Missed deadline risks legal limbo
It’s hard to imagine any legislation that could possibly satisfy everyone on the fraught subject of physician-assisted suicide. Sincere and well-intentioned opinion has been expressed on every side of this issue. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
So it’s no surprise that the federal government is encountering significant resistance to Bill C-14, a measure that would make Canada one of the world’s few countries to legalize doctor-assisted dying. The bill passed third reading on Tuesday night, by a 186-137 vote, and is now before the Senate. But indications are that the red chamber will not grant this legislation the speedy passage necessary to meet a June 6 Supreme Court deadline.
That’s unfortunate. Part of the blame rests with the previous Conservative government for months of foot-dragging on this issue. But actions taken by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have also made it difficult to meet the looming deadline — including his decision two years ago to grant independence to Liberal senators, turning them into free agents.
As a result, after next Monday, Canadians and their doctors will likely be making end-of-life decisions in the absence of federal law.
The Supreme Court unanimously struck down, in February last year, existing law criminalizing participation in assisted suicide. Justices found that Ottawa’s rules were cruelly condemning critically ill people to “severe and intolerable suffering.” The court gave Parliament until Feb. 6, to correct this injustice but later allowed a fourmonth extension to pass a new law.
In response to that deadline the government produced a sound legislative package, adopting an appropriately cautious approach to implementing the Supreme Court’s judgment. Under its provisions, people wanting a doctor’s assistance to end their life must have a “grievous and irremediable” condition leaving them in a state of “irreversible decline.”
Although the court didn’t specify that this condition had to include impending death, Bill C-14 allows for assisted suicide only when a person’s natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”
On the whole, the government crafted a credible and compassionate law that would ease the burden of suffering borne by Canadians while also protecting vulnerable people from opting for statesanctioned suicide in a moment of weakness or despair.
But this more cautious approach is not without controversy — and recent court cases appear to highlight a significant legal problem with the bill. For example, Alberta’s Court of Appeal, in weighing a request for physician-assisted death, noted that the Supreme Court had nowhere indicated that someone seeking assisted suicide had to be terminally ill. The appeal court found that, in setting a foreseeable death requirement, Bill C-14 fell short in complying with the Supreme Court’s decision.
That concern is likely to figure prominently in Senate debate. The bill is to be considered by the upper chamber’s legal and constitutional affairs committee before going back to the full Senate for further discussion. Amendments are expected.
Several senators, including James Cowan, Liberal point man in the red chamber, have already indicated they will not support Bill C-14 as written. Trudeau has scant leverage in this forum, having abruptly announced in 2014 that Senate Liberals would no longer be part of his caucus and would, instead, sit as independents with no partisan responsibilities.
This was meant to help restore the scandal-wracked Senate’s role as a place of sober second thought. Presumably, independent senators will consider bills free of partisan concerns. But this liberty significantly reduces the prime minister’s ability to sway hearts and minds in the upper chamber.
Trudeau might well find that assisted suicide isn’t the only issue in which independent senators, free to speak their mind, slam the brakes on his agenda.
The government crafted a credible and compassionate law. But the prime minister holds little sway over Senate Liberals who now sit as independents