Children of woman at centre of suicide bill call for changes

OTTAWA— The children of the woman whose suffering was central to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the ban on assisted death are urging parliamentarians to amend a proposed new law on medically assisted dying.

Lee and Price Carter say their late mother would not have qualified for medical help to end her life under the restrictive provisions of the bill introduced last week by the Trudeau government in response to the top court’s ruling. Instead, they say their mother and people like her would be forced to endure unbearable suffering, potentially for years.

“I’m shocked that this government’s proposal would exclude the very case this issue was tried on,” Lee Carter told a news conference Thursday on Parliament Hill.

“We fought for a half a decade and won our case at the highest court in the land and this bill would erase the victory that we achieved for people like my mom. We ask ourselves, what was the point?”

Kay Carter suffered from spinal stenosis, a painful condition that left her bedridden, unable to move or even feed herself. She found the loss of autonomy and dignity intolerable but was not, according to her children, facing imminent death.

The 89-year-old travelled secretly to Switzerland in 2010, where she legally obtained medical help to die. Her children, with the help of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) and several other plaintiffs, carried on the court battle to legalize the practice in Canada.

The proposed federal law, Bill C-14, would allow assisted death only for consenting adults, at least 18 years of age, who are in “an advanced stage of irreversible decline” from a serious and incurable disease, illness or disability and for whom a natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”

The bill is more restrictive than the conditions prescribed by the Supreme Court.