Medicine Forgets Its Vocation: Alberta Places Guardrails

When hospital chaplains find themselves counselling traumatized healthcare professionals, something has gone badly wrong with the practice of medicine.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. Across Canada, healthcare workers are reporting moral distress at levels unprecedented in the history of the profession. The source of that distress is not overwork alone — though the pandemic made that worse — but something deeper: a growing sense that the profession itself has lost its way.

The Expansion of MAID

At the centre of this crisis is Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) regime. Since its introduction in 2016, MAID has expanded rapidly — both in the number of deaths and in the categories of people eligible. What began as a narrow exception for those at the very end of life has become, in practice, an increasingly routine part of Canadian healthcare.

The statistics are stark. In 2022, MAID accounted for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada — a figure that has risen every year since the law was enacted. The trajectory is clear, and it raises profound questions about what medicine is for.

Alberta's Response

In this context, Alberta's decision to place guardrails on the practice of MAID deserves serious attention. The province has moved to ensure conscience protections for healthcare workers, to require more rigorous assessment processes, and to invest in palliative care as a genuine alternative.

These are not radical measures. They are, in fact, a return to basic principles that the medical profession once took for granted: that the physician's primary obligation is to heal, to comfort, and — when healing is no longer possible — to accompany the patient with dignity through the end of life.

The question is not whether we can end suffering by ending life. The question is whether a society that does so can still call itself civilized.

Medicine as Vocation

The Catholic tradition has always understood medicine as a vocation — not merely a profession, but a calling. The physician stands in a relationship of trust with the patient that is, at its deepest level, a form of service. When that relationship is distorted — when the doctor becomes an agent of death rather than a servant of life — something essential is lost.

Alberta's guardrails are a step in the right direction. But they are only a step. The deeper work — of recovering a vision of medicine as vocation, of rebuilding a culture of life within our healthcare institutions — will require sustained effort from Catholics and all people of good will.

The chaplains counselling traumatized healthcare workers know this. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to listen.