People with disabilities relive nightmare as Latimer seeks pardon

Exonerating killer would be an affront to equality and justice, Heidi Janz says.

Recently, news outlets reported that Robert Latimer has submitted a letter to the federal minister of justice seeking a pardon or a new trial following his conviction for the murder of his daughter Tracy in 1993. When I heard these reports, I, like many Canadians with disabilities, felt a sickening sense of deja vu.

For many Canadians with disabilities, including me, the murder of Tracy Latimer and the overwhelming media and public support for her father was a nightmarish wake-up call, alerting us to the fact that many Canadians, if not most, considered a life with disabilities as being a life not worth living.

During Latimer’s appeal trial, I vividly remember tuning in to a CBC news magazine show on the topic and being overwhelmed with horror. For the first time, I became fully aware that, as a person with severe disabilities, I too would be viewed by many as better off dead than disabled.

Latimer’s request for a pardon means that my nightmare, and the nightmare of thousands of Canadians with disabilities, is beginning all over again. In petitioning to be pardoned, he is declaring: “I was right to kill my daughter; the law was wrong. Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) is now legal in Canada. Therefore, I should no longer continue to have to carry the stigma of being branded a convicted murderer just because MAID wasn’t a legal option when Tracy was alive. And — did I mention? — I WAS RIGHT!”

What Latimer and his lawyers appear to be overlooking is that Medical Aid in Dying still isn’t legal for minors in Canada. Or perhaps it’s not so much that they’re ignoring that fact as it is that they’re hoping to promote a reshaping of the law that will vindicate Robert Latimer.

As to the issue of stigma, it seems to me that the stigmatization we should be worrying about isn’t Robert Latimer’s, but Tracy’s, and along with her that of all Canadians with disabilities.

From the time Latimer was first arrested for killing Tracy, he portrayed his daughter as little more than a suffering bundle of flesh. And the mainstream media was quick to promote this image of Tracy. As Shafer Parker, a former journalist who covered Latimer’s murder trials, says, “Instead of the pain-wracked, non-communicative sufferer described by Latimer, the record reveals that right up until her last weekend, Tracy continued to ride the bus to the developmental centre in Wilkie five days a week, 45 minutes each way. And in the caregiver’s communication book that was permanently attached to Tracy’s wheelchair Mrs. Latimer included frequent descriptions of her as a ‘happy girl’ who, for example, was ‘all smiles’ when her cousins came for a visit. And when her younger sister Lindsay invited friends for a sleepover, she was fully involved in their hijinks. ‘Tracy was the worst girl,’ her mother wrote, ‘up at 10 to seven, laughing and vocalizing. She was really good the rest of the day.’ ”

And yet, two-and-a-half decades after Tracy Latimer was murdered by her father, some mainstream media reports about his petition for a pardon still erroneously described Tracy as a “bedridden quadriplegic.”

Finally, like many other disability-rights advocates, I am sickened and alarmed by Robert Latimer’s petition for pardon because, contrary to the claim of Latimer’s lawyer that “granting a pardon to Mr. Latimer does not detract from any value or principle,” pardoning Tracy’s killer would, in fact, signal an abandonment of the government’s commitment to equality, justice, and ending discrimination against disabled Canadians.

Being a disabled Canadian could be about to get a whole lot scarier again thanks to Robert Latimer.