In Canada, like in every other country in the world, people die. To die is a perfectly natural thing, yet assisting someone’s suicide to help them end their own suffering is a criminal act.
The Criminal Code of Canada currently states that, “Every one who (a) counsels a person to commit suicide, or (b) aids or abets a person to commit suicide, whether suicide ensues or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment […].”
This includes doctors and physicians who are there to treat patients who may suffer from any number of both terminal and painful long-term diseases. These people, whose job is to assuage the suffering of their patients, are prohibited from assisting them with the one thing they often want most: an end to their suffering.
Assisted suicide can be the most compassionate way to help the incurably suffering. Canadians need to question the laws that forbid it.
When people approach the subject of assisted suicide, they do so because they feel they have no other option — people who are elderly, frail, and in constant pain, or people with debilitating diseases that chain them to a body no longer willing to respond to their pleas of movement or painlessness. These are the people who ask their doctors for assistance, the ones whom doctors have to refuse or face legal repercussions.
People with extreme physical disabilities turn to assisted suicide to die before their bodies become prisons.
Like any major legal proceedings, there is much hesitation and concern over what a change in law might look like. Many worry that enacting a law such as this would lead to the elderly or the sick being taken advantage of or coerced into ending their lives against their wishes.
But Canada is far from the first country to deal with this issue; other countries operate with legal assisted suicide, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands, and some American states allow it including Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and Montana.
There have been multiple court cases in Canada in which people with extreme physical disabilities have petitioned the court to either change or lift the law so that they may be allowed to die with the assistance they require. These people do not proceed into this lightly, but rather turn to it as a way to die on their own terms, before their bodies become prisons.
This month, the Supreme Court of Canada has said it will hear an appeal by the BC Civil Liberties Association seeking to change the law, so that “seriously and incurably ill, mentally competent adults have the right to receive medical assistance to hasten death under specific safeguards.”
The last very public challenge to this law came in 1993 when Sue Rodriguez fought for the right of assistance in ending her battle with ALS. A widely criticized decision came on Sept. 30 of the same year when she lost 5-4 in the Supreme Court of Canada.
With the vote so close twenty years ago in the last big debate over this issue, is it not time to revisit it? As a nation, our belief systems, and our treatment of our more vulnerable citizens, has since greatly progressed. This law should also change with the times. It is time to let all Canadians have the right to die with the same dignity and respect any one of us would desire.
