A bill on palliative care in Ontario, Canada, has been called a good first step, but Catholic Church leaders and medical experts insist more is needed.

While hospitals administering assisted suicide (MAiD, Medical Assistance in Dying) are fully funded, hospices have to raise 50 per cent of their operating funds in bake sales and fundraising drives, said Canadian Hospice and Palliative Care Association executive director Sharon Baxter.

Their demands include full funding, concrete plans for minimum standards of care and political will to see that all Ontarians have a realistic chance to choose palliative care well before they’re staring death in the face.

“The bill is good. It’s a good start,” said Toronto’s archbishop, Cardinal Thomas Collins.

But, without funding commitments and a pipeline in place to ensure qualified palliative-care specialists among physicians, social workers and nurses, a framework alone won’t actually deliver more palliative care, Collins said.

He also decried the lack of protections in law for conscientious objectors.

“I am really concerned that people — nurses, doctors, medical students as they’re going through their medical training — are very often put under considerable pressure,” the cardinal said.