VANCOUVER, British Columbia (LifeSiteNews) — The lawyer for one of Canada’s largest Catholic-based healthcare providers told his province’s top court that allowing euthanasia in its hospitals would go against her faith and be a “scandalous” practice against doctrine. 

Geoffrey Cowper, a lawyer for Providence Health Care, recently told B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald Skolrood that allowing the Catholic-based healthcare provider to opt out of euthanasia is in line with Catholic doctrine.

He was in court for a case in which the outcome will decide whether or not faith-based healthcare facilities will be forced to offer state-sanctioned euthanasia or “Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).”

Cowper said, “It’s our hospital. We own it, we control it, and that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“That’s not just what we’re lawfully allowed to do, that’s what the ministry commands us to do,” he added.

He noted how Providence is an “essential and integral ministry of the Church” in its model of healthcare delivery.

Cowper also said that although Providence Health Care gets public funds, it must commit to Catholic doctrine on life issues. He observed that receiving public funds does not make the hospital an actor in the government’s euthanasia program.

He said that the healthcare provider has an “institutional right” to freedom of religion in its facilities.

“The constitution recognizes Providence’s religious rights and interests, and it also reconciles the consideration of harms,” he said. “Those harms have to be balanced with the rights of religious institutions.”

The Delta Hospice Society (DHS), Canada’s foremost pro-life elderly care facility, was allowed intervenor status in the constitutional challenge, which will decide whether or not faith-based healthcare facilities will be forced to offer state-sanctioned euthanasia.

The case in which the DHS can intervene involves 34-year-old Samantha O’Neill, who was placed in Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital, where she was diagnosed in early 2022 with advanced cervical cancer. The JCCF noted that, in 2023, O’Neill said she wanted to be euthanized.

However, because the hospital is run by Providence Health Care Society, a Catholic-based community, St. Paul’s Hospital refused to euthanize O’Neill in accordance with infallible Church teaching.

O’Neill died in April 2023 while she was being transferred to another hospital that would consent to her euthanasia request.

As a consequence of the ordeal, O’Neill’s mother, Gaye, with the help of the pro-euthanasia lobby group Dying With Dignity Canada, sued “Providence Health Care Society and the Province of British Columbia, arguing that her daughter suffered needless pain and that her Charter rights to freedom of conscience and religion and to life, liberty, and security of the person had been violated,” according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF).

The woman’s family claims, as noted by the JCCF, that the refusal to offer euthanasia “on-site violated her Charter rights.”

It is expected that closing arguments for the court case will take place before the end of April.

The Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized in 2016. Canada now has the fastest-growing assisted suicide program in the world. Meanwhile, Health Canada has released a series of studies on advanced requests for assisted suicide.

Additionally, the pro-abortion Liberal government has considered stripping Canadian pro-life charities and churches of their charity tax status.