Canada’s laws about medical assistance in dying (MAID) continue to spur debate — especially when discussing how these laws impact people with disabilities.
Last week, a coalition of disability rights organizations launched a Charter challenge arguing MAID laws discriminate against people with disabilities by making it easier for them to die than receive supports to live. This follows a Charter challenge launched in August that argues MAID laws violate the rights of people whose sole condition is a mental illness by denying them access to MAID.
The debate is not limited to Canada. The push to legalize assisted dying is also happening in the UK.
Liz Carr, a British actor best known for her role on the BBC crime drama Silent Witness, recently starred in a documentary about assisted dying and disability, Better Off Dead? In it, Carr — who uses a wheelchair due to an autoimmune disease she acquired in childhood — visits Canada to hear about how Canada’s MAID laws are impacting Canadians with disabilities.
The documentary was recently nominated for a Grierson Award for Best Science Documentary.
Carr recently visited Toronto for a screening of the film. She spoke with reporter Meagan Gillmore about why she made the documentary and what she heard from advocates for assisted dying.
MG: How long have you been advocating against assisted dying laws?
LC: I started to get political as a disabled woman in the early ‘90s, so I was just about 19 [or] 20. I kept seeing very identifiably disabled people in the media calling for assisted suicide or euthanasia.
There was a style to [these news reports]. There was a tone to them, and there was a lack of balance to them, and I would get angry.
I am in a unique position, I think, to use the passions that I have and the politics that I have to get a documentary like this made.
MG: What was the moment you realized, ‘I’m going to make a documentary about this’?
LC: In 2008, I was on a heavy-hitting news show, Newsnight. I was commenting on how the public and the media had responded to [a disabled man’s] desire to go to Switzerland to die, where it was legal, unlike in the UK.
It horrified me that nobody was questioning why a young disabled man would choose death over disability, would choose to not exist over an existence as a disabled person.
Obviously, I felt that personally. I think that began my need to change things.
In 2011, there was a documentary where Terry Pratchett, the author, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he was exploring his own views on assisted suicide and wanting that for himself. There was almost no balance in the program that was done by the BBC. … I wrote then to the head of documentaries at the BBC and said, ‘You need to do something. You need to give us a voice.’
MG: Canada figures prominently in your documentary. When did you first become aware of Canada’s MAID laws?
LC: I’m friends with activists on this issue [in Canada] and in the States. We would hear things. I get newsletters from international groups.
[I] was aware that, originally, the [Canadian] law passed and it [was] for terminally ill people, within a ‘reasonably foreseeable natural death.’
When Track 2 came in, when it became that you did not have to have a reasonably foreseeable death [to be eligible for MAID] … that’s when you would hear the stories of disabled people opting for it or feeling they had no choice but to opt for it, and doing so for reasons that were about not being able to get the support to come out of hospital, not having the home care that they needed, or the pain relief.Â
I think disabled activists who oppose these laws have said for a long time, ‘These laws are ultimately about disabled people, and it will be used to end social suffering.’ We have seen everything that we feared come true in Canada, and that’s what I wanted to focus on in the documentary.
MG: For the documentary, you spoke to politicians advocating for these laws, activists and, in one case, a MAID practitioner. What would you say is the main argument you heard from them in favour of these laws?
LC: It’s always autonomy and control.
My response would be, ‘If it’s about autonomy, then why stop at one group of people?’ We either go for everybody, [or] we go for nobody.
If it’s about autonomy and supporting people to have a clean and pain-free suicide, then that’s advocating for rational suicide, and that’s a very different issue. If that’s what [advocates for MAID] want, then they should be really clear about that.
MG: You oppose the legalization of MAID in any form in the UK. Do you think just not having the law — or changing a law that already exists, like in Canada — is enough to keep vulnerable people from dying by MAID? Or do other things in society need to change as well?
LC: For me, as long as that lack of equity between certain lives [exists] then I just don’t believe that any safeguard can protect us, and I don’t believe that any law should come in.
We are still desperately trying to hold back the tide [in the UK]. If the law comes in, we will desperately be trying for it not to be expanded.
But the logic is that once the law comes in, it will be expanded. It’s not a slippery slope. It’s a legal certainty. Because if you legislate for the rights of certain people, others are going to start demanding that right. That’s exactly what happened in Canada.
If we see this as a rights issue, then of course, other people, including disabled people, devastatingly, said, ‘I want the right to kill myself. Why do I not have this right? I’ve got more of a right to do it.’
Why do we not put our energy and our resources into ending the suffering of individuals through changing the structures in society and providing supports?
MG: You were candid in the documentary about your own life. If you were to sit down with your 12-year-old self [who said you wanted to die], what would you say to her?
LC: I was told when I was 13 that I wouldn’t live to be old. I’ve lived every single day since then expecting to die, which is now 40 years.
I would actually tell myself, ‘You are not going to die young.’ When I think about all the time I’ve spent expecting to die and worrying, I wish I hadn’t [worried so much].
At the same time, my belief that I was going to die every day has meant that I’ve lived every day. I would say, ‘You’re going to be here in 40 years, and your life will be amazing. Hang on.’
I probably would have tried to find support and a good gang, so that I could have found my tribe eight years sooner than I did.
I also think if I was with others who could have taught me and told me, ‘It’s not you. You don’t have to walk and be able to do these specific things to have a good life or to have value.’ If I’d have had people around me to do that, I think that would have been transformative.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
