From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

“When a person is standing on the edge, the role of a responsible nation is to pull them back.”

Conservative MP Tamara Jansen’s Bill C-218—the “Right to Recover Act”—was debated in Parliament on Friday. The legislation would ban euthanasia for those suffering solely from a mental illness, which was legalized in 2021 with the Trudeau government’s Bill C-7, but subsequently delayed. It is set to come into effect in 2027, pending a parliamentary report.

Tamara Jansen led with a passionate and powerful speech highlighting the desperate need for Bill C-218; Conservative MP Andrew Lawton gave a supporting speech in which he shared his own experience with a nearly successful suicide attempt. Two Liberal MPs and a member of the Bloc Quebecois pushed back in support of euthanasia for mental illness.

Jansen moved that Bill C-218 be read the second time and referred to committee, and asked her fellow parliamentarians to imagine someone’s son, in his forties, struggling with a painful illness and struggling with addiction, depression, and anxiety. He is supported by his family, she said, and they are doing their best but struggling. When he finally gets a psychiatrist appointment, he hopes he might finally get real help.

“He is vulnerable, scared and hanging on by a thread,” Jansen said. “At that appointment, instead of being offered a plan to get him stable, MAID is raised as an option. The assessment moves ahead, and before he ever receives proper support for his mental health or addictions, he is approved. His MAID provider is the one who drives him to the place where his life is ended. This is someone’s son who needed help, not a final exit.”

“Believe it or not, this actually happened here in Canada, and this is where we are headed if we do not act,” she emphasized. “Unless this Parliament chooses a different path, Canada will allow MAID for people whose only condition is mental illness. That means men and women struggling with depression, trauma or overwhelming psychological pain could be steered toward death by a system that too often cannot offer timely treatment, consistent follow-up or even basic support.”

Jansen noted that when Parliament last debated assisted suicide, mental illness was not included in the core discussion—but that it was added “in a last-minute Senate amendment to Bill C-7.” Since then, Canadians from all walks of life have spoken clearly against this dangerous expansion. “Psychiatrists across Canada, including the chairs of psychiatry at all 17 medical schools, have told us plainly that there is no reliable way to predict when a mental illness is irremediable, which is a requirement in the MAID law,” she reminded her colleagues.

READ: Canadian broadcaster’s positive coverage of disability advocate’s euthanasia sends terrible message

“We must ask: who receives suicide prevention and who is guided toward MAID?” she asked. “If a person suffering from depression calls a crisis line tonight, do we encourage them to hold on or do we quietly redirect them to an assessor? What principle decides the answer? What medical test? What ethical standard? There is none. That is because the very feelings that drive someone to seek MAID, hopelessness, despair or the belief that they are a burden, are the same signals that every suicide prevention worker is trained to treat as a cry for help.”

Jansen also noted that Canada’s planned expansion has been condemned in the international community. “International human rights experts have raised the alarm, including the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which has urged Canada to step back. It warns that our trajectory risks discriminating against people with disabilities and mental illness and recommends repealing this expansion entirely. This is what Bill C-218 would do.” She cited several heartbreaking examples from Ontario’s MAID death review committee findings:

They describe a man who had cancer. I will call him Bill. Earlier in his illness, he had briefly mentioned MAID, as frightened patients tend to do. By the time he was assessed, he was delirious, confused and heavily sedated. His own medical team made it clear that he no longer had the capacity to make major decisions, yet a MAID assessor shook him awake, took the faint motion of lips as consent, withheld sedation, obtained a rushed virtual second opinion and ended his life that same day. Bill was not stable. Bill was not capable. He did not understand what was happening.

Alana Hirtle, the Liberal MP for the Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester, responded by attempting to divert from the issue. She told Jansen that her father died by assisted suicide in August 2024, after suffering from “four different types of cancer over five years,” and stated that she “fully supported his choice” and that she “supported the process as it took place and was there throughout it.” She then asked if Jansen had voted for the “initial legislation”; Jansen told her she was not an elected MP at the time.

Claude DeBellefeuille, a Bloc Quebecois MP, then claimed that he was “stunned” by what he had heard, stating that Jansen had been misleading “by claiming that the law allows for medical assistance in dying when major mental illness is the sole underlying disorder” when the “member knows that in 2027, a joint committee of members and senators will make a decision based on the recommendations of the Department of Health.” While he did, somewhat surprisingly, agree that “the medical community is not ready and will probably not be ready in 2027,” he insisted that Jansen “has simply found a way to assert her opposition to medical assistance in dying.”

“We simply do not have the medical grounds to declare that a life is beyond hope,” Jansen responded. “We have already seen cases where people were approved for MAID not because their condition was truly irremediable but because they lacked housing, treatment or basic support. That is not medicine; that is a system misreading desperation as destiny. … When a person is standing on the edge, the role of a responsible nation is to pull them back.”

Juanita Nathan, the Liberal MP from Pickering-Brooklin, gave a speech essentially reiterating the government’s talking points. More research is needed, she said, but fundamentally the “panel concluded that the existing Criminal Code safeguards, when supported by the development of MAID practices standards and the implementation of other recommendations, are adequate to allow for safe provision of MAID to people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.”

MP Andrew Lawton recounted his own suicide attempt, in which he almost lost his life and spent seven weeks in the hospital, during which he was resuscitated multiple times and on life support. He noted that on that “horribly dark and sad December day in 2010,” he could never have imagined that he would one day be standing in the House of Commons, happily married with a successful career. It is that experience, he said, which spurs him to speak so forcefully for Bill C-218—because “if the laws that are coming into force in 15 months had been there 15 years ago, I would probably be dead right now.”

When Bill C-218 was introduced, Lawton launched the “I Got Better” campaign, inviting Canadians to share their own stories.

He shared several with the House—while a number of the Liberal MPs talked loudly with each other across the House, even laughing out loud at each other. He shared the story of an Ottawa lawyer, who feared using MAID if depression should return. He shared the story of a man who struggles with mental illness and has attempted suicide and is afraid of what he might do if MAID is available. A woman who had been in a long-term abusive relationship told him that she would have used MAID if it had been available.

Lawton detailed several other stories and reminded his colleagues of testimony they had previously heard. “Dr. John Maher testified before Parliament that 7% of those who attempt suicide die by suicide,” he said. “That means that 93% of people who, at one or multiple points, want to end their life eventually get over that. The success rate of MAID is 100%. By design, this is a policy that will give up on people.”

Lawton’s closing lines summed up the stakes. “These are real people,” he said. “There are faces to this. If Bill C-218 does not pass, people will die. We have a right and a duty to stand up for those who need it. I will be proudly supporting this bill, and I thank my colleague so much for introducing it.”

You can support Bill C-218 and submit your own story to MP Andrew Lawton here.