Final Senate vote on assisted dying bill set for Feb. 17, days before court deadline
Senators have agreed to put a bill to expand access to medical assistance in dying to a final vote by Feb. 17, but they’ve signalled their intention to propose substantial amendments.
The agreed date for the vote will leave just over a week for the House of Commons to deal with any amendments approved by the Senate before a thriceextended, court-imposed deadline of Feb. 26.
It’s a tight timetable that could yet make it impossible to meet the court deadline.
Senators, who began final debate Monday, will begin dealing with the amendments to Bill C-7 on Tuesday.
An amended version of the bill would have to go back to the House of Commons for MPs to decide whether to accept or reject the amendments before shipping it back to the Senate, where senators would have to decide whether to approve the bill even if some or all of their amendments were rejected.
In theory, the bill could bounce repeatedly back and forth between chambers.
The bill is intended to bring the law into compliance with a 2019 Quebec Superior Court ruling that struck down a provision allowing assisted dying only for those whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”
It scraps that provision but retains the foreseeable death concept to set up two sets of rules for eligibility: more relaxed rules for those who are near death and more stringent rules for those who are not.
It would also expressly prohibit assisted dying for individuals who are suffering solely from mental illnesses.
Sen. Marc Gold, the government’s representative in the Senate, acknowledged that some senators think the bill goes too far, while others think it doesn’t go far enough. But he said, to his mind, that divergence of opinion demonstrates that the bill has struck the right balance.
“The bottom line is that it is a reasonable, prudent proposal that achieves a complex balancing of rights ... Bill C-7 is neither too hot, nor too cold, but just the right temperature,” Gold said during Monday’s debate.
Gold further suggested that unelected senators should be cautious about tinkering with the bill, noting it was supported by two-thirds of elected MPs from all parties in the House of Commons, giving it “a strong democratic stamp of approval.”
But Sen. Pierre Dalphond, a former judge who sits in the Progressive Senate Group, argued that the exclusion of those suffering solely from mental illnesses is unconstitutional, violating their right to equal treatment under the law regardless of physical or mental disability.
Dalphond said he believes it’s reasonable to propose a sunset clause to put a time limit on that exclusion, giving the government time to come up with guidelines for providing assisted dying to people with mental illnesses.
And he said he’ll introduce another amendment to specify that the ill-defined concept of mental illness does not include neuro-congnitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s.
There is support among senators for referring the bill to the Supreme Court for advice on its constitutionality, both from those who think it’s too restrictive and those who think it’s too permissive.