[C0LLETTE]

KELLY GRANT HEALTH REPORTER
PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2019 Globe and Mail.

Physicians who object on moral grounds to providing health-care services such as assisted dying, abortion and birth control must offer their patients an “effective referral” to another doctor, Ontario’s highest court has ruled.

In a unanimous decision released Wednesday, the Court of Appeal for Ontario reaffirmed a lower court’s conclusion that it was a reasonable limit on the religious freedom of doctors to require them to connect their patients with willing providers of medical assistance-in-dying (MAID) and other contentious health services.

Vulnerable patients “seeking MAID, abortion, contraception and other aspects of sexual health care, turn to their family physicians for advice, care, and, if necessary, medical treatment or intervention,” Chief Justice George Strathy wrote.

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“Given the importance of family physicians as ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘patient navigators’ in the health care system, there is compelling evidence that patients will suffer harm in the absence of an effective referral.”

The Court of Appeal for Ontario is now the highest court in the country to have ruled on the thorny question of how the conscience rights of doctors should be balanced against the rights of patients to access publicly funded health services – a question that became more pressing after the legalization of assisted dying three years ago.

Around the time the federal law was enacted in June of 2016, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) – which licenses doctors and regulates the practice of medicine – adopted a MAID policy that made it clear that physicians who refused to provide assisted deaths were obligated to meaningfully connect their patients with doctors who would.