Quebec Life Coalition

On July 16, 2009, the Globe and Mail published an article entitled “Quebec Physicians Tentatively Propose Legal Euthanasia”. In the article, Dr. Yves Robert, Secretary of the College des Médecins of Québec, stated that “Avoiding the debate contributes to the general hypocrisy around this issue. To say that [euthanasia] doesn't happen because it is illegal is completely stupid. … We have to stop hiding our head in the sand.” This led us at QLC to believe that the Collège was looking for clear, legal sanction of some forms of deliberate killing.

We therefore spoke with the source for that story, Dr. Yves Robert, who assured us that what he was talking about in the interview with the Globe was not euthanasia per se (which he refused to define) but rather a question of “appropriate care.”

I therefore hesitated to write this article, given the conversation I had with Dr. Robert, and given that Dr. Robert emphasized that the opinion expressed both in the Globe and Mail article and to me was absolutely NOT the official stance of the Collège, which would only be revealed in a report coming out this October. But I decided to warn QLC readers anyway because, whether you call it “appropriate care” or something else, the deliberate killing of an innocent human being is wrong, whatever the circumstances (someone with a terminal illness dying from too much pain-killer isn’t deliberately killed if the intention was to diminish the pain caused by the terminal illness, and not to kill.)

And as for keeping a “tight watch” so that euthanasia or “appropriate care” will be allowed only in “certain, well-defined circumstances” (for example, as Dr. Robert himself suggested, “when the patient is terminally ill and a couple weeks –not years— away from death”) is a song we’ve all heard before, when abortion was being introduced (i.e. “abortion will only be allowed in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the health of the mother”). And we all know how that went. So this is something that we’ll continue to follow, because, barring an election, Bloc MP Francine Lalonde’s Euthanasia Bill C-384 is coming dangerously close to being passed.