A letter from three United Nations monitors, including Gerard Quinn, the special rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, sent to the Canada’s Liberal government last week said a new euthanasia bill would have a potentially discriminatory impact on persons with disabilities and older people who are not at the end of their lives.

If adopted, the bill will violate the right of persons with disabilities to live that’s protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the letter said.

It would also “risk reinforcing (even unintentionally), ableist and ageist assumptions about the value or quality of life of persons with disabilities and older people with or without disabilities,” it continued.

Bill C-7, which passed in the House of Commons and is now being debated in the Senate, would allow Canadians to access so-called “medically assisted death” even if they’re not already facing “reasonably foreseeable” natural death.

The bill is in response to a 2019 Superior Court of Quebec ruling that found it unconstitutional to deny assisted suicide to people who aren’t already dying.

Commentator Fr. Matthew P. Schneider says the new law will push euthanasia on the disabled. “Canada has already had two particularly troublesome issues since approving ‘Medical Aid in Dying.’ First, the law was presented as assisted suicide, but 99.95% of cases were euthanasia. Second, they pointed out how killing off the sick saved millions of dollars, as if that is a good thing”.