Webinar: Interpreting Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Legislation

The federal government passed legislation in June 2016 that allows eligible Canadians to request medical assistance in dying. But that legislation contains many terms that continue to generate uncertainty and confusion among patients and health care providers, and require clarification, say Jocelyn Downie and Jennifer Chandler in a recent report from the Institute for Research on Public Policy. In this webinar, the authors discuss some of the interpretative difficulties posed by the current legislation in determining eligibility and the solutions they propose to bring greater clarity to the process.

Webinar

An initiative of the IRPP research program Faces of Aging

Speakers

Jocelyn Downie

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Jocelyn Downie is a member of the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Medical Assistance in Dying and a former member of the Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on End-of-Life Decision Making, the Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group on Physician-Assisted Dying and the pro bono legal team for the plaintiffs in Carter v. Canada. She is a university research professor in the faculties of law and medicine at Dalhousie University and a member of the Dalhousie Health Law Institute.

Jennifer A. Chandler

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Jennifer A. Chandler is a member of the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Medical Assistance in Dying. She holds the Bertram Loeb Research Chair and is a professor at the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa.

Moderator

France St-Hilaire

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France St-Hilaire is vice-president of research at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). She oversees the Institute’s research agenda and coordinates certain projects on economic and social policy. France has written extensively on public finance, social policy and fiscal federalism. She has also coedited 13 IRPP volumes, including Income Inequality and The Canadian Story (2016).