Feds out of touch with right-to-die law
MONTREAL— At a time when no main federal party would take the lead on medically assisted suicide, Quebec decided to step into a breach that cried for the attention of governments.
For six years, under three different premiers, the province consulted on and debated end-of-life practices. The result is a law that offers the option of medically assisted suicide to terminally ill patients. It passed on a free vote last year with the support of all four parties in the national assembly. It is scheduled to go into effect next month.
In the interval, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the Criminal Code ban on medically assisted suicide. It laid out a legislative way forward that borrows heavily from the Quebec law. The top court gave the federal government a year to decide whether, or how, to replace the current statute. The deadline is Feb. 6.
Now, a mere two weeks before the introduction of the new Quebec protocol, the federal justice department — under new Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould — has joined forces with two groups seeking a court injunction to have it put on hold.
In Quebec Superior Court earlier this week, a federal prosecutor argued that until the existing prohibition on medically assisted suicide becomes void in February, a doctor who acceded to the death wish of a terminally ill patient, as per the Quebec law, could face criminal charges.
In an interview, the federal minister told Le Devoir she wants the province’s plan suspended until Parliament is done dealing with the issue. The Quebec government has declined that request.
There are so many things wrong with the federal decision to put itself on a collision course with Quebec over this issue that it is hard to know where to begin.
That starts with the predicament of terminally ill patients whose rights would be put on further hold while Parliament fiddles some more for an unspecified period of time.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is still pondering whether to seek an extension to the Supreme Court deadline. The Quebec law could ultimately be in limbo for much longer than the few months between now and early February.
Even under an expedited parliamentary process — with potentially debatable results — the odds of having a new federal law on the books in a couple of months would be long ones.
And then there is the matter of the veiled but ultimately empty federal threat of criminal prosecution.
For more than a decade before the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code section on abortion, Quebec declined to prosecute the doctors who were performing the procedure. It is not about to drag the medical staff that applies its end-oflife law to court, regardless of the whims of a rookie federal government.
It is not just on the notion of prosecuting Quebec doctors on the basis of a struck-down law that Trudeau’s justice minister is spitting in the wind.
Regardless of the timetable challenges of Parliament, medically assisted suicide is coming soon to all of Canada, under provincial variations on the Quebec regimen.
The only way that would not happen would be for Trudeau to invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to maintain the status quo. But the sun will rise in the west the day a Liberal federal government circumvents a charter-based Supreme Court ruling.
Given that, common sense would suggest Wilson-Raybould be thankful that Quebec has done all the legwork and come up with a legislative template for the rest of the country to borrow from.
Her government should be supportive, not obstructive, of the plan to put that template to the test as of next month. There is not a province that would not benefit from watching Quebec’s health system transition to the Supreme Court prescriptions.
Wilson-Raybould’s bid to force the Quebec law on hold is exactly the kind of move premier Philippe Couillard was alluding to when he cautioned the incoming Trudeau government to resist the temptation to reinvent the wheel last week.
Couillard was ostensibly speaking about climate change and the work done by the provinces in the absence of the previous Conservative government. But he could have been talking about a more general father-knows-best approach to federalism that has, in the past, gone a long way to sour provinces on the federal Liberals. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.