The State Is Promoting Suicide in Canada With Its Assisted Death Law

The Supreme Court stated that its ruling was an exception to the law that protects vulnerable persons from being misled into seeking suicide. It purported to take comfort from the experience of Belgium which has permitted medically assisted suicide since 2002 and where the incidents of such occurrences have not greatly increased. The court rejected a great deal of evidence citing abuse of rights of euthanasia in various jurisdictions, with the somewhat flippant assertion that its decision would be based on law and not on anecdotes.

The Carter decision was not particularly well formulated but that does not mean it was a mistaken decision. This is an issue of life and death somewhat like abortion. As a Christian, I believe that life is a sacred gift, and we have some obligation to retain it as long as we can and facilitate it when we can. But I understand that other people may have other views, and in any case, I do not believe that the state should have the right or aspire to have the right to stigmatize or penalize a person of sound mind who does not wish to continue to live, or to require a woman who does not wish to have a child to give birth to one. By the same reasoning I do not approve of the death penalty; however heinous the crime and however certain the guilt of the accused, murdering the murderer compounds the wrongdoing.

As a practical matter, all but the totally incapacitated possess the ability to commit suicide and as suicides occur, it is reasonable to assure that they are as painless and discrete as possible. Similarly, the real issue in abortions is when the unborn attain the rights of people, and there is room for endless respectable disagreement on this point. But in the meantime, abortions occur and they should be sanitary and unembarrassing to the women who have them. (I dare to specify women because I’m a traditionalist who believes that there are two sexes and that every person should work out their own sexuality without coercion or public indecency.)

Despite the fact that the Carter decision was an exception to the legal bias against suicide and the law protecting exploitation of vulnerable people to induce suicide, the ruling has been widely misrepresented as an unlimited endorsement. A Quebec lower court has proclaimed medically assisted suicide to be a constitutional right of every Canadian, dispensing with the express condition required by the Supreme Court that the individual seeking this remedy does so because of hopeless and “intolerable suffering” from an “irremediable medical condition.”

The 2016 MAID legislation has a good many loopholes that permit zealots to exploit the law and as a result, in these seven years there have been more euthanasia deaths in Canada than have occurred in the Netherlands and Belgium—which together have about three-quarters of Canada’s population—since they legally permitted euthanasia 22 years ago.

In Canada’s MAID legislation, physicians self-report, they are not required to provide serious data to anyone, and family members cannot obtain the records of the deceased. The governing criterion of unacceptable suffering is determined solely by the patient, and Canada’s MAID law is apparently unique in the world in not requiring that the medical profession and health-care providers ascertain that there are no other options, and there is no bar in the doctors or health-care workers taking the initiative in urging the suicide alternative.