Getting Dead in Canada

The Catholic Thing ^ | 2/20/15 | David Warren

[marshmallow]

In the time since I filed my last column from up here in the Arctic wastes, “physician-assisted dying” has been legalized by a unanimous decision of the Canadian Supreme Court. The decision reversed the Court’s own hard-reasoned position, upholding the law in 1993. It is stayed for one year to allow our Parliament a legislative response. This actually makes things worse.

The only remaining live question is whether there will be any restrictions at all on euthanasia, and the likely answer is no.

In 1988, our Supreme Court vacated certain restrictions on abortion that had been retained in the extremely liberal 1969 abortion law of the then Trudeau government. Parliament was given an opportunity to rewrite that, consistent with the “Charter of Rights” that another Trudeau government had bequeathed the country – as interpreted by an activist Court.

The politicians ducked. The Mulroney government (“Progressive Conservative”) tried and failed to find a consensus, and then gave up. The result was abortion-on-demand, from conception to live birth, at the expense of the taxpayer, with priority for abortions over all other medical “needs” in the country’s monopoly health care system.

The politicians are very likely to duck again – not only from their own cowardice in tackling a controversial issue, but because the Supreme Court’s ruling is infinitely extendable. The “right to physician-assisted suicide,” which they have now discovered in that same Charter, by a process of reasoning that I would characterize as insane, is sufficiently abstract to pass through any barrier.

It must now be made available for free to any “competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances......