The Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying tabled its report on June 24, recommending that the government indefinitely exclude persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness from eligibility for medical assistance in dying. The committee heard 44 witnesses and reached a single recommendation: don't proceed with expanding MAID to mental illness.
Critics want courts to decide
The Globe and Mail's André Picard criticized the committee's 'can't do' spirit and suggested the minister should refer the question to the Supreme Court, arguing judges 'actually make reasoned decisions. Something our politicians seem to struggle with mightily.' Senator Kristopher Wells agreed, posting that 'Picard is right again. There was no consensus and the final report and recommendation have no credibility.'
Both Picard and Wells were on the committee. Wells, an activist and academic appointed to the Senate by Justin Trudeau in 2024, joined three other senators in a dissent asking the government to skip legislation and put the question straight to the Supreme Court. The Bloc Québécois wants the same thing.
Courts have shaped MAID law
Canada's assisted-dying law has been written by courts from the start. The Supreme Court struck down the old prohibition in Carter in 2015, overturning its own earlier ruling. Parliament responded with Bill C-14, a limited regime offering MAID only to those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable. That limit lasted three years until a single Quebec Superior Court judge undid it in Truchon in 2019. Ottawa did not appeal and instead rewrote the law as Bill C-7, opening the broader Track 2 for non-terminal suffering.
The government's own lawyers told the MAID committee that both permitting and prohibiting assisted suicide for mental illness can conform to the Charter, and Carter expressly did not decide the mental-illness case. No constitutional wrong cries out for correction; this is a question on which Parliament has a free hand.
Democracy vs. judicial override
Picard's complaint is that politicians cannot reason and judges can, so reasoning should be handed to judges. A certain kind of progressive has made peace with that arrangement: the hardest moral questions are too weighty to be left to voters and safer with clever lawyers who do not answer to them. On this view, the Charter stops being a set of limits on government and becomes a standing invitation for judges to do the governing instead.
The committee's recommendation was a democratic decision: 17 members heard evidence and reached a conclusion. The complaint from Picard and Wells is not that Parliament could not decide—it decided—but that it decided the wrong way. Their cure is to give the question to nine unelected judges who might decide differently.
