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By Deborah Gyapong
Canadian Catholic News
OTTAWA (CCN) -- Work is underway on a draft assisted-suicide and euthanasia bill and on a new test case to challenge the Sue Rodriguez Supreme Court of Canada ruling.
In the early '90s, Rodriguez, who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), wanted the legal right to doctor-assisted suicide. The Court turned her down by a 5 - 4 ruling. In 1994, she found an unnamed doctor to help her take her life.
News of the draft legislation and possible test case came out on CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup March 2, during an interview with Jocelyn Downie, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at Dalhousie University.
In a telephone conversation March 6, Downie confirmed legislation is in the works, but she declined to give any details. She also would not confirm whether a potential test case has been found or a search for such a person is still going on.
Cross Country Checkup devoted the March 2 program to the recent decision to release Robert Latimer on day parole. Latimer had been serving a 10-year sentence for the second degree murder of his disabled daughter Tracey. Last fall, a parole board hearing turned down his request for release, because he was unrepentant for the killing. He appealed and won. He will live in Ottawa, where he plans to lobby for clemency and for a change in the law.
 | | Margaret Somerville, the Founding Director, McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law |
For Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, one of the big dangers in the looming euthanasia debate is how mixed up and confused the arguments and the cases in question become. This confusion can be "very favourable to the pro-euthanasia side," she said in an interview.
The Latimer case is not a euthanasia case, she stressed.
Initially, the pro-euthanasia people recoiled in horror at the Latimer case, she said, because it was viewed as a father killing his disabled daughter. They said we would never condone anything like that, but only the assisted suicide of a competent adult with informed consent, she said.
"We know that familiarity inhibits our moral intuition, and so now it seems as though they are quite happy to say we should be nice to Mr. Latimer because it was just mercy and compassion," she said. "Obviously what they're saying is that's an ethical justification for what he did and it should be a legal justification."
Somerville said she finds euthanasia "alarming no matter how broad or how narrow" the definition is.
Somerville warned of this confusion when she spoke to a group of conservatives at the Canada Networking Conference put together by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy in Ottawa Feb. 29 in a talk entitled: 'The next contentious ethical issue: Euthanasia and end-of-life issues.'
The danger of the Latimer case is that it shows how the very narrow definition of euthanasia could be expanded to include compassion as an ethical and legal justification for killing somebody, she said.
Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) executive director Alex Schadenberg said in a telephone interview he expects a new euthanasia and assisted suicide bill to introduced after the next election. The last such bill was put forward as a private member's bill by Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde.
He said he also expects Robert Latimer will be plying the halls of Parliament Hill, trying to win people over to his point of view. But Schadenberg thinks that Latimer will be as effective as Jack Kevorkian, the so-called suicide doctor, when Members of Parliament get to meet him and get a real sense for motivation.
The March 6 issue of Maclean's magazine profiles Robert Latimer and reports on the underlying rage in his letters to politicians.
"His false idea of mercy seems to have bought him an early release," said Schadenberg. "Normally he wouldn't qualify. He doesn't have remorse; he doesn't see he didn't any wrong."
"His idea is a direct threat to other people," he said, because others might say to themselves if it was okay for Robert Latimer to kill his disabled daughter, maybe there is nothing wrong with my killing a disabled person.
Somerville said she believes that somehow Canadians need to be shocked back into seeing the larger moral context and what it means for the moral context if we legalize it.
Though she usually opposes linking abortion to euthanasia, she said she thinks the normalization of abortion provides one useful comparison.
A third of all pregnancies overall end up in abortion, and one in four women in Canada have had an abortion, she pointed out.
"What if one in four people in Canada ended up being euthanized," she asked. "What would that mean as a society?"
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In order to maintain respect for human life, we have to exercise respect for human dignity in general in the form of a restraint when it comes to taking human life, she said.
Another case that has helped confuse the euthanasia debate concerns Samuel Golobchuk, an elderly man on respirator in a Manitoba hospital. His doctors want to remove the respirator and stop treatment. His Orthodox Jewish family wants treatment to continue. They recently won a court injunction. The issue in the Golubchuk case is who should decide. Doctors in Manitoba recently declared they should make the final decision, not families.
Somerville said she does not believe doctors should have the absolute right to trump the rights of families.
"The family has got the basic right to decide, but there can be exceptions when what they want is patently unreasonable," she said.
The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition also supports the Golubchuk family in their battle.
-- Courtesy of Canadian Catholic News. Please do not reprint without permission.
Related stories:
Free Robert Latimer
The current fate of Robert Latimer is a national disgrace. By now, the Saskatchewan farmer has been languishing in prison for more than seven years. Recently, the National Parole Board rejected his application for day parole. The stated rationale for the board's decision could serve to keep Latimer behind bars for the rest of his life: According to the judgment, he failed to show sufficient "remorse" for what he did. That's because Latimer reportedly feels no such remorse. He believes that what he did was right. He ran afoul of the law by ending the life of his 12-year-old daughter. He insists that he did so in order to relieve the unremitting pain she was suffering as a result of a severe disability. (No one knows how she felt: Her mental limitations precluded meaningful consultations.)
A. Alan Borovoy, National Post, February 1
Orthodox Jew in Winnipeg hospital stays on life support as dispute goes to trial
A Winnipeg judge ruled Wednesday that an 84-year-old Orthodox Jew will remain on life support until a dispute over whether a doctor can disconnect him without the family's permission can go to trial. Samuel Golubchuk's adult children, Percy Golubchuk and Miriam Geller, looked elated after Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench Justice Perry Schulman ordered Grace Hospital to "provide full medical care" to their father until the end of a trial.
Canadian Press, February 13
In the matter of life and death, the family should rule
This is not a "religion versus medicine" issue. It is more a human-rights issue -- specifically, the right to live.
Reuven Bulka, Globe and Mail, February 24
Robert Latimer should have been convicted of only "compassionate murder"
With Robert Latimer finally getting parole, it's time to again look at how Canadian law could be changed to deal with instances of mercy killing. I interviewed the Prairie farmer in prison in 2004 and came away convinced our legal system had not been up to the task of dealing with his mercy killing of his daughter.
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun, February 27
On Robert Latimer and how Canada just became scarier for the disabled
One of the central reasons why Latimer.s parole was originally declined in December, 2007, was because he refused to acknowledge that he did anything wrong. He killed his daughter, he argued, out of love. He was putting the girl out of her misery. Perhaps a more candid explanation was that he was putting her out of his.
Michael Coren, National Post, February 27
Latimer gets day parole
Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan farmer who killed his severely disabled daughter, is set to be released on day parole in a halfway house after the parole board yesterday reversed a decision to keep him behind bars. The Appeal Division of the National Parole Board overruled a December ruling by the Pacific regional office of the board denying Latimer day parole.
National Post, February 28
'Laws are not as important as Tracy was'
The case of Robert Latimer has polarized society, judges and the media. The hearings before the National Parole Board and its reactions to this case are just as conflicted. While Latimer's appeal to a panel for day parole was refused last December, the board's appeal division granted him his freedom yesterday, rejecting many of the arguments made by those at the first hearing.
National Post, February 28
Canada just became scarier for the disabled
One of the central reasons why Latimer's parole was originally declined in December, 2007, was because he refused to acknowledge that he did anything wrong. He killed his daughter, he argued, out of love. He was putting the girl out of her misery. Perhaps a more candid explanation was that he was putting her out of his.
Michael Coren, National Post, February 28
March 13/2008
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