When the doctors convene in Calgary Aug. 18-21 a key issue will be end-of-life care during a strategy session on palliative medicine and physician-assisted dying. But the difference between the CMA and Parliament is that, while the CMA can set internal policies and make recommendations, it cannot pass law. Still, Canada’s doctors represent a powerful voice that matters.

On end-of-life issues, Canada’s doctors have consistently and prudently rejected assisted suicide and euthanasia. To do otherwise, the CMA concluded in a 2007 policy statement, would require “a fundamental reconsideration of traditional medical ethics.”

Those ethics have not changed over the years but Canada’s social landscape is ever-moving. That is particularly true in Quebec. There, legislators are considering a law to outflank the Criminal Code — which classifies euthanasia and assisted suicide as criminal offences — by wrapping euthanasia in the cloak of health care. Bill-52 would absolve doctors of an obligation to provide care until a patient’s natural death and instead let them give lethal injections to consenting, terminally ill patients who meet certain criteria.

With a vote in Quebec looming this fall, the CMA has a timely opportunity to use its “parliament” to send an unequivocal message to its members, the public and governments. The message should again state clearly CMA opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide. It should also reaffirm a call to expand palliative-care services that, today, are accessible to less than one-third of Canadians.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are the antithesis of health care. Canada’s doctors have consistently and admirably embraced that position even as the din continues to rise in many Western nations from those insisting patients have a right to demand death and that it should be delivered by doctors.

But even though most doctors oppose change, a recent CMA survey showed that, should death by doctor become legal, 25.8 per cent of Canadian doctors would be “very or somewhat likely” to help a patient commit suicide. That is still a significant minority (compared to 54 per cent holding the opposite view) but it represents almost 20,000 doctors who, in their own minds, have already made the “fundamental reconsideration of traditional medical ethics.” And that is alarming.

Among the ethical principles governing Canadian doctors is a pledge to provide patients with physical comfort and spiritual support even after hope is lost for recovery. Doctor-assisted death would be a head-on collision with that fundamental value. So far, Canadian doctors have steered clear of the danger and, hopefully, they’ll do so again.