Legislative Background: Bill C-7: Government of Canada’s Legislative Response to the Superior Court of Québec Truchon Decision

Part V – Monitoring Regime

Proposed Data Collection Enhancements

The proposed legislation would also authorize the Minister of Health to develop additional regulations to enhance the current federal monitoring regime. This authority and the future regulations would reflect changes in the legislative regime and Canada’s experience in implementing MAID since 2016.

Specifically, it is proposed to collect certain information from practitioners who assess MAID eligibility (without yet having received a written request), from other health sector personnel who have the responsibility to conduct preliminary assessments of MAID requests for care-coordination purposes, as well as from pharmacy technicians who may provide MAID substances to medical practitioners.

Since the implementation of the federal MAID monitoring regime in 2018, it has become clear that capturing information based solely on the “written requests” for MAID, as currently set out in the law, has resulted in an incomplete picture on who is requesting MAID across the country. Various provincial and territorial MAID coordination systems have been set up to triage the intake of MAID requests, which means that some requests do not meet the written request requirement of the current legislation and are thus not reported.

The proposed modifications would address these gaps in the law, and provide a fuller understanding of the MAID landscape in Canada. Amending the federal MAID regime to include these new requirements would provide for data collection that more clearly aligns with the original intent of the 2016 MAID law, that is, to collect information on all requests for, and cases of, MAID.