timetable. The proposal is narrower than a ban on anyone who has a mental illness.
As Leyland Cecco reports in The Guardian, the exclusion was written as temporary when Canada expanded its assisted-dying law in 2021, then extended twice. The central difficulty is not whether psychiatric suffering is real. It is how to judge whether it cannot be relieved, and who gets to make that judgment. Advocates for eligibility argue that excluding mental illness alone violates rights and access to health care; a federal challenge to the existing delay is underway.
A government committee recommended keeping the exclusion indefinitely. It also called for more equitable access to mental-health services. Those positions belong in the same conversation: restricting one path without improving the care people can actually reach leaves the underlying suffering untouched. The government has announced an intention to legislate, not enacted the new rule yet.
The article also discusses advance requests by people who may later lose the ability to consent, including those with Alzheimer’s. That is a separate legal question, not an exception to the proposed mental-illness-only exclusion.