OTTAWA -- As the federal government launches a public consultation on laws governing assisted suicide, opponents are calling any move to expand the practice proof of the slippery slope they have long predicted.

As Ottawa prepares to rewrite Canada’s euthanasia law, palliative care doctors and hospice operators are urging lawmakers to acknowledge that palliative care and medically induced death are separate and distinct things.

Ontario was home to 1,499 instances of assisted suicide last year, a 77.8-per-cent increase over 2017, according to numbers released by Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner.

OTTAWA - A Catholic psychiatrist is applauding a position paper by the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) which says the mentally ill should remain ineligible for assisted suicide even though he believes such efforts are doomed to fail.

In the year since state-sanctioned, medicalized suicide became legal on June 17, 2016, doctors have deliberately caused the death of their patients at a rate of about three a day.