Of course I have
no insider's access, and I do not know what is said in cabinet
meetings, but I suspect the Harper government already has a team of
civil servants drafting a law to allow suffering and dying patients
to request the help of a doctor to ease and aid their death.
A competent
government would not be caught flat-footed by something like last
week's Supreme Court decision which unanimously told the feds they
have one year to put such a law into the books.
That's what a
civil service is for in a modern democracy.
Aside from
tweaking the wording to reflect the court ruling, the only delay for
introducing such a law would be politics.
But we should not
discount the politics in a decision like this one.
For the nation, it
might be better to delay introducing a bill on doctor-assisted
suicide until after the federal election, expected in October. A new
government, with a new mandate, could summon the civil servants to
produce their draft law, tweak it again, and bring it to Parliament.
If it requires too
much courage on the part of federal candidates to discuss the issue
on the campaign trail, Harper can remove that from the campaign by
introducing the law now, pushing it through to the Senate, before
dissolving Parliament this summer.
In fact, a draft
of such a bill does already exist. Tory MP Steven Fletcher has
introduced a private member's bill that would allow assisted suicide
for some individuals. And I do not doubt his bill has received
assistance — with the knowledge and quiet approval of cabinet —
from the civil service in its formation.
But again,
political realities must be acknowledged.
About three
quarters of Canadians polled by Ipsos recently supported such a law,
and 84 per cent of them agreed with the statement: “a doctor should
be able to help someone end their life, if the person is a competent
adult who is terminally ill, suffering unbearably and repeatedly asks
to die.”
Even so, the
concerns of the minority need to be heard and addressed.
One such group
would be people with disabilities. Another group would be people in
palliative care, now and in the future.
Heidi Janz sits on
the Bioethics Committee of the Council of Canadians with
Disabilities. Born with cerebral palsy and confined to a wheelchair,
she wrote that resources for high-needs disabled people are too slim
to justify a law simply making it easier for them to die.
She says between
16 and 30 per cent of Canadians have access to palliative care, but
in the disabled community it's closer to five to 10 per cent.
“We won't do
anything to help you LIVE,” she wrote in an email to CBC in an
online discussion of the Supreme Court case, “but now, we're
prepared to hasten your death.”
Those are
precisely the concerns that politics are meant to address.
Dr. James Downar,
a physician with Dying with Dignity — which commissioned the Ipsos
poll — says the idea that this ruling will become a slippery slope
into devaluing the lives of vulnerable people, has not occurred in
the jurisdictions that already allow doctor-assisted suicide.
Rather the
opposite, he says. The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland
and others are world leaders in providing palliative care for very
sick people who want to live.
The option, the
legal choice that people have in those countries, has led to
improvements in palliative care, Dr. Downar claims.
We should have no
doubt that our government knows these things, and has found models of
compassionate policy that can be copied into Canadian law. Laws that
I suspect already exist in draft form on health minister Rona
Ambrose's desk.
They would simply
be waiting for final tweaks of wording and political timing for it to be
introduced.
The Supreme Court has set a deadline, and government would not wish to risk being in contempt of court. A strong majority of support and opinion on this subject already seems to exist in the electorate.
Watch, then, how
this — or the next — Canadian government approaches us with
material any competent government would already have in hand.
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