Feds get extra month to reform assisted-dying law as bill stalls in the Commons
OTTAWA — The federal government was granted one more month Thursday to expand access to medical assistance in dying even as its efforts to do so stalled in the House of Commons.
Quebec
Superior Court Justice Martin Sheehan agreed to give the government a fourth extension — until March 26 — to bring the law into compliance with a 2019 court ruling.
The decision came just one day before the previous deadline was to expire.
The 2019 ruling struck down a provision in the law that allows assisted dying only for those whose natural deaths are “reasonably foreseeable.”
Bill C-7 is intended to bring the law into compliance with the ruling, expanding access to assisted dying to intolerably suffering individuals who are not approaching the ends of their lives.
However, the bill is stalled in the Commons, where the Conservatives refused for the third straight day Thursday to facilitate debate on a motion laying out the government’s response to amendments passed last week by the Senate.
Conservative MPs talked out the clock on the motion Tuesday and then refused the unanimous consent needed to extend the debate until midnight, despite calling last week for extended hours to allow thorough debate on the issue.
They refused unanimous consent again Wednesday to allow the Commons to sit into the night to wrap up debate on the motion.
And they refused unanimous consent again to sit Thursday night.
The Bloc Quebecois offered to give up its opposition day Thursday, an opportunity for it to set the agenda in the Commons, to allow debate on the motion to continue. The minority Liberal government decided that would be pointless, given the Conservatives’ stalling tactics.
“Conservatives have twice blocked our proposal that the House sit late to debate this important issue, despite claiming that they want extended hours,” Mark Kennedy, a spokesman for government House leader Pablo Rodriguez, said late Wednesday.
“Based on this, we now know that Conservatives will continue to obstruct, and cancelling the Bloc opposition day tomorrow will not change anything.”
The Conservatives were largely opposed to the original bill and object even more strenuously to the amended version the government is now proposing.
The bill originally would have imposed a blanket ban on assisted dying for people suffering solely from mental illnesses. The government is now proposing a twoyear time limit on that exclusion, six months longer than the time limit approved by senators.
The government has rejected another Senate amendment that would have allowed advance requests for assisted dying, as well as an amendment intended to clarify what constitutes a mental illness. It has accepted a modified version of two others.
The Bloc has said it will support the government’s response to the Senate amendments, assuring the motion’s eventual passage. But until Conservatives agree to wrap up debate, it can’t be put to a vote.
Once the motion is passed, the bill will still have to go back to the Senate for senators to decide whether to accept the verdict of the elected parliamentary cham
When two Canadians are unjustly incarcerated in China, it perhaps becomes easier to feel empathy for the entire Uighur people held hostage in remote Xinjiang.
Perhaps the suffering of the few helps puts the focus on the many. If not for our Two Michaels — career diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor — being ransomed for the past two years by China’s new “hostage diplomacy,” Canada might well have been more diplomatic and less declarative about allegations of genocide against the Uighurs.
Possibly the peril of so many Canadians living in Hong Kong has also opened our eyes. When 300,000 fellow citizens are warned by Beijing to show patriotic fidelity to the Chinese motherland, without protection from their Canadian passports, it focuses the mind.
Against that backdrop, the House of Commons passed a symbolic motion of condemnation Monday over China’s genocidal treatment of minority Uighurs, who form a Muslim majority in the Xinjiang autonomous region. They were acting on repeated accounts from human rights monitors of mass detention in ideological re-education camps, slave labour, forced sterilization, state surveillance and religious repression.
The allegations are hard to ignore, even if our own ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, closed his eyes to the realities on the ground in his old job heading McKinsey & Co. Before he joined our diplomatic service, his consulting service held a sumptuous corporate retreat in Xinjiang province, not far from where Uighurs were being detained.
Diplomacy, like consulting, sometimes takes its time. And sees what it wants to see.
Politicians, too, find their own way in their own time. Outgoing U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo issued a belated declaration of genocide only on the day before the Trump administration gave up office last month, after four years of deliberation.
It is a reflection of realpolitik that Pompeo felt too timid to attempt it earlier, for fear of antagonizing the Chinese. The new Biden administration has indicated it stands by the inherited declaration - too awkward to rescind it after being boxed in by its predecessors.
Canada’s Conservative foreign affairs critic, Michael Chong, is not so cynical a politician - he showed himself far more idealistic in leading the parliamentary campaign that culminated with Monday’s vote. But he benefited from the fact that the resolution is non-binding no change in government policy, because the Liberal cabinet abstained (though Liberal backbenchers backed it).
This isn’t the first time Canadian MPs have spoken out about genocide in Xinjiang. A Commons subcommittee on human rights made a similar declaration last fall, provoking a furious response from China then, and again this week.
What’s interesting about the stronger Canadian response over the Two Michaels is how it compares to the incarceration of
another Canadian citizen, Huseyin Celil, years before.
Celil is a Uighur activist who was arrested during a family trip to Uzbekistan in 2006 and handed over to China in 2007, where he was convicted on vague terrorism charges and sentenced to life imprisonment in a trial denounced by Canada.
When I returned from the Toronto Star’s Asia Bureau in 2005 to become a newsroom editor, I oversaw our coverage of Celil’s plight, so it feels personal to me all these years later. In truth, there wasn’t much Canada could do at the time, nor is there a great deal we can do now — either for Celil or the Two Michaels — beyond taking measures to avoid importation of products made with slave labour.
That might make us feel better, but it won’t change anything for the better. Any sanctions would amount to a rounding error for China’s unstoppable economic juggernaut.
Equally, we are powerless to restrain China’s increasingly reckless behaviour in Hong Kong, which is not a genocide but a kind of political suicide — destroying the crucible of democracy that could have acted as a transitional force as the mainland modernizes. There too, I feel a personal stake watching the fate of two aging pro-democracy activists — newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and former opposition leader Martin Lee — whom I got to know while in Hong Kong.
They both face punitive legal actions, persecution masquerading as prosecution, now that Beijing has imposed its own draconian national security laws on the supposedly autonomous former British Crown colony handed over in 1997. These two Hong Kong leaders, along with the 300,000 Canadian passport-holders living there, also make it personal.
China is an increasingly dominant force, with whom we are enmeshed economically in supply chains and trading relationships whether we like it or not — from medical masks to mining resources. We couldn’t decouple if we wanted to, nor would the rest of the world, and so we must somehow cohabit without collaborating.
Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, told our Ryerson Democracy Forum last month about his pro forma public scolding by the Chinese (after the previous genocide declaration by MPs), and the private diplomacy that continues. China under President Xi Jinping is not only different from the more modulated China of previous years, it is also dramatically different from our previous adversaries, Rae noted.
The old Soviet Union posed a military threat that camouflaged its economic weakness; by contrast, China is both a rising military and economic superpower.
Where once the world could unite against apartheid South Africa by imposing virtually global economic sanctions in the 1980s that suffocated its highly vulnerable market economy, China is impregnable by comparison.
We wield no such leverage today because Beijing dominates and dictates the terms of trade. It is not dependent on foreign borrowings, for it is in fact the world’s biggest creditor, even if it acts discreditably.
China’s might makes it invulnerable, but its pride does not leave it impervious to sustained and strategic political pressure. This week’s parliamentary resolution is a sensible first step, but won’t get us very far.
To make strides, we need to move in lockstep with other countries who share our sensibilities - and vulnerabilities - while understanding that we cannot bring an economic superpower to heel. There can be no military or even economic confrontation, but political containment - multilateral, not unilateral is the way forward.