Thank you for the invitation to stand before this committee.
My name is Dr. Timothy Ehmann, and I have been practising child and adolescent psychiatry for 10 years in a variety of in-patient, outpatient, academic and community settings.
I would like to begin my testimony by stating categorically that to extend the current MAID regime to minors—mature or otherwise—is negligent and irresponsible.
This debate began shortly after I began practice and has been like a dark cloud looming over my early career. I have followed as the Government of Canada has forged ahead despite many warnings to desist. I am adding my voice to say that it would be wise for the government to proceed no further down this dark path.
The proposition that death is a legitimate treatment for any form of suffering is false.
The proposition that the physician community can reliably assess the competence and capacity of minors to consent to death is false. It is not supported by any available research on the subject. Any physician who peddles this message is doing little more than saying, “Trust me; I'm a doctor.”
There does not exist any standardized, reliable and valid assessment for determining the capacity and competence of minors. Research has demonstrated that unaided competence judgments, even from seasoned and otherwise skilled physicians, are unreliable. In a routine medical practice, children are oftentimes incompletely informed, and the communication between an adult physician and child is oftentimes flawed.
There are many systemic influences on a child's decision-making. No decision is made free from influence. This raises the important question of how to evaluate precisely how free the child is in any decision. One new systemic influence just might be the cultural shift that the Government of Canada is propagating, which is moving our society increasingly towards a culture of despair.
The government messaging that it will offer death as a solution to life's suffering is suicide inducement. We are well aware of the phenomenon of suicide clustering in youth, such as on reserves, and that messages of despair increase suicide rates.
It is a difficult time to be a child in Canada.
MAID is not an evidence-based medical practice. As such, compelling physicians to adopt this practice through law sullies and undermines the integrity of the medical profession. Canadian physicians have been trained to practice modern, evidence-based medicine directed by scientific fact, not postmodern, ideologically-based medicine directed by political authorities.
MAID is an experimental practice without pre-existing safety data, adverse outcomes reporting, or adequate safeguards and accountability. The Government of Canada needs to hold itself to the same level of accountability and standard as it would hold any pharmaceutical company before a new drug or treatment is introduced to the Canadian population. We do not subject children to high-risk experiments.
Minors are a categorically vulnerable population. Postmodern philosophies that postulate that to exclude vulnerable populations from their right to death is to discriminate against them are shallow and dangerous. Legislation that is undergirded by these philosophies is a risk to our children.
The Canadian government and its representatives are conducting themselves paternalistically with regard to the MAID regime.
Organizations representing disadvantaged and vulnerable groups within our society that have presented evidence to this committee have been disregarded. These representative groups have asked for either safeguards or exclusion from eligibility for MAID for their communities and been denied such. The Government of Canada has effectively communicated to these groups that the government knows better what is in their interests than these vulnerable populations themselves do.
In modern society, with modern medicine and scientific advances, the need to kill a child does not exist. Why then the Canadian government's headlong rush to open up the MAID regime to minors?
Thank you.