Editor:
Coast Hospice provides compassionate end-of-life support to all regardless of circumstances or choices. Our aim is to enhance the quality of life for those facing advancing illness, death and bereavement through skilled and compassionate support, education and advocacy.
Our service to the community over the past 30 years is testimony to these deeply held commitments. A policy that would either hasten or postpone death would be a violation of our core values and is therefore not a part of the Society’s response to the federal government’s legislation on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Our policy is intended to ensure the right of choice for our clients and for our volunteers.
In providing compassionate hospice care we do not judge how someone has lived their life. And the Society, its volunteers and directors would never seek to impose any opinion, view or policy from any government or agency about how someone “should” die – that decision is the individual’s alone to make and must be based on what they believe is best for themselves and those they love.
Each of us will have to decide how we spend the final days of our lives and over 80 per cent of Canadians agree MAiD should be an option as part of that decision.
This choice is, as it should be, a deeply private matter between an individual and their physician. Let us leave it that way.
Denis Fafard, President, Sunshine Coast Hospice Society
